These Demented Lands

Morvern Callar Cycle #2

by Alan Warner

After the critical success of his first novel,   Morvern Callar, Alan Warner has written an extraordinary, stirring sequel to Morvern's odyssey, confirming him as one of the most original, uniquely gifted writers to have appeared this decade.

An air-crash investigator haunts the hinterlands of an island--around the isolated honeymoon hot spot, the Drome Hotel--gathering the debris from fallen planes that the islanders have fashioned into makeshift sheds and fences; but what kind of jigsaw is he really assembling as he paces the runway?

A young woman makes landfall on the island, crossing the interior to arrive at the Drome desperate, strange--and strangely familiar.

Meanwhile, DJ Cormorant is trying to organize The Big One, a rave on the adjacent airstrip, and from all over These Demented Lands come twisted characters, converging for one final Saturday night at the Drome Hotel.

Genres: Fiction, Scotland, Novels

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 1997

About the author

Note: There is more than one Alan Warner, this is the page for the award-winning Scottish novelist. For books by other people bearing the same name see Alan Warner

Alan Warner (born 1964) is the author of six novels: the acclaimed Morvern Callar (1995), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; These Demented Lands (1997), winner of the Encore Award; The Sopranos (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award; The Man Who Walks (2002), an imaginative and surreal black comedy; The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (2006), and The Stars in the Bright Sky (2010), a sequel to The Sopranos. Morvern Callar has been adapted as a film, and The Sopranos is to follow shortly. His short story 'After the Vision' was included in the anthology Children of Albion Rovers (1997) and 'Bitter Salvage' was included in Disco Biscuits (1997). In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2010, his novel The Stars in the Bright Sky was included in the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.

Alan Warner's novels are mostly set in "The Port", a place bearing some resemblance to Oban. He is known to appreciate 1970s Krautrock band Can; two of his books feature dedications to former band members (Morvern Callar to Holger Czukay and The Man Who Walks to Michael Karoli). Alan Warner currently splits his time between Dublin and Javea, Spain.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing apocalyptic novel. A sequel of sorts to Morvern Callar, although the point of view isn't, nor the action, limited to Morvern. The narrative alternates between two first-person narrators, one of whom is Morvern. Heavily symbolic and full of outrageous characterizations and scenes, with lyrical prose, and postmodern interpositions of road (and other) signs and flyers and posters. Heavily weighted with millennial christian overtones it would be interesting to compare and contrast this novel with Emer Martin's Breakfast in Babylon. Also interesting is the intertext between this novel and Morvern Callar. Early on Morvern discusses and labels her emotions, and provides commentary on what she felt (or didn't feel) in the earlier novel. So we have a private language of emotions: "The Indifferent Feeling," "The Correspondence Feeling," "The Toffee Feeling," "The Cheese Sandwhich in the Back of the Car Feeling," "The October Afternoon Feeling," "Peeling the Tangie Feeling," and "The Rudder Feeling," all the feelings that as she says "make me me." But the only ones she describes are "The Indifferent Feeling," and "The Correspondence Feeling." We are left to wonder about the others, except for "The Rudder Feeling," which is the controlling one for this novel. Warner's mastery of language is more impressive in this novel because it is multi-voiced.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

These Demented Lands is a sequel to Morvern Callar, although Morvern's name is not revealed until the last page. Alan Warner's people are the essentially unnameable. As in Morvern Callar, few if any, are known by their "real" names - thus The Aircrash Investigator is also known as The One Who Walked the Skylines of Dusk with Debris Held Aloft Above His Head, Houlihan, Warmer, Failed Screenwriter, The Coated One Who Walked the Skylines and Monsieur Debris Man

Morvern is on a night ferry to the island on which her foster mother is buried. This may be the ferry across the Styx, to an island of the dead, generally the drowned. When the ferry sinks (this time), Ferryman bawls, "If it's the return tickets yous have got, best swim for it". At various points on her journey Morvern says, "I've kicked myself free the earth long ago...I don't count", "If you come ashore in that darkness, and I've done it; it crosses your mind you're back from the dead...Free to vanish" and "'He goes I was already dead,' I goes, 'Drowned. I'm in netherworld; purgatory.'". On this island the hotel summer ferry is called The Charon and the dining room is decorated with a frieze of a sinking Armada ship. Just offshore there's a sunken barge, The Lusitanos. Whether Morvern, as "another who wanders these demented lands in days of the end" is already dead or not, she is going to a psychedelically surreal island not of this world.

