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A review by marthmuffins
These Demented Lands by Alan Warner
2.0
These Demented Lands - 2/5
So, this is a sequel to one of my favourite books of all time and a piece of media (both the original book and especially the film) that I would consider foundational to who I am as a person, Morvern Callar. This semi-sequel is not nearly as good. It's definitely got the same voice, the bits written ostensibly by Morvern have the same idiosyncratic way of writing (for example, people like The Aircrash Investigator become "The One Who Walked the Skylines of Dusk with Debris Held Aloft Above His Head" in her words) and attitude, and those chunks of surreal wandering through the demented land of the Island are by far the best part of the book.
However, over half the page count is given over to The Aircrash Investigator, a boring and dour man who's perspective didn't really add much beyond obnoxious male gaze. If it had remained 200 pages of disjointed wandering through purgatory then it would've worked a lot better for me, but as it is the whole middle of the book drags the entire novel down and it loses the surreal nature that was working so early on whilst never capturing the grounded moments of the first. It feels like Warner had enough material for a novella or a longer short story but ended up padding it out in the middle.
Overall then, I still really recommend Morvern Callar, and I definitely don't recommend These Demented Lands.
So, this is a sequel to one of my favourite books of all time and a piece of media (both the original book and especially the film) that I would consider foundational to who I am as a person, Morvern Callar. This semi-sequel is not nearly as good. It's definitely got the same voice, the bits written ostensibly by Morvern have the same idiosyncratic way of writing (for example, people like The Aircrash Investigator become "The One Who Walked the Skylines of Dusk with Debris Held Aloft Above His Head" in her words) and attitude, and those chunks of surreal wandering through the demented land of the Island are by far the best part of the book.
However, over half the page count is given over to The Aircrash Investigator, a boring and dour man who's perspective didn't really add much beyond obnoxious male gaze. If it had remained 200 pages of disjointed wandering through purgatory then it would've worked a lot better for me, but as it is the whole middle of the book drags the entire novel down and it loses the surreal nature that was working so early on whilst never capturing the grounded moments of the first. It feels like Warner had enough material for a novella or a longer short story but ended up padding it out in the middle.
Overall then, I still really recommend Morvern Callar, and I definitely don't recommend These Demented Lands.