Book review: The Stars in the Bright Sky

WHEN Alan Warner's Morvern Callar blazed into print in 1995, two things stood out. In the foul-mouthed, urban-focused, male-dominated torrent of books which came pouring out of Scotland with Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting at their helm, Warner wrote from a rural base, and he wrote about women.

He cemented this reputation when, three years later, he wrote The Sopranos, an adrenaline-fuelled journey to Edinburgh in the company of a small-town Catholic girls choir intent on exploiting all the lights of the big city. Its rollicking pace and vivid language captured something of the headlong hormone-fuelled energy of being 17, recklessly gambling with life simply because you have more than enough of it to spare.

The sequel – three years later for the girls, 12 for Warner – finds the sopranos at Gatwick, intent on a last-minute holiday they haven't booked yet, luggage bulging with high heels, condoms and bikinis. Predictably, chaos ensues: a lost passport, a lot of drinking, some drugs.

But a lot has changed in three years. Finn and Kay are at university. Manda has had a baby and morphed into a first-class chavette. The catalyst in the mix is Finn's university friend, Ava, beautiful, wealthy and clearly up to something.

The division is clear from the start. The girls who have stayed on in "the Port" have two suitcases apiece, the others have demure carry-ons or backpacks. The Port girls go to McDonald's, the others to Pizza Express. Finn has a quotation from Beckett tattooed on her thigh, Manda wants to go on Big Brother. Allegiances shift and re-group, but that chasm is hard to ignore. How on earth, one wonders, will they last five minutes on holiday together?

Much of the indiscriminate, exploding energy of the girls in The Sopranos is curtailed, either by middle-class common sense, biding their time for the opportunities offered by their futures careers, or because their horizons are limited and no such careers exist. ("Ava snapped at Manda: 'I'm sick of all this sapphic innuendo as well.' 'What's Suffolk?' Chell frowned and turned to Kylah.")

The narrative voice has changed too. The voice of The Sopranos, rough, rich, halfway to the girl's own demotic, is replaced with one which is more polished, lingering over descriptions of night skies and airport architecture, isolating Manda in her grotesque glory, by turns repulsed and fascinated along with most of its readers.

Deliberately allowing his plot to stagnate, Warner pitches Manda against Ava, and the others begin to fade into the background. At opposite ends of the social scale, they are both self-centred, in the grip of a kind of angry hedonism, British culture at the turn of the 21st century writ large.

But the inequality of their world is painted in angry primary colours. There is one set of drugs laws for the rich, another for the poor. While Manda brags about holding a party in the VIP area of the town's new nightclub, Finn ponders the vocabulary of segregation and exclusion, realising how Manda evoked it unthinkingly, while she herself is often excluded.

It's a brave male writer who takes on a novel about six young women, and at times it feels like he's trying too hard (the conversation in which the group compares brands of tampons is not strictly necessary). At other times, he relaxes, delivering some hilarious scenes and a handful of unexpectedly moving ones. But the book's underlying anger does occasionally mire a plot which – like its characters – is going nowhere fast.

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 16 May 2010