Ewan Morrison Writes

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THE FOLLOWING IS A TRANSCRIBED RADIO INTERVIEW WITH ABC (Australia)

You can link to the site here ABC

Ewan Morrison’s The Last Book You Read and Other Stories

In Australia for the Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Ewan Morrison speaks to the Book Show about his collection of streetwise short stories. The Last Book You Read and Other Stories captures the desires of men and women who are gay, straight, young and old.

Transcript

Joe Gelonesi: He’s been described as one of the most interesting and exciting voices to emerge in Scottish fiction in recent years, but don’t expect another crime writer or a dour realist. He’s young, modern and thoroughly global Ewan Morrison, welcome to The Book Show.

Ewan Morrison: Thanks for having me.

Joe Gelonesi: There’s so much I’ve identified in your work that I’m just going to choke with questions really, but let me just get on to the very first thing which is being Scottish. You have been hailed as the next big thing. Irving Welsh himself, from Trainspotting fame, has singled you out, but you don’t necessarily see yourself as a Scottish writer, do you.

Ewan Morrison: No, indeed. When someone asks me, ‘Aren’t you proud to be Scottish?’, I always refer back to that great scene in Trainspotting where Renton and Tommy are out in a field somewhere and Tommy turns to Renton and says, ‘Aren’t you proud to be Scottish? Look at that landscape.’ And Renton turns around and says, ‘You know, Tommy, everyone slags off the English but what are we, the Scots, but a nation who are overruled by a bunch of effete arseholes, so no amount of nature is going to make it any better.’

Joe Gelonesi: I want to get into this theme of the fact that Scotland is part of a much bigger cosmopolitan global narrative which is what you’re really dealing with. But just tell me, do you think that what we need least, perhaps, is another dysfunctional maverick Scottish detective? Has it become a little bit too stereotypical for your liking?

Ewan Morrison: I’m more concerned with the perpetuation of the heroic suffering Scottish male. This was the thing I was really pushing against, and I saw this represented for about 20 or 30 years in Scottish fiction and Scottish films. So I was more interested in what would it be like to have middle class Scottish characters and bisexual Scottish characters, men who dress as women, women who dress as men, people who lose themselves in different worlds when they log onto the internet and don’t really feel they’re particularly Scottish at all.

Joe Gelonesi: Can I just go back a few years. You were involved with screen as a director. You’ve won a hell of a number of awards, BAFTAs and whatever. You went to the USA in 2001. There’s a great story there about you being the new up and coming screen director, and the timing didn’t work for you.

Ewan Morrison: Yes, it was rather unfortunate. I remember packing to go and receiving a phone call telling me to watch the television because the first plane had just hit. I was due to fly out on the 13th of September and basically I arrived at a world that was radically different form the one I’d imagined I was going to. Everyone’s got their own stories about post-9/11 but there was still dust on the windowsills by the time we arrived a month later. Everyone in New York said it was business as usual and there was a big proactive push to try to get the film we were going to be working on off the ground. But unfortunately it was a kind of a generation X critique of western capitalism, that was the feature film I was going to be doing, and the ideology had changed considerably after September 11th.

Joe Gelonesi: Virtually overnight your film idea basically was trashed.

Ewan Morrison: Pretty much fell through, yes, we had to start from scratch, we had to revise other ways of doing it. Also, investment in New York at that time was very poor. Even though people were saying it was business as usual, people were scared of investing money.

Joe Gelonesi: So you came back, to some degree, without the spoils that you went over to get. People were saying that you were going to be the next big thing.

Ewan Morrison: Curiously, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I know that sounds like American self-help talk, but the disaster of having a promising film career go up in smoke meant that I just had to start writing for myself in a very simple way. It was a great relief to know that I didn’t have producers hanging over my shoulder wondering about this line and the next line and this character, and with their cheque book and pen poised or possibly removed. So just writing for myself was a real revelation.

Joe Gelonesi: I want to explore that a bit later on too, about this idea that working in film might change the way one approaches character and whether it’s simplifies character too much, and I think you’ve probably had to walk a pretty fine line in your writing in this regard. But I’ll talk about that in a moment. You’ve mentioned generation X, and really generation X is at the centre of what you write about. You write about a generation who’s wedged between the dreams of the 60s, the hyper-capitalism of today. That’s your generation. Tell me about why they interest you so much.