When Morvern jumps out of the ferry into the dark water, "I opened my eyes in the static and rumble. A landscape of colours was glissanding on the lunar seabeds way below; my black legs slowly kicking so thin in silhouette...A constellation of pinkish bubbles rose up under my feet then drifted, swole, each bubble's angle reflecting a diamond nova from both its north and south pole, In the furthest distances of this universe the rising planets and blue stars from seabed geysers, a huge surface of tiny bubbles, wobbled under us lit by deepest flarings below; a coral reef gone insane in the colours of these killing seas" then "Just when I was getting the All Dramatic..." she rises.

As you can see, Morvern's vocabulary has improved since she left the Scottish village in which she grew up to visit the raves of Europe. She has even read books, and refers to Pincher Martin," the book of drowning". She's stopped smoking and "getting mortal" - for a while. The book ends with her nastily elegant letters to her stepfather, a former friend Orla and Mr Grainger, father of the one-eyed girl Morvern saves from the ferry. ('It was her who saved me but she's not nice"). This type of thought and expression is far beyond the capabilities of the "Thanks for bumpin us" Morvern we knew previously.

There are nods to Morvern's former life in the mainland village - the steerhide jacket, now old and tatty, "all tears and fatherings", the Walkman and the novel which HE from the first book left her. But it was her time "Down There" (apparently Europe) "and the things that happened to me, walking in moonlight with dark sunglasses among forest fires and shooting stars" which has given her the sensitivity to describe feelings at last - even, occasionally, other peoples'. But Movern is Morvern and she tells us that she has made a deal to tell us this story using "The Indifferent Feeling". Probably a better choice for the reader than "The Cheese Sandwich in the Back of the Car Feeling." If Morvern has begun to use what brain she has, sadly, there still isn't much of it. She likes to tell people about her peculiarly shrewd observational talent -"I have the skill of noticing things, that much you can make a song and dance about: like on a rainy day in the city when you have enough for a taxi you wonder why the wetness on the vehicle floor is only on the left-hand side, til it dawns on you: that's the pavement side where almost all are going to be getting in through."

Morvern arrives looking for The Drome Hotel, although we don't know why, and she is warned against it many a time. She elects not to take the Disco Bus, which seems a wise choice. She treks across the island to The Drome Hotel:-

"Bended double like the clans at Culloden stepping into the end, I traversed bensides ever upwards. I climbed straight through steady blackout - the sodden Levi's going stiff on both thighs with the perishingness - knowing always, hung up in some place of aboveness like a cyan-coloured censer swinging in the wind, snugged up in the clam of a scree-clagged corrie, was the campfire: the campfire with its angle of floor that had let me see it when I swam out in the Sound but hid from view deep down at the sole bulb of Ferry Slipway below

This is geographically a small island - fifteen miles across as the crow files. But eschatologically, whether it is the afterlife or not, it is boundless and unknowable - as the place names tell us, - Outer Rim, Inaccessible Point, the Mist Anvils, the Far Places, Sorrowless Rigs Burn. Although the island is apparently one of several, neither named nor on any map, it seems to be Scottish and could be somewhere in the vicinity of those pleasant lands, Royston Vasey, Craggy Island and the frigid desert in "Dead Man".

