Their Lips Talk of Mischief by Alan Warner, review: 'dark satire'

Francesca Wade admires an ambitious novel about two chancers in Thatcher’s Britain

Alan Warner won the James Tait Black Prize last year for The Deadman's Pedal Photo: GARY DOAK / Alamy

By Francesca Wade

1:00PM BST 01 Oct 2014

Alan Warner’s last book was set on a Seventies Highlands railway; this, his eighth novel, jumps to London in 1984, the year of miners’ strikes and Brighton bombings. Lou and narrator Douglas are a Withnail and I-like pairing, their friendship sparked by a dramatic chance meeting in A&E.

With mutual unemployment and literary pretensions, they share a grubby flat with Lou’s fiancée Aoife and baby Lily at the top of an Acton council block. The men’s engagement with the politics of Thatcher’s Britain is limited to occasional incoherent diatribes and a few guilty pennies in a “Support the Miners” bucket. Rather, they spend their days nursing pints of Guinness at the grimy local, toasting the day their unstarted novels will surely go, Morrisseyesque, straight into Penguin Modern Classics.

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Warner is one of Scotland’s most inventive talents; a Granta Best Young British Novelist of 2003, he was Booker-longlisted with 2010’s The Stars in the Bright Sky, while The Deadman’s Pedal won the 2013 James Tait Black Prize. Their Lips Talk of Mischief is further evidence of his interest in outsiders, his gritty sense of place and period, and his sensitivity towards small details.

But, overall, it lacks the raw energy of his earlier work: the characters and plot (a hackneyed love triangle centring on beautiful, naive Aoife) are less original than we’ve come to expect from him. The heroine of Warner’s fine first novel, Morvern Callar (1995), blows a stolen inheritance on Mediterranean holidays, but Lou and Douglas are less imaginative: they don’t even vary the pub into which they sink money scrounged from elaborate housing benefit cheats and other scams. Lou is violent, misogynistic and hypocritical, Douglas increasingly weak and shallow, while Aoife and her friend, Catholic exhibitionist Abby, are seen only through the men’s leering eyes.

Scenes within the claustrophobic confines of the flat and pub, full of cool blather and callous betrayal, grow frustratingly repetitive. The novel is at its dark best in vignettes of set-piece comedy which satirise the men’s attempt at a bohemian lifestyle: there are hilarious interactions with the breezy publishing executive who uses them for casual copy (think Cat Caption Calendar 1986), and a gripping scene where the gang do a runner from an Indian restaurant.

But as relationships become tested by jealousy, Catholic guilt and illicit sexual desires, the ensuing destruction is borne not of evil, as the title seems to suggest, but of apathy, amorality, self-indulgence and ordinary nastiness.