Ewan Morrison: This other phrase as well, the ‘post-modern’…I realised when I was 18 that all these post-modern theories, these ideas about the end of the idealism of the 60s and the collapse of the narratives of progress and the end of Marxism was basically what I’d experienced with my family growing up. I had hippies as parents who were hugely idealistic, but by the time I went to university they’d lost their home, my father had become an alcoholic, basically all the things that they’d believed in had fallen to pieces. So I couldn’t find any representation of that in Scottish culture but I was seeing it coming out of America, I was hearing it through the music, through bands like Nirvana, books like Douglas Coupland. Reading Generation X was a relief; it was strangely enough the story of my own life but told from the other side of the world.

Ewan Morrison: Yes, and it’s a generation which is facing something very interesting. I suppose it’s this trough between a time where things were kind of…I don’t know, real, they stuck…relationships stuck, there were institutions, there were families, the world didn’t seem to be floating and melting as it is now. Perhaps the generation that follows, gen Y, doesn’t get that because they’re already born into that world. Is it that shoulder, is it that distinction between the generations that interests you?

Ewan Morrison: I think that generation X is caught between two poles really because generation Y are much better adapted to a world which is very short-term where, as the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman said, the future is temporary. Gen Y, people ten years younger than me, are used to the fact that they don’t have anything that lasts more than three months, whether that’s a job, a place to live or a relationship. Gen X was brought up with a sense of values that it saw collapsing, so we have a kind of nostalgia, I guess, for something a bit more solid, although we’re very suspicious of it. I think generation X are the most fascinating generation that I’ve come across. I have a vested interested in saying that, being one myself.

Joe Gelonesi: Ewan, let’s take you straight to your first novel, Swung, which is about swinging.

Ewan Morrison: Indeed. Swinging, for those of you who don’t know, is people who have multiple sexual partners and make a lifestyle choice out of it.

Joe Gelonesi: I figure that you did research for this way beyond Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice and those sorts of 60s…

Ewan Morrison: Yes, indeed it was…if you’ve ever heard of Hunter S Thompson’s journalism, gonzo journalism, you put yourself in the story, I kind of did the same, so it was gonzo authorship. I did swing, if that’s what you’re asking.

Joe Gelonesi: We won’t go into too much of the salacious detail, but essentially the people that you present in Swung, for people who have never been part of that subculture, seem almost incredible. I mean, they are real, but what they engage in and how they go about it is quite extraordinary, and yet what you’re saying to me is it’s all very much real.

Ewan Morrison: It’s quite banal at the same time though. It’s really an extension of things we’re seeing around us now; internet dating. From internet dating to swinging is really just a click of the mouse away, and more people are experimenting with these multiple options that consumerism is giving us in terms of our sexuality. I see a huge growth in the whole swinging thing. It’s almost become as easy as shopping on eBay.

Joe Gelonesi: It’s interesting, one of your characters in Swung, Alice, says it’s almost like a parallel sexual universe happening in the shadows that people don’t realise.

Ewan Morrison: Yes, absolutely, and one of the reasons that Alice and David get into it is they’re so terrified of actually being part of the normal, known universe. They are being kids of gen X, they are looking for the indie outsider take on things that will stop them from just being a conventional bourgeois couple. So it comes at the right time in their lives; they’re heading towards their 40s, they just got a house together, they’re just scared of the baby question and the career question, this is their last chance of exploring a nether world.

Joe Gelonesi: Perhaps you could read just a small section because I think that segues well into the section you’ve got highlighted there from the book.

Ewan Morrison: Sure. This is from Swung, and this is quite early on in the book. Alice has just discovered something on the internet.

[reading from After they'd made love, Alice couldn't sleep... to ...this most intimate of pictures on a website.]

Joe Gelonesi: And that most intimate of pictures is in fact a wedding shot, not what people would think from that reading.

Ewan Morrison: It’s their wedding photograph with their faces whited out, and it’s an image that keeps haunting Alice throughout the whole book. It kind of stands in for her ambiguous relationship towards marriage and also of the many people she’s loved and lost in her life already, their faces erased.

