Hitting some high notes

Jonathan Cape, #9.99

The soaring ascent of Alan Warner's literary star has recently burst into a firework display of cinema economics. He has, reportedly, been paid #500,000 for the film rights to his third book, The Sopranos.

Cast this figure into the stodgy pool of UK publishing and the picture goes wonky. Think what a British outrage Martin Amis caused when he sacked his agent because she couldn't get him a precise half-million advance for his mature tome, The Information. Amis, at the height of his career, found a new agent and got the advance. Warner, rolling in it, has yet to produce a wholly convincing novel.

Morvern Callar, Warner's first, justifiably propelled him into the front rank of novelistic promise. The bleak character of Morvern took on almost legendary dimensions as a fin-de-siecle creation, and the signature of Warner's style - a language wrought equally in demotic and literary flames - seemed to sign a blank cheque for the revival of British writing. It was too slight to be a major novel, but the measure of potential had been set.

Warner's second, These Demented Lands, was a failure but not a disappointment. Too crazed and formless to be complete it none the less revealed talent in experiment with itself. A monumental Scottish topography - with apocalyptic regions identified as Far Places, Mainland, or Central Belt - demonstrated an ability to transform a little country into a universal landscape. Characters loomed huge as Devil's Advocate, John Brotherhood, Chef Macbeth, or The Aircrash Investigator. It was all just in the writing. The shape of a big novel was, surely, just round the corner.

Of course, if a #30m film of The Sopranos gets made then half a million for the rights will be no big deal. But it's like Robert Redford paying over #2m for a sappy romance called The Horse Whisperer after its author, Nicholas Evans, had only completed a couple of chapters. Could be a nice flick, but what about the book?

The Sopranos does have a powerful concept which suggests filmic possibilities. A group of teenage girls from a convent school on the west coast are descending on the Scottish capital - never specifically identified as Edinburgh - for a choral competition. Music is the last thing on their minds. They are a brat pack of savage-and-vulnerable female adolescence let loose in the city.

From bus to bar to brothel to shops to police station, the hoarse sopranos from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour high school shatter the confines of religion and small-town life. All in one day their miseries and ecstasies are poured into drinking sessions, the gaspings of sex, and the convolutions of friendship. They are wriggling over the dark pins-and-needles of adult reality. Think Thelma and Louise meets Trainspotting.

''Concept'', however, is where any apparent compatibility with cinema ends. There is little or no narrative movement. The structure is loose and episodic. It is verbally dense. Despite the motif of a road trip and a wild day out in the city, very little actually happens in The Sopranos. Or rather, events in the novel take place deep in the background to Alan Warner's real obsession, which is the lyric potency of his language.

This descriptive gift is fantastic. Warner can take one of his sopranos - Kylah, for example - and watch her take a drink of alcoholic cherryade in the bus with the same intensity with which he observes a vast highland landscape passing by outside. He leaps in perspective from, one moment, ''a drop squash came out the corner of her mush and she rubbed at it with arm of her blazer, and it was that cheap, nylony material the blazer was made from, so a wee dribble liquid scampered cross the cuff . . .'' to geological metaphors the next: ''Slabs and rations of granite burst through meagre top soils, thrusting up like broken bone through split flesh.''

It's a gift which also applies

to character. Warner gets inside the heads of his adolescent heroines by getting into their bodies - the textures of their clothes, their taste for drinks and music, the way they examine themselves and lose control of themselves through sex or vomiting. Or just the words they use - gleering, bammering, hootsying and gigglestifling.

If you take one comic-vulnerable image from the book think of Orla, miraculously recovered from leukemia, snogging some guy in an Edinburgh club. He confesses he wears glasses and she confesses she wears a brace. So they decide to put their gear back on and rejoin battle as their true selves. In an almost endless kiss the stud in his tongue locks with the brace in her mouth and they are stuck.

The strength of Warner's raw material, however, only goes to highlight what is missing: basic storytelling facility and the structure of a theme ambitious enough to carry his astonishing verbal abilities. Earning big money through cinema, Warner fails to display the control which would be second nature to the meanest professional screenwriter. As one of Britain's most exciting novelists, he is yet to come of age.