Book review: Ménage, by Ewan Morrison

WITH his debut collection of stories, The Last Book You Read, and the subsequent novels, Swung and Distance, Ewan Morrison has swiftly established himself as the foremost chronicler of the more perplexing and unconventional contemporary relationships. His is a world where sex is easy to get and hard to sustain; where perversion might be redemption and where the chimera of commitment threatens to blight every "seize the day" opportunity.

His new novel, Mnage, explores these dilemmas further, but also suggests ways in which he's more than a top shelf Tony Parsons. Set in Hoxton during the early 1990s art boom and finance bust, and in the present day (with another recession but conspicuously less art), it follows the lives of Dot, Saul and Owen, a group of friends whose experiment in living leads them to wonder if "three's company, two's a crowd".

The novel mimics the trio of its subject. In 2009, Owen is a respected art critic, Dot is a Turner-nominated video installation artist who had a well-publicised breakdown and Saul has disappeared. Each of the nine chapters begins with Owen's analysis of one of Dot's works, for the catalogue of a major retrospective. It then switches to the third person, focused on Owen, and describes their current circumstances. Finally, it moves to the first person, as Owen narrates the halcyon but honking days of the 90s, when the three of them scrounged drugs and dole, shoplifted Pot Noodles and blagged wine and loo roll at trendy YBA parties. If Saul is absent in the present, he is the overwhelming figure of the past.

A grunge dandy, Saul is guru to both Dot and Owen. All three are obsessed with radical art movements – Surrealism, Dadaism, Situationism, Fluxus – the very movements that advocate the destruction of art as an art in itself. Morrison deftly allows them to be both sincere and derivative. Their beliefs may be plagiarised, but they are genuinely held. (Their mantras and slogans reminded me of the old New Yorker cartoon, where an exasperated wife says to her painter husband: "Why do you have to be a non-conformist like everyone else?") Under Saul's tutelage, Dot starts recording their lives almost continually on a video camera, while Owen shapes Saul's radical rejection into something like an aesthetic theory. In each of the first-person sections, the origin of one of Dot's later works of art is revealed, and the origin tends to undercut Owen's more formal pronouncements on her oeuvre.

The shuttle-cocking between past and present means that, from the outset, the reader knows that the mnage trois will end disastrously. The book's momentum derives from discovering exactly how, and charting the change from friends, to lovers, to rivals. The ideal – a relationship without possessiveness, without jealousy, without power dynamics – obviously fails in the past. Might, Morrison suggests, it be recuperated in the present, with older and wiser heads?

Stylistically, the novel aims for the "degree zero" tone. It is unobtrusive, studiously plain-spoken, a tactic that works well given the baroque and flamboyant behaviour of the participants. The only false note is in Owen's critical pieces, which seem rather nave and blatant, and would have been a perfect opportunity for some linguistic pyrotechnics, given the mandarin and oblique nature of much art criticism.

There are also a few in-jokes, such as a citation to "G Wellbeck", imitating the surname of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who deals in similar territories (though with more ire and less nostalgia than Morrison). They must have been fun to put in, but they disrupt the desired verisimilitude.

Mnage is an accomplished, often poignant, novel. It would be easy to satirise the YBA scene: indeed, a certain element of self-satire seems present in the work of Lucas, Emin and Hirst. Morrison forgoes the obvious approach, commendably. More than the protagonists, the novel strives to go beyond corrosive irony and world-weary cynicism to recapture a sense of the possibilities of love.

It's an area which Morrison has made his trademark. There is, however, a danger of being typecast; a fear that bubbles up in the novel's analysis of the art scene.

An Author's Note in Owen's essay discusses the treadmill of creativity, the "good five years" that dwindle into mechanical reproduction. Being aware of those pitfalls may prevent Morrison from falling into them.