Joe Gelonesi: You were talking about the couple trying to find something real, break through, perhaps connect in a way that they can’t connect, through the swinging scene. You also use the term ‘banal’. Is it possible that this parallel subculture is really just responding to the economic model we’re in, the hyper-capitalism, hyper-consumerism, don’t form any relationships that are too deep, don’t create tradition around them, jettison everything that we’ve had, don’t have any gatekeepers. Is it possible that that’s all it is?

Ewan Morrison: I think it’s entirely possible. You have to navigate your way through this world that seems overly determined by consumerism, for sure. We can see the growth in the sexualisation of absolutely everything, and this is also tied very much, as I said before, to the fact that our lives are becoming more temporary, we’re using forms of amusement and entertainment and communication that tend to break down the usual conventions of locale, family, neighbourhood. We’re living in a time of eroticised fantasy, where you put in your credit card details and you can imagine sexually that you’re anyone, anywhere. So it’s a huge transformation in social relations, really.

Joe Gelonesi: Do you worry about the actual future of the book? This is interesting, I guess, coming from you because your original career was in the televisual scene, and now because, as you say, you’ve had to turn to writing in this way, do you worry it’s kind of dead?

Ewan Morrison: It’s kind of like…I remember when VCRs came out, people said Betamax will kill cinema, then they said VHS will kill cinema. Cinema still seems to be going. I think the book is in a similar situation. People fetishise books, they like to own them. This whole idea that people would read an entire book off the internet is really ludicrous, unless what we might see is the shortening of books and the growth of the short story, which I’m all up for as a form. I think there’s too many bad novels in the world as it is, we could do with a bit of a cull anyway.

Joe Gelonesi: The Last Book You Read is a collection of your short stories. I recognise some of the characters in Swung perhaps being tested out in that short story form in The Last Book Your Read. Interestingly there are 30-something men who are out of work or they’re actors or they’re artists or they’re impotent, which is another theme which seems to come up quite a bit.

Ewan Morrison: As David says in the book Swung, he’s impotent in so many ways, yes.

Joe Gelonesi: These characters, I guess you tested them through the short story form before you got to the novel.

Ewan Morrison: Yes, also in the collection of short stories I was really interested just in the idea of characters who are trying to lose themselves, so I was trying to create a kind of template for what I saw as a new kind of character, someone who doesn’t…the first thing you usually find out about someone is where they live, what their earnings are, what their class background is, what their sexuality is. Most of the characters in the short story collection start off with the premise that they wanted to lose all of those things or they had lost them. They were floating in an ether but somehow managed to, generally through sexual contact with other people, find some kind of real. So after I finished the book of short stories I realised that no matter how fragmented people’s social lives are, how temporary, people do need each other and do look for the answers in each other. So Swung came out as a natural evolution of that, the idea of a couple taking this culture head on.

Joe Gelonesi: It’s interesting because I think it was Irving Welsh who said in his review of your book in The Guardian that, at its heart, Swung is a fairly traditional love story. It sort of stretches the term a bit, I think, but that’s what he said, and what you’re saying to me is that there is some kind of older-fashioned tradition involved.

Ewan Morrison: I’m not sure if I would use the word ‘love’ in an unqualified sense but I certainly think that companionship, a need for exchanging humour and ideas with a partner, yes, that’s a really powerful thing, and it’s at the heart of both books.

Joe Gelonesi: Ewan, I want to also talk to you about the inner voice, because I think what happens with your work is you think there’s a lot of action but in fact it’s all the action trapped in people’s heads, it’s all that stuff that one says to oneself during the day and switches between what you actually say compared to what you’re actually thinking.

Ewan Morrison: And what you actually do as well. There’s been times where I’ve tried to write a paragraph and I’ve thought, ‘Joe goes and picks up the cup, and on his way he stumbles across a critique of consumerism, a question as to why he can’t reach sexual climax and the fact that he’s worried that he might be becoming an alcoholic. Then he finally gets to the cup.’ It’s a recurring trope that happens throughout the work, that people do lose themselves in their minds, and sometimes it does change the outcome in a fairly standard set of actions. Yes, it’s more or less the way I think about things, they way that the characters seem to drift in and out of the third person. There are specific things that they’re trying to do but they do get lost in their own thoughts.

