Sultan of swing

During a decade flying high in film and television, Ewan Morrison had a front-row view of contemporary culture in the making – a perspective that he put to use, after the collapse of his Hollywood dreams, to become one of Scottish fiction's hottest prospects. His 2007 debut novel, Swung, centred on the swinging phenomenon and examing the rootlessness and sexual insecurities of highly powered professionals. It was a critical triumph, described by Irvine Welsh as a "beautifully crafted, completely realised" work. With two more acclaimed novels now under his belt, Morrison has firmly established himself as a leading chronicler of modern neurosis.

 

Did you do much swinging while you were researching Swung? And did you tell other swingers that you were researching a book?

Actually, I was about a year into swinging and two years into internet dating when I realized that I should write a book inspired by my experiences. Now that I look back on it my experiences in swinging were fairly benign and friendly – you always start off with fake names but by the time the clothes are removed and the music is put on and the lights are lowered, I’d pretty much 'fessed up to who I was and why I was there with three other naked people.

With internet dating I stared into the void of what sex could become in a consumer culture: bodies literally being used up in the endless search for the next better, bustier, sexier, skinnier, hotter etc. It's a huge and terrifying phenomenon, and utterly addictive in a way that swinging isn’t. People I swung with are still friends, whereas the hundred or so I met on the internet are not.

You write about sex in a way that's detailed without being embarrassing – is there a secret to writing about sex?

We are saturated with sex images but the reality of sex is more messy and fraught and is really quite moving and full of paranoias and insecurities. Tabloids and men's mags annoy the shit out of me. It’s all about desirable unobtainable bodies, the capitalist dream of how the best thing is beyond your reach. I want to try to defuse that bomb and to make sex quite banal, failures and all.

I’m opposed to our pornographic culture but rather than fight to remove all sex images I’d rather explore what subtle things two people can exchange. After all, we're heading towards an entirely narcissistic masturbation culture, and what has to be saved is the dialogue of two people selflessly staring into each others eyes in a state of awe.”

You've described your upbringing as a kind of “hippy dream” - did you always know you were going to be an artist of some stripe?

It’s quite amazing to look back at what my parents tried to achieve in running The Wick Festival of Poetry Folk and Jazz in the 1970s. It was a hippy dream - many other writers, artists, musicians moved north to ‘escape from the corrupt modern world’ in the 60s. These people were reading all the radical texts. Some of them were Marxists, others anarchists and proto-ecologists. Others still were radical Scottish nationalists. However, what my parents found was that American-style pop culture had got there already and destroyed their ideal of a rural idyll.

Personally, I had no choice but to be an artist of some kind or another - I was never a part of the community I was brought up in and art has to come from some kind of alienation.

What was your first artistic success?

My first great artistic success was perhaps a fledgling attempt at being a post-modern artist. I was runner-up in a UK-wide plasticene modeling competition in 1980, with my lifelike rendering of all of the members of AC/DC in a medium designed for making dinosaurs and coil pots. To be able to achieve the effects of coloured stadium lighting on the band member's arms, legs, faces and instruments was no mean feat.

I've read that you came to writing after a trip to New York in 2001, and the atmosphere in the city meant that your film-making projects didn't work out. Do you think you would have become a novelist wihtout 9/11?

In 2001, I had a deal to direct my first feature film with a big venture-capital company in New York. It was a love story and a critique of capitalism all in one. It was about a man who falls in love with a woman in a facing tower. I was due to fly out to New York to start pre-production on September 13th 2001 - it was horrific. On the day we arrived there was a centimeter of dust on the exterior window sills and our neighbour told us about fragments of burned papers he had picked from his garden. The New Yorkers were overjoyed that we came despite the crisis and they put on a brave face, but the project and all future projects for that company were destroyed.

In a strange irony, American mass culture had destroyed my parents' dream of an authentic Scottish Culture, and in trying to escape from Scotland, I had experienced another collapse of a culture. I still love America, hate it and love it. I have not yet had the courage to go back.

Do you feel that you're part of a particular “scene” of Scottish writers?

I’d say that we're all writers who are writing into a kind of void left by the death of the old certainties - the collapse of socialism and a secure notion of Scottish national identity. These writers are all coming from places which we haven’t seen before in "Scot Lit", be they queer, Asian, Jewish, consumerist youth, or even just middle-class.

All of these writers are pushing against the old orthodoxy and hegemony of the Scottish author as chronicler of white working class culture. That position has become "prolier than thou" and is an impasse.

Alan Bissett & Ewan Morrison, Charlotte Square, Monday 17 Aug 2009 8.30pm £9