FICTION: CATHERINE HEANEYreviews The Stars in the Bright SkyBy Alan Warner, Jonathan Cape, 394pp, £12.99
MANDA, KAY, Chell and Kylah are off on holiday. They’ve come to Gatwick from their small hometown, in Scotland, armed with vast wheelie cases, acrylic nails, mobile phones and a laptop to book their last-minute package to an as-yet-unspecified destination – maybe Magaluf, maybe Las Vegas. One thing is for sure, though: the airport doesn’t know what’s about to hit it.
The Stars in the Bright Sky, the latest book from Alan Warner (most famous for his highly acclaimed debut, Morvern Callar), takes up the story of characters first introduced in his 1998 novel The Sopranos, set while the girls were still at school and wreaking havoc on a trip to the city. Now, a few years on, they're in their early 20s and struggling to find their place in the world. Sweet-natured, haunted Chell, clear-eyed Kylah and the impossibly overbearing Manda still live in their hometown, their lives circumscribed by the smallness of the place and the unlikelihood of their ever escaping it. Middle-class Kay is studying architecture in Edinburgh while their old gang leader, Finn, who is joining them at Gatwick, has moved to London and is finishing her philosophy degree. The smartest of the bunch, she has made a new life and new friends, such as the sophisticated (and English) Ava, who is also in tow and elicits much curiosity.
From the moment they descend from the Hotel Hoppa bus at Gatwick on Friday night there is a dogged tone to the group’s excitement, as they install themselves in the Flight Deck bar to kick off the mayhem, in their heels and slogan T-shirts. (Manda’s: “Some Won’t, Some Might, I Will.”) Inevitably, the heavy drinking soon leads to a chaotic litany of lost passports, missed flights, a Kafkaesque cycle of costly rebookings, and sojourns in various airport hotels. As Friday turns into Saturday, Sunday and beyond, the question becomes less about whether the young women will ever get away and more about what will become of them in a wider sense, as they drink and smoke their way through recollections of the past and hopes for the future. Over four days of laughter and sniping, innuendo and revelation, loyalty, longing and betrayal, six very real characters emerge – against all the odds – during the sequence of bleary-eyed escapades.
Warner seems to have a natural understanding of female friendship and its attendant undercurrents, and delivers some poignant truths amid the inane chatter about bikini waxes and fast food. For all the superficial (often scatological) banter, these young women – especially those marooned at home – are capable of deeper understanding of where their lives are headed: Chell’s description of her interview at the town’s tourist office is a funny, bittersweet expression of self-knowledge, while Kylah seems resigned to the fact that her talent as a singer won’t be enough to rescue her from a dead-end job. There is something sad, meanwhile, in single mother Manda’s recounting of her exploits in Rascals, their town’s nightclub, and her constant rebuke to Finn and Kay that “you really missed yourselves” in leaving it all behind. But there is a resilience to them all, and a gruff tenderness to their friendships, that elevates these girls above the two-dimensional Red Bull-swigging stereotypes they might become in lesser hands.
Indeed it’s Warner’s non-judgmental approach to his characters and his fondness for their unrepentant way of life (especially foul-mouthed, infuriating Manda) that makes this, ultimately, a warm read, when it could be unrelentingly bleak. That said, the successive bouts of drinking and debauchery are in danger of becoming tediously repetitive (by the end you’re as desperate to get out of Gatwick as they are), and there is some welcome relief when the group escapes for a day trip to a castle, which gives rise to some of the funniest set pieces in the book. Warner also brilliantly captures the featureless, transient nature of airports, bending it through the prism of girls’ naive awe at the gleaming bars and shopfronts – of the Gatwick Hilton, Chell observes, “there’s always the chance Johnny Depp is around in a posh airport joint like this.”
Much of the achievement of The Stars in the Bright Skylies in the combination of the author's highly crafted, often beautiful writing and his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue (albeit fairly salty stuff – you have been warned). This slips from time to time when Finn or Ava delivers odd bits of social commentary – expressing, say, Warner's own sentiments on status symbols or class division – and these passages can feel too obviously contrived. For the most part, though, he maintains an admirable balance between the two.
The danger of a book like this is that, through its very faithfulness, it ends up being as empty of substance as the world it critiques, but Warner avoids this through his compassionate approach to his characters in all their hysterical, squalid glory. The climax (or anticlimax) of the closing pages may annoy some readers, yet it provides a natural transition between these strange few days and what will follow. The girls world is changing, and they, like us, must wait to see what happens next.
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor of the Glossmagazine