Joe Gelonesi: You have no qualms about writing from the female perspective. There are long stretches inside women characters’ minds, and sometimes it takes me a page or two to realise that you’re doing that, and I feel kind of surprised. I’ve had to go back to the beginning of some stories, particularly the one of ‘Cassandra05′ who is putting in an ad in an internet dating site.

Ewan Morrison: Yes, she’s the one who puts in an empty profile and receives 3,000 replies, yes.

Joe Gelonesi: Do you feel like you’re tracking that accurately? Do you have women readers say to you that you’ve nailed that?

Ewan Morrison: Yes, I get that quite a lot. Women are very surprised. In fact I got one reply on Amazon from a women saying, ‘May the real Ewan Morrison please stand up as the woman he is? This book could not have been written by a man.’ There’s a few popular clichés about men writing women’s parts. Someone once famously said, ‘If you want to write a woman, you should write a guy and then remove reason and morality,’ and that would give you a female voice. I don’t really subscribe to that, but I do generally…in my life I find women more interesting than men, so maybe I listen harder to women than maybe most guys do.

Joe Gelonesi: Sex is at the absolute core of the writing, it pops up, it just happens, it’s explicit when it happens, and although confronting at first, it does seem natural to the prose. I’m reminded of Flannery O’Connor who said that she didn’t mind or object to writing about sex as long it did have a purpose in the text. You remind me a little bit of Michel Houellebecq, I’m not sure if you’ve…

Ewan Morrison: Oh, I was a huge fan of Houellebecq.

Joe Gelonesi: Yes, I have to say, I think where you succeed in writing about sex, he fails in that it feels that he introduces it almost as an act of pornography more than anything else.

Ewan Morrison: Also he’s using it to illustrate some philosophical points, he’s trying to prove this decadent collapse of civilization, and none of the characters are having particularly wholesome or emotional sex. It’s a form of degradation. I think I’ve parted company with Houellebecq recently because I do believe it’s a misuse of literature to be trying to spell out philosophical points. I think it’s more compassionate to work from inside the mind of characters and to feel for characters, and if they want to have a shag then let them have a shag, it might be a good one. You shouldn’t remove the possibility of them actually having some fulfilment or new experience.

Joe Gelonesi: So you see it as Houellebecq basically spelling out some sociological tract as opposed to writing.

Ewan Morrison: Yes, he’s becoming increasingly seen as a sociologist and a philosopher rather than a novelist. At last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival I was horrified to find a sociologist standing up and quoting the works of Houellebecq, and I felt like saying, well, hold on a second, which sociologist is this guy called Houellebecq? He’s a guy who writes fiction, and in fact science fiction.

Joe Gelonesi: However, he is humorous, and is humorous in the sexual descriptions in his novels and, I have to say, that’s what you are too. I caught myself laughing out loud with your work, as much as I might have laughed and probably felt bad about laughing in some of Houellebecq’s descriptions.

Ewan Morrison: There’s a scene in Swung where Alice has this problem which she calls her jukebox mind where every time she gets into a really intense existential situation some stupid song will come into her head just at the point where she should be saying something meaningful. So she’s about to have sex with this couple and the guy rolls on a strawberry-flavoured condom, and she’s looking at the offending object and starts singing Strawberry Fields Forever.

Joe Gelonesi: Yes, there are many moments like that in your book. Can I talk to you about the USA, because one of the things that you do talk about is this mass cosmopolitan gentrified world that’s happening everywhere, from the West End of Glasgow…

Ewan Morrison: The Ikea-fication of the world.

Joe Gelonesi: The Ikea-fication of the world habitat and everything else, Jamie Oliver cookbooks and the rest of it. Also the people who populate your works are people with these broad transatlantic accents. There’s a hint of American in there and there’s a hint of something else but you’re not sure where they come from. Are you getting to this kind of notion that that American form of globalisation is forcing the same difference everywhere, and are you kind of getting that sense through the actual accents?

Ewan Morrison: Oh yes, you can probably even hear it in my own accent actually. It’s a fairly soft Scottish accent. Yes, I’m very conscious, have been for a long time, of the influence of American culture. I don’t see it as an entirely negative force, to be honest, I can see that we could do with a bit more of America in Scotland.

Joe Gelonesi: Which bit though?

