Malls often appear in fiction as the mise-en-scene for random violence, abducted children and zombie attacks. But in this collection of fiction, non-fiction, analysis, anecdote, reportage and collage, by forensically looking at the real world of malls, Ewan Morrison orchestrates a far more subtle and satisfying book, full of dashed hopes and moments of bravery, blighted lives and small triumphs.
In the stories, Morrison's fascination with the distortions of love and the erotic under capitalism is matched by a resistance to making the characters mere exemplars of a sociological thesis. The strangely touching little back stories humanise the evocation of a place that is like everywhere else, and which insists the characters there are like everyone else. These range from the woman who knows from her call-centre job to which demographic category she belongs, to the weekend dad who isn't allowed to take his children to fast-food shops but somehow knows the entire menu, to the wife-to-be whose final fling is structured around brands and what they might mean, or fail to mean.
A book so replete with the contemporary, where M&S and Gap and Starbucks and Build-A-Bear are not just companies but exist as internal realities, runs the risk of seeming merely faddish. Morrison manages instead to evoke them as flawed archetypes, lost gods in a pantheon of deranged choice.
The sections of reportage are, by comparison, less about pathos and more about the people behind the brands: car-park attendants, cleaners, security staff. If the consumers are bemused, the workers here are constantly surprised.
The non-fiction is the most disturbing. The mall was initially conceived as a modern agora: in Richard Williams's The Anxious City there is a lovely image of Milton Keynes as it was intended to be, with an icon of Jimi Hendrix towering over the free-flowing new urbanites. To place that vision against, for example, online hints about how to create anarchy in the mall, reveals how complex responses to the mall actually are.
This is also a quirkily nostalgic book, since the mall is dying. Online shoppers don't drift or derive or dwam around: they point and click. Tales From The Mall is an elegy as much as it is a philippic.
Morrison is easily the most interesting Scottish writer of his generation. His book is global in purpose and local in detail; and when Scots is used, it is as part of a wider debate about how language infiltrates, subjugates and eludes. It is disappointing that the publishers who promise an enhanced ebook soon have been so lax and parsimonious in production: the cramped margins, headers, clipart cover and bizarrely large page numbers make this look less professional than it deserves.
That said, the snippets of the enhanced version on YouTube show a great deal of promise. They are not illustrations that accompany the text, but aesthetic objects in their own right, often diverging from the printed "source". They are a kind of rebuke to the idea of recycling to maximise monetisation. The use, for example, of pictogram people conveys, in a way the text eschews, the levelling, depersonalising nature of the mall's endeavours; the music creates an eerie somnambulism far from the text's sometimes hectic registers.
Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books is published by Polygon.
