There is strange cargo in the coastal waters of the west of Scotland. The North Sea may have its oil; Loch Ness its cryptozoology. But the flotsam sifting into the Atlantic bestows its own kind of marine magic. At Holy Loch, where American submarines spent the cold war salting the water with radioactive isotopes, the story goes that the loch's name memorialises a cargo of shipwrecked Jerusalem earth. And up nearer Oban – the novelist Alan Warner's native soil – the Sound of Mull covers a small flotilla of craft sunk at one time or another by reefs or wartime ordnance.
Warner's seventh novel, The Deadman's Pedal, is punctuated by tales of strange drownings and sinkings. It isn't exactly a new motif: in Morvern Callar – the book that made Warner's reputation – Morvern got high while immersing herself in the night-time Mediterranean. Shipwrecked in its sequel, she washed up on the island shore of what seemed another kind of novel entirely, the experimental and eerie These Demented Lands.
This time we return to The Port, the fictional Scottish town familiar from several of Warner's previous novels. (Across these books, Warner has made The Port an emblematic place, not unlike Hardy's Wessex, or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.) It is 1973. About to turn 16, Simon Crimmons is itching to leave school and to get out from under the control of his overbearing father, the owner of a local haulage firm. Over the course of a summer his life begins to change rapidly as he falls in love, first with a working-class girl from his school and later with Varie Bultitude, the hippyish daughter of a wealthy local landowner. Meanwhile, against the wishes of his aspirational parents, he takes a job on the strike-hit railway as a trainee engine driver. From Simon's railway experience comes the novel's title: the deadman's pedal automatically stops a runaway train should the driver lose consciousness.
Making a rough tally, the submerged contents of this novel include a motorbike, an English ferryman, two soldiers, a weathervane, several coffins, a set of Empire style furniture, some copper saucepans and a whole village sunk to make way for a hydroelectric power scheme. Even dry land isn't: water seeps through the novel, coating the mourners at a railwayman's funeral, darkening torch beams with its droplets, pooling in canvas chairs and rusting cars. The climax of the novel makes neat narrative sense of this pervading dampness but it's tempting more generally to think of Warner as a watery writer, at home on this drenched coastline. His fiction inhabits a shifting littoral zone where accumulated deposits of realist detail – Warner's narrators and focal characters are nothing if not observant – can suddenly shelve off into the deep waters of myth.
At his best in textures, glimpses and sudden twists, he has an impressionist's sense for the way in which the visible and the felt resolves into narrative, though at times in this novel, and particularly at the ends of chapters, he seems to strain for the portentous phrase. One effect of this is the peculiar tic which produces variations such as "these blinded lands", "these evening lands" and "the inner summer lands" – an overworked rhetorical flourish encouraged, presumably, by the book's current of macabre Scots Gothic. And though The Deadman's Pedal abounds in striking images and sharp dialogue, it does seem a little lopsided, as though some major points haven't quite been fleshed out. Indeed, you begin to wonder whether we might glimpse some of these characters again on our next trip to The Port.