Ewan Morrison: I hate to say but all the things that we probably hate about America would be very good for Scotland. For example, a bit of privatisation of public assets might actually help us shift what was a really static, frozen, top-down, state run culture. Other things…we could do with a bit of multiculturalism in Scotland as well. We don’t really have that. And also, to be a bit more political, we could probably do with getting separation from England and starting a republic.

Joe Gelonesi: Bingo! Ewan, I could take it so many different directions, but perhaps I could just leave the last question to you yourself. I mean, what do you want from the world? In a sense, these books are about questioning the world that you’re in, and I can’t work out sometimes whether you’re railing against it or whether you’re accepting it in all its fun and fluidity and freedom.

Ewan Morrison: I think I almost started writing to have a bunch of friends who I could talk to about all the things that I was concerned about, these friends being the characters. It becomes kind of addictive in itself. I’m very much against the idea that a writer should write to get a point across. I’d rather find out what the characters have got to say, so I guess so long as I’m a lonely solitary writer I’ll keep on having to invent fictional characters who might help me out in life.

Joe Gelonesi: Just on that point, finally…you’ve worked in the screen business, do you think character is very difficult now to create in these kind of longer-form fictional works because of the levelling process that television and film has done to character?

Ewan Morrison: There’s a great thing in Houellebecq actually where he talks not only about that phenomena happening in film but in the world that film has created. Houellebecq says how is it possible to write novels when characters have ceased to exist in the real world, where people are actually becoming levelled themselves? So he says, basically, the novel is a dead form because no one has got personality anymore, which I find a hilarious satirical point, but it’s got a certain amount of truth to it. So yes, I think it’s an important goal to try to invent really rich characters who are not just the same zombies who sit and watch Big Brother every night.

Joe Gelonesi: Ewan Morrison, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. Enjoy your stay in Australia, and I hope things go well at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival for you, and good luck with your books.

Ewan Morrison: Thank you very much.

Watch an interview with Ewan on First Tuesday Book Club ABC TV Australia. He discusses his favourite novel Revolutionary Road and the influence of Henry Miller. FIRST TUESDAY

A FREE PODCAST of the story ‘The Piers’ has been brought out by UWA press of Australia who have published the Australian version of the collection THE LAST BOOK YOU READ AND OTHER STORIES. It can be head at the following URL:

http://www.uwapress.uwa.edu.au/__data/page/106923/morrison_podcast_FINAL_VERSION.m4a

TRANSCRIBED RADIO INTERVIEW
To read a full transcription of Ewan’s recent Interview with Joe Gelonisi of THE BOOK SHOW, ABC RADIO (Australia). Go to the address below.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2007/2014517.htm

REVIEWS and ARTICLES

THE GUARDIAN. 21.04.07. by Irvine Welsh.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2061343,00.html#article_continue

THE SUNDAY HERALD. Sunday 8th April. Profile on Ewan Morrison. Peter Ross.
www.sundayherald.com

http://www.sundayherald.com/life/people/display.var.1315049.0.sultan_of_swing.php

THE SCOTSMAN. Saturday 7th April. Scottish Exclusive - cover story. Article on Ewan Morrison and swinging in Scotland. Lee Randal.
www.scotsman.com

http://living.scotsman.com/people.cfm?id=515012007

The following story appeared in THE LIST
http://www.list.co.uk/magazine/index.php?w=module:article,action:view,id:1727

INTERVIEW ALSO APPEARED IN THE BIG ISSUE

THE DAILY RECORD and THE BELFAST TELEGRAPH both picked up the Independent story WELL SWUNG (below) on Tusday 3rd April. The daily record ran it as cover story.

THE INDEPENDENT. 31st March 2007. Cover story. Diary of a swinger - The inside story of Britains Secret Sexual Revolution.

WELL SWUNG - ‘While working on a novel about swingers the acclaimed author Ewan Morrison spent a year exploring Britains secret Sexual Subculture. Twelve Months and many, many partners later, this is what he learned.

To read the article go to:

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2405037.ece

The Belfast Telegraph Version:
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/features/daily-features/article2423766.ece

ARENA MAGAZINE. MAY 2007. The controversy Issue. Sex stories by Britains hottest authors. p.162. HEAVEN - short story.
www.arenamagazine.co.uk