All is steeped in the cold, the wet, the mist. Warner is good at the closely observed landscape and watery atmosphere of the rainy, tufty, mossy, stoney island in the gloaming, the frosty sun and the "nightimeness". "[T]he hillsides that were leaping up all round us with white gashes of new-filled streams striping the glen among the wet, green nobbles and blackened spreads of tan." . Fire or light on, or in, the water appears again and again throughout the story.

The trek to The Dome recalls Morvern's long walk in the snow at the end of Morvern Callar. The power station blackout in that, the best part of that book, prefigures the telly-aerial repairers' mission in its sequel. However, the episodic nature of this later trek is a weaker aspect of "These Demented Lands" Warner tries too hard to surprise us with the bizarre. Morvern meets (inter alia) two men taking their dead father overland to the sea, a group of University filmmakers recreating a fifteenth century cattle drove (fuelled by meals of boiled tadpoles and partly funded by the Arts Council), the Devil's Advocate in his tent, and a nice forester. In case you think you are imagining that Warner has been influenced by Mad Max when you read about Knifegrinder - "He wheeched his leg sudden over the bike so's you had to take step back to mind the antlers. With a squat he was down lifting the bike onto its fold-out stand, then he took a belt, like a Hoover belt, attached it to a grooved disc by the centre of the back wheel; from a worn leather pannier he took a black grinding stone with its glistening wee bits, and affixed it near the pedal, pulled on the belt taut, and when he turned the throttle on the handlebar the stone went whizzing round" - don't fret - later another character is referred to as "Mad Max". There is a miniature railway, (the Kongo Express) and various unexpected animals including a bear, a kangaroo, gorillas and a prescient horse called Charlie. There's a ghost who walks. Some of these touches are splendid, but many fail to tie into the overall work.

John Brotherhood took over the Drome Hotel (so-called for the airstrip which brings in honeymoon couples) from his father, who is dying upstairs in a spectacularly ghastly way. The Aircrash Investigator lives in, and drinks a lot of whiskey at, the hotel, and is engaged in a subtle, nasty antagonism with Brotherhood, the meaning of which was lost on this reader. Nor is it clear why Brotherhood is hotile and threatening to Morvern. But then, Brotherhood enjoys misery for its own sake. He plays with the honeymooners, orchestrating "infidelities and orgies" for his amusement. He calls the island, "our little Forbidden Planet where we can play at The Tempest daily". Accordingly, the Drome Hotel is a fun place. If the newly-weds are not already dead, they might want to drown themselves, rather than attend the compulsory "drag party", where the only music spun by DJ Cormorant is by Bob Dylan from The Permitted Albums and the decorations include inflated condoms "stuck up around the fakey chandeliers with pale surgical tape from Brotherhood's father's skinny wrists where his glucose drips fitted into him". "Chilli and rice is being served by Nurse Macbeth". If they need some air though, they can "stroll, arm in arm around the concrete slabs forming two figure 8s in the pine plantation" or attend the mosquito bite competition (actually midges of course, this being a UK kind of island).

The Aircrash Investigator and Morvern alternate the narration. The book seems to be compiled from manuscripts which include insets from the Aircrash Investigator's report on a crash which happened a decade ago at the airstrip. Apparently this incident is based on a real-life incident in 1975, "the Great Mull Air Mystery". In the context of the Drome Hotel, it can be no coincidence that the planes' call signs were Alpha Whiskey and Hotel Charlie - but we don't know what that signifies, any more than we can be sure what a spaceship has to do with it. The "manuscripts" also include facsimiles of road signs, posters and the Argyll Archipelago Records press release outlining the career of DJ Cormorant in chart form. Interesting touches, but not really necessary in a book which doesn't quite hang together anyway.

