Interview: Alan Warner - The wild man of letters

Does contemporary fiction need another Scottish writer of grittily realistic prose? If that Scot is Alan Warner, winner of literary prizes and object of style mag hero-worship, the answer is probably yes

"IT'S THE MOST f*****g unbelievable country," Scots novelist Alan Warner says of his homeland. "It's a philistine and racist place... we come down here and pretend it's God's Calvinist country and slag you off, but the level of discourse up there is incredibly poor. People like to pretend there's some kind of artistic renaissance in Scotland. A renaissance is something that happened in Italy over a period of 200 years."

I had always imagined Warner wearing some gaudy Braveheart tartan on his sleeve, coupled with a prolier-than-thou persona; instead, he says, he's "very fed up with being bunched with that whole Scottish thing" and - during the course of our very liquid lunch - is flash about the buoyant state of his finances: "I'm f*****g rolling in it," he says, explaining how he has just sold the film rights to his third novel, The Sopranos, for pounds 500,000. "The money has now bought me a buffer zone where I can just be alone again and work on a new manuscript."

With his themes of social dislocation, drug ingestion and sexual abandon, Warner has become one of publishing's enfants terribles. He has also garnered immense amounts of critical praise, winning the Somerset Maugham Prize for his first novel, Morvern Callar, and, this week, the Encore Prize for his second, These Demented Lands. His third, The Sopranos, will be published in ten days time by Jonathan Cape.

Warner talks about his books and manuscripts much more eagerly than about himself and, for connected reasons, is one of the few modern novelists to eschew first-person, autobiographical fiction. "I'm very suspicious of that Jack Kerouac thing," he says. "You know: 'I've driven across America and now I'm going to write about it, explaining all my thoughts.' Now all you need to write a book is an Oxbridge education and a coke habit. It all seems a bit self-indulgent to me; and because I'm a very insecure, private person, I'm cautious about using myself as material."

Born in Oban, on the west coast of Scotland, in 1964, Warner likes to paint a picture of his homeland as a cultural vacuum, and himself voraciously reading any material which appeared in John Menzies. He left school at 16 to work on the railways, but came to London three years later to do a Humanities degree. He received a one-year bursary to study film in Glasgow for a year before heading off to Spain, where he did bar-work and Class As. He was always writing: "I haven't been a writer for three years, I've been at it for 16 years." It was in Spain that he found the inspiration for Morvern Callar and later met his wife, the half-Irish, half-Spanish Holly. He was still working on the railways when the book deal finally came through.

But to get at what he calls "that objectivity", Warner has tended to write in formally interesting ways, borrowing from Scotland and Spain, but never obviously cut-and-pasting in his own life. In Morvern, the heroine is an unpublished novelist whose boyfriend commits suicide, leaving a novel on his computer which she claims as her own. "It's a novel about Morvern's rejection by that artistic, middle-class world. The novel left by her boyfriend is then filtered through her perversions." He does something similar in The Sopranos, where a film script takes over from the narrative as American camcorderers film the young girls.

Another stylistic talent is for taut prose from the female perspective: following Morvern Callar from the check-out counter to the Balearic rave scene, or in The Sopranos tracing the "virgin megastore" of a coach load of choir-girls from the convent to the big city. In the new novel Warner again looks at the hairline fracture between innocence and delinquency, as the girls get drunk and laid before the big concert. The journey itself is a metaphorical one of explicit sexual and social discovery: "Now the bus was moving over a pass between two colossal blocks of mountain - slabs and rations of granite burst through meagre top soils, thrusting up like broken bone through split flesh."

Warner's prose is capable of the worldly wise ("When Morvern gets off a bus," he explains, "she knows to look in the mirror, rather than turn round to the driver") and the childlike: one teacher, thinks one of the characters in The Sopranos, "should be all burned up in flame cause of her badnesses to childs". In the book there's endless elision, definite articles are dropped and consonants lost: there's "offof" and "wi" and "dinnae". "To me," says Warner, "it's interesting to say important things using that so-called vernacular. For so long I struggled under this misapprehension that you had to have some mystical understanding of the English language, and be a Greek and Latin scholar. I must have spent three years feeling guilty about not knowing 'the rhythm of prose'."

So, after so much success, does he still feel like an iconoclast? "It's real chip on the shoulder stuff: I still feel guilty for not bothering with all the correct grammar and the like. All I can do is follow the instincts which have brought me this far. I always read the sentence to see how a character would say it. I hear the breath, the structure: I find the way people say things incredibly attractive."

But however beautiful the writing, it's warts and all and never far from the coarse: "They heard the piss stream stop. Rattle of bog roll holder as she scooped in under her." "The primitive in art has always interested me," he says. "I still feel I'm writing anti-novels like Kelman and Beckett, questioning the art form, redrawing its boundaries. Like Velazquez showing the painter in a painting, I want to put it all in."

It's the same with his attitude to Scotland, taking in the good, the bad and the ugly and eulogising whilst satirising. He beautifully describes one town as "hunched round a harbour like a classical amphitheatre, where the ocean grew still in a trapped bay an the mountains of the islands seemed to hang in the skies of summer nights..."; and then only a few pages later one of his characters offers the nationalistic brag: "Aye, an by the way, we did invent the Internet."

By this stage of the lunch Warner is asking for unfeasibly complicated drinks, confidently shouting his orders over to the bar; I'm feeling more like Kay, one of the characters in The Sopranos who's never quite sure what or why she's drinking. "F. Scott Fitzgerald said my favourite literary quote," Warner begins. "'A bottle for a paragraph, a crate for a chapter.' And you just know he was talking Don Perignon." Warner, of course, is just about to publish a whole book.

If success hasn't gone to his head, it's certainly gone to his wallet. "I'm sure I've got more money than Julian has," he begins, recalling an interview when he claimed to have nothing in common with the likes of Julian Barnes: "What could I say to Julian Barnes if I met him? Lend us fifty thousand quid?" Barnes promptly sent him a note saying "This is all I can manage at the moment" and enclosing pounds 10. Warner sent back 20 Scottish one-pound notes. In another unlikely-sounding yarn, he describes living the lit-star lifestyle in a hotel in Hay-on-Wye. Accidentally crawling through cow dung to get to a rave, his room subsequently became smeared with the stuff. "My editor got a letter asking Cape authors to refrain from putting excreta on the walls," he says, guffawing loudly in the now empty restaurant.

All of which rather reminds me of the idle rebelliousness of pierced eyebrows and drunken handjobs that goes on in The Sopranos. Cultish writers carpet-bomb into his conversation. As he writes out a bibliography of iconoclastic fiction on my behalf (Mark Richard, Onetti, Pessoa) it strikes me there's something of the clever-clever kid behind the bike-sheds about Warner.

"Spain is the only other country I know apart from Scotland," he says. "I don't like football or business, so I only articulate myself through works of art. I appropriate England through Dickens, Ballard, the realist tradition." His next book, to be called The Oscillator, about a Spanish man infected with HIV who retraces all his lovers across Europe, will end up in Scotland.

Before that, Warner will be working on the film script for The Sopranos (with Michael Caton-Jones of Rob Roy and Jackal fame). Morvern Callar is also in production. So I wonder, when you're that stratospheric, do the reviews of the next few weeks even worry him? "They aren't important, especially now I'm rich. You know, it's just f*****g words."

The Sopranos is published by Cape on 4 June