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At the beginning of The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (Cape, £11.99), the fifth novel by the Scottish writer Alan Warner, the narrator, Manolo Follana, learns that he has HIV. Thus the stage is set for this small-town Spanish playboy to reflect on his life, enumerate his acts of selfishness and venality, and bring his character to some kind of reckoning - maybe even to redeem himself with an act of uncharacteristic bravery.
It's a workmanlike structure but somehow rather depressingly predictable. The heart sinks at the idea of 390 pages' worth of a vain egotist taking a masturbatory joy in the intrigues of his own wickedness.
In truth, there is a bit of this, but less than you might fear, and - despite an ending that feels as though Warner's publisher got on the phone and told him to stop shilly-shallying, time was up - it's
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The voice of a dying playboy in Alan Warner's new novel is oddly compelling, writes tim auld
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really rather intriguing and well-paced. Above all, the narrative voice is compelling, consistent and charmingly believable; and Warner deserves praise for ventriloquising a complex man who is vain, vulnerable, petulant, generous - and unquestionably Spanish. At no point does he let the accent drop.
Skilled though this voice is, there is something rather inconsequential about the plot, which doesn't really lead anywhere. And there are times when you wonder why you bother to keep company with Follana. But Warner, like all good barflies, is a master of the anecdote and short story, the literary set piece. And it is in these set pieces - an extended dramatisation of a Jaws screening, a description of a tawdry threesome, a melancholic tale of childhood ingratitude and a longed-for toy, a wife's suicide - that the value of this novel lies. 
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POSTED MAY 2, 2006
Two Way Split by Allan Guthrie
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