The inhabitants of the island, as poor and depraved as any in Morvern's home village, tell their own and others' fantastic and gloomy stories with the same deadpan eloquence. There are some missteps - the Devil's Advocate's petrol-fuelled escape from the ferry and the story of the Siamese twins, for instance. There are some flat parts - the rather boring trip out to meet a plane, and the underwater video scenes. Warner insists on hinting mysteriously at things which one person suddenly realises about another - The Devil's Advocate realises something about Morvern, Morvern realises what the Devil's Advocate's wallet holds, the Aircraft Investigator realises that Brotherhood knows something about him and the Aircrash Investigator realises that Morvern is "like him" in some way (by looking at the nailpolish on her toes). We don't know what these realisations are until much later, and each of them is then something of an anti-climax and an irrelevance, particularly the one of the you-knew-I-had-this-gun-sort from Royston Vasey's pub scenes. In addition to the episodic incidences of Morvarn's long trek, there is a narration by the Aircrash Investigator of his journey to "a part of the island, despite my vow to explore every inch of it when I landed, which I had never seen". This involves a floating drumkit, the Outer Rim Hotel, candles on the roof of a silver Opel Manta, stoned whelk-pickers with halogen lamps on their heads and a motoring accident. Although evocative and effective, it seems to be there for colour and does not quite knit in. Finally, in our list of complaints, does Morvern really have to be "divine","fucking gorgeous","drop-dead-gorgeous thing a beauty" and such a stunner that conversation stops when she enters a room? Methinks this is a bit silly.

But perhaps these criticisms are misplaced. These Demented Lands is what it is, a picaresque voyage through an afterlife of one sort or another, Morvern's attendance at "the going under of the evening lands". It is much richer, if not as coherent as Morvern Callar. Both stand-alone, but we do recommend reading them (yes, do) and in order.

Late in the story there is a kind of ambulant crucifixion, which is also compared to the voyage of Icarus or of Odysseus. The symbolism is not accidental. Morvern arrives at Easter and her story concludes at New Year 2000. D J Cormorant's millennial New Year's Eve rave is a big one for Morvern and Warner's trippy, feverish telling of it is a standout - reminiscent of the ending of "The Children's Hospital" with its Biblical overtones.This reader is stll no sure quite what happened. Suffice it to say that Morvern leaves the Drome Hotel the next morning in a coffin - a coffin which previously held spaghetti vongole - but she is every bit as alive as she was when she arrived

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hallucinatory sequel to the great "Morvern Callar," the first section of this book is a superb recounting of our heroine's island journey as a lyric fever dream. It's shot full of pitch black humor and hauntingly weird images, all told in Morvern's indelible voice, and it's well worth picking up the novel for those first 60 pages. You could consider it a novella and call it a day.

After this, the book switches perspectives to the Aircrash Investigator whose rambling insights, confusing obsession, and listless predicament aren't nearly as interesting. The larger problem is that Warner is too concerned with tying up the various plot strands in a conventional sense - which often ruptures the book's beautiful dream logic. Some of the later sections regain the crazed energy of the beginning - the carnivalesque finale, Superchicken's aquatic driving adventures, etc. Three stars is definitely selling this short, but consider it a comparison to the near flawless achievement of Warner's debut.

[Joelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Still have no clue what this book was written about, for whom it was written.

[Palmyrah · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a stain of creepy cold-weather surrealism that runs through modern Scottish fiction – think of Alasdair Gray or Iain Banks, or even Irvine Welsh. These Demented Lands belongs on the same shelf, though it isn't violent or bleak; in fact, it's fun.

I worked my way through the first part of this slim book in delight, thinking 'I've never read anything quite like this before.' Further on in, though, I realized with some disappointment that a lot of the colourful stuff I'd been reading wasn't material to the plot of the novel; and a little later I realized that there really wasn't a plot to the novel, either.

Strange to say, I still enjoyed These Demented Lands. The Scots-inflected prose is elegant and highly readable, with occasional rhapsodic elements. The descriptions are cinematic and psychedelic, the sequence of events has its own mad dream-logic, there are moments of bizarre yet laugh-out-loud comedy and everything does come together in the end, though it does so in a tearing hurry and not entirely to this reader's satisfaction.

