Book review: Distance

EWAN MORRISON'S SECOND novel, the much anticipated follow-up to Swung, takes off in a rush, a headlong dash, a slipstream of heat with the force of irresistible suction. Giddy, off-kilter and wholly absorbing, it features two lovers, besotted, reeking of lust and loss, in the wake of a week of powerful sexual-cum-psychological intrigues in New York City and beyond.

Spatially, they are at the airport, saying their strained, distraught goodbyes. But their minds are trapped in a bubble of lust. She (Meg, thirty-something American script-doctor, would-be writer) gives Tom the ad-man, the Scot, the screwball, (no chicken himself) a goodbye gift; a love-bite. As Morrison brings us almost close enough to touch that spreading bruise, what we sniff is madness, impending doom, lives bruised by bad choices, dodgy relationships, inner conflicts, a weight of baggage Tom won't be declaring at the check-in. He doesn't wave back.

The odds are stacked. Back home in Edinburgh, Tom rejoins his lover, his son, his ex-wife and a half-buried problem with the booze. Just ten years old, the savvy son, Sean, is plagued with a stutter, as once his father had been. He is gifted, smart and sensitive. Tom's emotional motivation for coming home is to be a good dad. And the question of home – where and what it is – underpins the burden of much that ensues.

Morna, Tom's lover, waits on the edge. He's supposed to break with her for Meg's sake. He keeps her at bay. At work he's a joke, but the whole caboodle of PR and ad-work, a faux campaign to promote the virtues of the city in which he lives, is a running sore, an empty metaphor for the future. And then there's the time-lapse, the six-hour limbo between their time zones as Tom and Meg, embroiled in phone-sex, field the frustrations of being apart, the sneaking suspicions, while leading their syncopated lives.

It is little surprise, and a great relief, that Morrison fails to maintain the pace of the earliest chapters. But with that inevitable easing comes the need to engage the reader at another, less visceral level: the need for pure plot, for the sheer momentum of lives interacting, a day to day progress. With Tom this is slow, but at least there is incremental movement: Sean sees a medic about the stutter; Tom sails closer to giving Morna chapter and verse about his commitment across the ocean. Things stall at work. And the vodka leads him into temptation.

But Meg is alone, with a dodgy script to fix, and a yen to be a real writer – egged on by Tom from the yawning distance. Her life resembles an art-house movie in which nothing happens, but something might. Her days are interior, self-obsessed. Morrison solves the narrative problem by giving Meg a confessional voice.

We read her journal through which she revisits the first wild week; through which she conveys her attempts to write. There are many confused communications, telephone cock-ups. Tom drops his mobile down the loo. In a funny scene he attempts its retrieval. The phone is dead.

Is the tryst dead too? To keep us hooked, Morrison frames the tale as a countdown to Meg's promised flight to join her lover, his son, his wild habits and dead-end future in dear Auld Reekie. One of Tom's drinking buddies, sums things up: "'Well, there's yersel and yer American lassie and yer ex-wife and yer boy right...It's as clear to me as day.' He looks over his shoulder and whispers: 'Wan of ye has tae die.'"

At this point (halfway through the "story") you feel a death might liven things up. There is too much verbiage, conversational psychotherapy, technically brilliant enough to keep you turning the pages while falling asleep.

You wish Meg had half the talent of her creator, half the wit. Tom gets the good lines, the half-profundities, the journey of sorts.

The novel's ending is soft in the middle. The last few chapters flout credulity. Leaving me feeling – ironically aping the novel's title – mostly distance.