Morrison’s debut short story collection, The Last Book You Read, is the subject of fevered hype on the international book fair circuit. The style magazine Arena has singled it out as the essential literary purchase of the summer. In Scottish terms, it’s the most assured short story collection since AL Kennedy’s Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains and the most compelling Scottish literary debut since Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. On an international level, it signals the emergence of a precocious literary talent.
Such is the confidence of Black and White, Morrison’s publisher, in him, it has set up an exclusively literary imprint as a vehicle to exploit the book’s undoubted commercial potential. With the UK’s leading booksellers raving about him, success seems certain for the 33-year-old graduate of Glasgow School of Art. But, having been here before, the writer says he is “taking nothing for granted”.
Five years ago Morrison was a film director. After being nominated for three Baftas and receiving a Royal Television Award, he was singled out as the man who would make it big in Hollywood by John Archer, the Scottish Screen supremo at the time. Within a year he’d been headhunted by a group of international venture capitalists, handed a million-pound budget and whisked off to New York to pursue his dream.
The adventure was ill-starred; he arrived in the city on September 13, 2001. “Two days previously, the world had been on its axis, but now there was a thick smear of dust from the World Trade Center caking the windows of my apartment,” he recalls. Suddenly, the sardonic study of antagonistic US industrial relations he had planned to film seemed wholly inappropriate.
“New York was licking its wounds and there was no space for criticism, especially from an outsider. It was the wrong film at the wrong time.” As the fledgling director assembled his cast, his paymasters went bust.
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“As Scots it’s drummed into us that you have to go to London or overseas to make it. So you can imagine how I felt, sitting on the stoop of my apartment in New York selling off the few possessions I’d amassed in America. I had no job, no money and no future in New York. I was the guy who’d caught the boat heading for salvation just before it sank.”
Battered, bruised and shorn of ambition, Morrison turned his attention to the 25 notebooks full of half-formed ideas he’d carried back to Glasgow. “I had no great hopes; I wanted to reclaim my creativity and to salvage some pride through proving that my talent wasn’t in question,” he says. “Mostly, I wanted to be distracted.”
What emerged was a heart-wrenching clutch of post-millennial fables that became The Last Book You Read. Morrison is a tender chronicler of the broken dreams and spiritual desolation that lies beneath the surface gloss of advanced capitalist society. Cut adrift, on both sides of the pond, in hotel rooms, cheap lodgings and suburban dream homes, his subjects are the underemployed, unloved and overeducated denizens of Generation X, who came of age only to find that their parents had siphoned off the best social, economic and employment opportunities for themselves.
While he was writing, Morrison paid the bills with a portfolio career of music videos for bands such as Arab Strap, “morally questionable corporate promos” and bill-paying commercials.
The son of idealistic hippie parents, Morrison was a CND member at 10. He recalls his parents staging a poetry festival featuring Edwin Morgan and Norman McCaig. “When my father was lambasted in the John O’Groat Journal for staging culture on the Sabbath, he remortgaged the house to fund an expansion of his hippie dream,” says Morrison.
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“Three people turned up to see Norman McCaig’s reading. Two thousand locals were down the road watching the Krankies. Reason and culture defeated by a tiny woman in a schoolboy’s uniform. The house was repossessed shortly afterwards and I’ve been distrustful of idealism ever since.”
Despite his conspicuous work ethic, Morrison nevertheless identifies with the swingers, adulterers, failed parents and desperadoes that populate his fiction. “They’re sick of their thwarted intelligence, ground down by their goals and tired of endlessly desiring something new, some Shangri-la that’s permanently postponed.
“It’s a world without any form of higher authority. It’s like that Woody Allen quote: ‘Marxism is dead, feminism is dead and I don’t feel too good myself.’ We’re the last generation to be living with the weight of failure of all the big 20th-century ideas. We’re public-sector people cast adrift in a private-sector world; dreamers who can’t access how to be happy.”
Safely ensconced within the last bastion of Glaswegian bohemia, he can at least console himself that he’s not perpetuating another Scottish literary cliché by trotting out a formulaic tartan noir thriller. He says: “I don’t feel any great affinity to things Scottish, so to write in any other way would be disingenuous. The stuff in my books: Ikea beds, Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks, kids’ toys, music — it’s the lifeblood of a particular class at a particular point in history.
“That’s the stuff of fiction now: far more relevant than a bogus, manufactured sense of place or a contrived plot. I reckon the last thing the world needs is another dysfunctional maverick Scottish detective.”
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The Last Book You Read is published on August 25 by Chroma, £9.99