Books & Poetry

Ewan Morrison’s debut novel peers into suburban Glasgow to snoop for a bit of swinging. Well-trodden territory, one might worry. However, the novel’s greatest strength is its own awareness of the tiredness of its themes, and the acknowledgement that the exposing of cliché has itself become cliché. There is nothing very new about bored depictions of suburban life, cynical television executives, or indeed the world of swinging itself. But what Morrison does is to re-establish an intimate bond between reader and character through a kind of sustained interior monologue, verging at times on free association.

This is how we experience David and Alice, who have recently moved into the attractive East End of Glasgow. He a failed actor and she a failed artist, their redundancy and frustration are embodied in David’s impotence. As he says, he is impotent ‘in so many ways’. Partly as a joke, or to prove that a joke may just as well be lived as anything else, partly to cure David of his affliction, and partly in a true attempt to sting the world into some kind of meaningful reaction, the couple log into the world of internet swinging. There is the interesting suggestion that for some couples the only means of communication is by proxy, by involving others in their relationships. Soon enough, David and Alice are romping with the best of them. But they can’t quite abandon themselves to the wantonness of their experiment, and indeed they remain obsessed with each other’s desires and needs.

As ‘Swung’ begins, there is a worry that it will exhibit the kind of name-dropping, know-it-all post-modernist tendencies that are too irritating to endure. However, Morrison reveals a far subtler agenda. Beneath the boredom there remain yearnings and struggles, there might just still be spheres of genuine experience.