I realize I haven't said much anything about the actual story or the characters in the book, or even about its setting. None of that really matters, though. Anyone interested enough to want to find out more should read this blogger's review, which I fully endorse and agree with:

http://guysalvidge.wordpress.com/2009...

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lifeless piffle that abjectly fails to evoke a dream-like or hallucinatory atmosphere due to slack writing and barely-doodled ciphers of characters. Morvern Callar is as boring as she ever was, joining the dreary death-march through 200 pages of lame quirkiness, the excruciatingly portentous efforts at "postmodernism" merely acting as reminders that more talented writers have done it far better (Alasdair Gray, for just 1 example). If you think Verve, Iain Banks and The Mighty Boosh are exciting cutting-edge stuff then you'll love this.

[Black Glove · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text be dripping with gritsy descriptions of terrain. S'all wondrously corking, albeit irksome by the end. Toss in some weirdo-spangled chumps, a bit of slapdash vernacular, other wayward shufflings, and (two-hoots) we get an edgy, delirious fiction very tasty for outcasts, vagabonds, dipsticks and diddlers. In sum: surreal enough to provoke a scarecrow; wild enough to make a magpie jealous.

[Ninian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would’ve been three stars due to the fact I never had any clue what was going on, but Alan Warner writes so many incredibly memorable visual cinematic strange moments it got up to 4 again as it’s such a intense atmosphere

[Elisa Panerai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Morvern Callar, but good. I'd have to read it again as with the Scottish narrators I missed some things I think throughout the book

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

just reserved Warner's latest from the library, and noticed I hadn't added this one on GR. It is a kind of sequel to the great 'Morvern Callar' but not anywhere near as good. It's been over ten years since I read it, but I remember finding it a bit bitty and contrived, but with great moments.

[Czeska · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite confusing and has no real plot. Despite not knowing what was happening, about half way through I kind of enjoyed the story, as weird as It was

[Marth · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I adored Morvern Callar and The Sopranos and have only just got round to reading this, the sequel to Morvern Callar. I had high hopes, but they were not entirely realised. I accept that Warner is an oddity as an author, it's what I like about him. In a way he reminds me of Nicola Barker, a genius author who for me can be very hit and miss in terms of enjoyment. That is kind of what you sign up for when you follow an author who isn't afraid to push the boundaries. For me, this was a kind of Gonzo Scottish vibe. Slightly psychedelic, verging on mystical, hallucinatory in places and, if you care to ponder it deeply, probably quite philosophical. There were some funny moments here amongst all the stream of consciousness and depth, but for me, what really missed the mark was the sense that Morvern Callar herself was largely missing from the book. If I hadn't known it was a sequel, I wouldn't have known that it was her in these pages and that was a shame, because she's a great character. It has moments of greatness I think, but it's too all over the place to ultimately pull it together.

[Laura Macdonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded up but to be honest I don't know where I am with this or how to rate it. It's very 1990s postmodernism, and I didn't know what was going on for most of it, but did stick with it and finish it.

I read Morvern Callar in the late-1990s and really enjoyed it (I was in my late teens and I grew up in the Scottish Highlands so it was context-appropriate). My paperback of these Demented Lands moved house with me several times over the last twenty years and I finally read it - I think I would have enjoyed it at lot more if I'd read it soon after it's predecessor. For me it ended up maybe being wrong time, wrong place, wrong life stage to enjoy it properly.

[Darin Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dazzling in spots, difficult to get a hold of in others. It’s hard to know what to make of this book, so I’ll just take the vivid writing for what it is and try not to make too much of whatever plot there is. Many strange goings on, and some of it ultimately makes sense but nevertheless a puzzling sequel to Morvern Callar. I did enjoy it, I give only three stars for it being hard work to get anything out of.

[Mark Rubenstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

All wallpaper and no wall.

[Donald · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was rather odd. I didn't even realise it was Scotland at first... thinking it was some exotic island.

