Thanks IR. I think the resort is supposed to be on an unspecified part of the Spanish holiday coasts, Costa del Sol or perhaps Costa Brava. Yeah, I didn't rate the film very much because it seems to drift and lack focus - one of the great things about the book was that it, even when not a lot might seem to be happening in terms of plot events, it had this amazing intensity running through it. Perhaps that's the problem with transposing what is often a character's interior monologue into film, it's often going to seem silent and empty. They cut about the last third of the book out of the film too, which weakened it for me. Also, I don't think it worked with an English woman playing Morvern - which prob sounds racist or at least typically parochial coming from a Scottish guy, but one of the great things about the book was the sense of a woman who is both inside and outside her own community. It's important that she starts out as an Oban local, for her to then discover there is more to her than that.
As for The Man... I like it a lot, but it's probably my least favourite of his books. I think my problems with it were mainly to do with the 'nastiness' you mentioned; all of his novels are nasty to some extent, but here more than elsewhere it seemed very gratuitious, as if he was very keen to keep up a reputation for being shocking/edgy. I think it also had to do with the fact of all his previous novels having female protagonists, writing solely from a male perspective for the first time, he seemed to hype up all the tough, violent, angry aspects to emphasise the change, and it ends up with an unbalanced narrative. I do agree that the ending was great though, because it seemed cruel in an appropriate way this time: rather than a nastiness which you could revel in and enjoy, it just seemed to make everything the character had done before seem pointless and meaningless, which is a brave way for a book to end. It had that element of 'should have seen it coming, but I didn't', at least for me.
The whole authenticity/realness thing in his work doesn't bother me tbh, but that's most likely because I grew up in a part of the country very similar to the one he writes about, and so can identity with the situations presented, plus I did feel that prior to Warner that the modern West Coast life was very much under-represented in culture as a whole, so it's just a thrill to see it in novels. But, it is also a fact that all of his novels, especially after MC, have been very carefully and artfully constructed. So my view would be that you can't round the fact that the 'reality effect' is a big part of what people respond to, but there are lots of other more artistically self-conscious things going on in his work if that's what you're into.
