First of all, Alan Warner‘s novel The Sopranos is not about a troubled gangster’s life of family and organized crime in New Jersey, as the librarian so gleefully exclaimed when I borrowed it: “I didn’t knowthe series was a book too!” Anyway. Rather, The Sopranos is about a group of choirgirls from a Scottish port town who are headed into the city to compete in a school choir competition. The choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour have reached the finals of their school choir competition, which means a trip into the city. However, the Sopranos minds aren’t on winning the competition, or even singing. Their priorities lie in getting drunk, getting laid and going shopping. And, hopefully, returning home in time to get to the local nightclub where they anticipate attractive and randy sailors from the submarine in port will be.

Ach what’s ‘insecure’? Eh? A word out ah Cosmopolitan. It’s just another word for ‘scared’. Ahm scared Kay, just like you probably are, scared about what I am, where am going, what job, if ah ever get one, ahm going to do, wondering if it’s possible to plan anything in a life anymore. Am ah ever going to get out the Port?

At first, mainly due to Warner’s technique of not using quotation marks and heavily accented dialogue, I found it difficult to distinguish between the five girls. As their back stories are revealed in flashbacks, they become more distinct. Orla has been seriously ill and has received radiation therapy which has left her, she worries, too skinny and without breasts. In the hospital she attempted to have sex with a man in a coma – which reminded me of a very similar scene in The World According to Garp. She is intent on losing her virginity on the city trip. Kylah (who, for some reason, I couldn’t help but imagine looking like Effy Stonem from Skins.) is a talented singer who is in a local band, Lemonfinger. She doesn’t treat it as seriously as her male bandmates, all of whom she has slept with without the others realizing. Chell is a bit of a mystery, with a tragic family past and a fondness for animals (though there is a seriously disturbing anecdote about Chell keeping puppies), and she seems forever infantile, as if she is somehow emotionally stunted. Manda’s father is extremely poor, she is the most promiscuous of the five girls and their unofficial leader. Fionnula’s story remains a secret until a revealing conversation with Sopranos enemy, Kay, at a bar as they drink themselves sick and stupid. She tells Kay of her lesbian urges and her fear of acting on them due to living in such a small town.

And on and on, till they came to a roundabout, the grass at its side muddied, the high arc lamps already on, despite the generosity of the evening light, an the cars jostlin round, beepin and fightin all in a hurry to get to where an why, an it was possibly one of the ugliest places in the land, for these girls who came from a town, 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 in November the sea turned black while salt gathered in the window corners of even the furthest-back houses.

The trip into the city sees the girls shed their uniforms and inhibitions as though the freedom and anonymity of the city is something that is completely unavailable to them in their small town. As they move around the city they gradually reveal their personalities – although they always diminish somewhat in the context of the group. They also reveal their small town naiveté, as they trust people they shouldn’t, and expect the same small town attention from city services. There is the usual gossiping about each other behind their backs, much of the tension centred around Manda and Fionnula’s growing differences. As they form new friendships, find new boys, get their school uniforms stolen, get taken to hospital and eventually turn up to the choir competition either late or without appropriate uniform, expulsion from school seems likely. Of course, this only means that the Sopranos have even more reason to continue their shenanigans into the night. To their dismay, the submarine was only in port to offload a deceased soldier so the nightclubs are filled with the regular crowds. A few more adventures and personal revelations, and the Sopranos end their night eating free breakfasts in a local diner.

What I really loved about The Sopranos is Warner’s heartfelt compassion for these girls. He gets into their heads and the group of girls mentality so well. It did take me a while to warm to the characters and their stories, as a group they tend to blur together, but as their trip went on and especially as they returned to their hometown, I fell for these girls and Warner’s portrayal of them in a major way. In their hometown, beautiful visual images of three of the girls in the Mantrap nightclub, covered in dust glowing under ultraviolet light after heaping a pile of seaweed together in order to climb into the club toilets when the bouncer won’t let them in. Or setting off fireworks in a bouncer’s house and accidentally setting fire to his marijuana plants and sending a rocket through the window of a bank. Warner ends the novel with a scene of melancholic ambiguity that doesn’t diminish the power of the changes the girls have gone through over the course of the novel. If anything, it merely affirms their youthful adventures as necessary for change and for freedom. The Sopranos is a lot of fun to read, and it has such a huge amount of heart and warmth that makes it very difficult not to fall for these characters.

(I have the recently released sequel, The Stars in the Bright Sky, on hold at the library and as soon as it comes in from processing it will be a reading priority. I just want to know more of Finn, Kylah, Kay, Manda, Chell and Orla.)