[Stevie Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Morvern Callar imo but really improves in towards the end

[Spiros · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose I should say "spoiler alert" here: but really, any reasonably intelligent reader will recognize the protagonist on page 11, when she mentions her copy of "Verve: All In The Mind (HUTCD 12)". In this sequel to MORVERN CALLAR, we find our heroine washed up on an island peopled by such driven figures as the Argonaut, the Devil's Advocate, the Knifegrinder, the Aircrash Investigator, and the evil John Brotherhood. An air of subterranean menace pervades the island, as these and other bizarre characters pursue their agendas.
While Warner loses none of his brilliance as a writer here, and some of the scenes are downright hysterical (especially the scene in which Superchicken reverses his car offof a pier), the novel feels a little bit diffuse, the result of the splitting of the narrative voice between Morvern and the Aircrash Investigator, Houlihan.

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

another book spoiled by the blurb. alan warner is trying so hard to not make morvern callar the obvious narrator, only revealing the name as the last two words of the book. but what did warner expect? morvern was his wunderkind debut, certainly he knew he'd get interviewed by the scottish literati and have to reveal it, no? irvine welsh called him brilliant! flash point debuts don't beget sophomore sales. you'd have to bring it up.

either way the book is a little slight, of perspective, of supposed magical realism, of plot.

novel vernacular always gets stuck on me, dissipating over the hour after i put it down. needless to say, i couldn't stop inserting "nae" into conversations in and out of my mind.

[Ape · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughts from 2006

More Scottish wierdness from Alan Warner. This follows on from Morvern Callar, although I actually read it before I read Morvern. And to be honest, I think I prefer this one over Morvern Callar. She isn't the only main character in the book and she isn't the narrator this time - that job goes to the air crash investigator.

The story is set on a Scottish island with a cast of odd characters and bizarre behaviour. Very curious read. Quite funny in places.

[jillian (jill) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Warner. The same kind of love I have for McInerney, Easton Ellis and a few others. I would have loved to love this and the writing, of course, was fantastic....BUT wow, was this NOT for me. If you'd like to read Warner, please, for the love of god, read Morvern Callar first. This book might make you hate him.

[funkgoddess]

i find this book impossible to rate.

there were glimpses of a story i might have been interested in, but lost in a trippy, fluid style. Full of steady and ever-chaning characters, i was never too sure where i was.

an interesting exercise in form, but not for me. i suffered through morven caller and now i've suffered through this, i've done my share of alan warner.

[Ewan Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warner is gifted there is no doubt. his characters are odd, warm, crazy and hilarious. this very strange book captivates and surprises while keeping the reader on his toes at all times.

John Brotherhood's character is work of genius. as is the 'Knifegrinder' - an amusing representation of the mental people who inhabit these islands on the fringes. I loved it but it is pretty mad.

[Jo Beckford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this years ago as a teen and loved its quirky acceptance of violence and mistrust in an outlying remote community of people who the world forgot. Reading it again 20 odd years later it is still an apt description of these weird little places where life is hard and the reasons to stay are few but also epic in their own disjointed and unraveled way.

[Brendan]

bought this in San Francisco. written by the same guy who wrote Morvern Callar, which Lynne Ramsay turned into one of my favorite movies. i've started it like three times but its written in bizzare phonetic Scottish vernacular, really need to buckle down to make sense of it.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

For once I agree with the blurb wholeheartedly: just as good as Morvern Callar. I love his style of writing so much, I could happily read nothing else for the rest of my life.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 4 out of 5]

The further adventures of that Scottish wild child and nature-luster Morvern Callar. If you dug the first one, you have to read this one (and there's a third).

[Tony · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a mess this is... This "darkly intoxicating brew" (The Guardian) picks up the story of young a young Scottish lass (see his debut, "Morvern Callar") as she returns from the continent. She comes to a wee little island where honeymooners stay at a weird hotel, and there's a cast of supporting bizarros. Really tough to get through and none too rewarding despite occasionally clever language at times. Warner's got talent, but try his much more accessible "The Sopranos" before trying this.