There's a stain of creepy cold-weather surrealism that runs through modern Scottish fiction – think of Alasdair Gray or Iain Banks, or even Irvine Welsh. These Demented Lands belongs on the same shelf, though it isn't violent or bleak; in fact, it's fun. I worked my way through the first part of this slim book in delight, thinking 'I've never read anything quite like this before.' Further on in, though, I realized with some disappointment that a lot of the colourful stuff I'd been reading wasn't material to the plot of the novel; and a little later I realized that there really wasn't a plot to the novel, either.Strange to say, I still enjoyed These Demented Lands. The Scots-inflected prose is elegant and highly readable, with occasional rhapsodic elements. The descriptions are cinematic and psychedelic, the sequence of events has its own mad dream-logic, there are moments of bizarre yet laugh-out-loud comedy and everything does come together in the end, though it does so in a tearing hurry and not entirely to this reader's satisfaction.I realize I haven't said much anything about the actual story or the characters in the book, or even about its setting. None of that really matters, though. Anyone interested enough to want to find out more should read this blogger's review, which I fully endorse and agree with:http://guysalvidge.wordpress.com/2009...
another book spoiled by the blurb. alan warner is trying so hard to not make morvern callar the obvious narrator, only revealing the name as the last two words of the book. but what did warner expect? morvern was his wunderkind debut, certainly he knew he'd get interviewed by the scottish literati and have to reveal it, no? irvine welsh called him brilliant! flash point debuts don't beget sophomore sales. you'd have to bring it up.either way the book is a little slight, of perspective, of supposed magical realism, of plot. novel vernacular always gets stuck on me, dissipating over the hour after i put it down. needless to say, i couldn't stop inserting "nae" into conversations in and out of my mind.
Do You like book These Demented Lands (1998)?
Lifeless piffle that abjectly fails to evoke a dream-like or hallucinatory atmosphere due to slack writing and barely-doodled ciphers of characters. Morvern Callar is as boring as she ever was, joining the dreary death-march through 200 pages of lame quirkiness, the excruciatingly portentous efforts at "postmodernism" merely acting as reminders that more talented writers have done it far better (Alasdair Gray, for just 1 example). If you think Verve, Iain Banks and The Mighty Boosh are exciting cutting-edge stuff then you'll love this.
—Jonathan Norton
A hallucinatory sequel to the great "Morvern Callar," the first section of this book is a superb recounting of our heroine's island journey as a lyric fever dream. It's shot full of pitch black humor and hauntingly weird images, all told in Morvern's indelible voice, and it's well worth picking up the novel for those first 60 pages. You could consider it a novella and call it a day. After this, the book switches perspectives to the Aircrash Investigator whose rambling insights, confusing obsession, and listless predicament aren't nearly as interesting. The larger problem is that Warner is too concerned with tying up the various plot strands in a conventional sense - which often ruptures the book's beautiful dream logic. Some of the later sections regain the crazed energy of the beginning - the carnivalesque finale, Superchicken's aquatic driving adventures, etc. Three stars is definitely selling this short, but consider it a comparison to the near flawless achievement of Warner's debut.
—Jeff Jackson
