Distance by Ewan Morrison (2008)
Distance fails on a number of levels.
It is the story of Meg and Tom, a professional couple in their late 30s who share a passionate week in New York and fall in love. When Tom returns home to Edinburgh they decide to embark on a long distance relationship. The plan is that in a couple of months, Meg will fly out to Edinburgh to take the relationship further. Meanwhile, they have to grapple with time-zones and the like. Tom works for an Edinburgh ad agency and drinks too much. He is divorced with a 10-year old son and enjoys a friends-with-benefits relationship with Morna, whose son is best friends with his lad. Meg is a script doctor with aspirations to become a screenwriter. After Tom leaves she spends a lot of time recalling the week with him, writing in her journal and looking over an abandoned screenplay she had written about her history of serial dating disasters.
The couple are both extremely needy, seeming not to be able to go more than an hour without texting, emailing or talking to one another on their mobiles. If they are out of contact for any period of time it is a signal for all kinds of doubt and anxiety. OK, if this had been an angst-filled teen drama I might have been more sympathetic to this kind of insecurity but these two are were supposed to be mature adults. Maybe it is a reflection of modern relationships that I've just not experienced and thank goodness for that!
There are a number of sex scenes in the book as the couple engage in phone and cyber-sex as well as recollections of their week together. I didn't find these erotic, more furtive and somewhat grubby. Even though overall the book counted as a 'fail' for me, there were a few aspects that I did enjoy including the references to popular culture, or when Tom's son suggests he experience Second Life or his misadventures with a new mobile phone whose predictive text function completely messes with his head and results with his accidentally sending a series of bizarre messages to Meg. Still these were little flashes of enjoyment in a hard slog through 400+ pages.
Despite the fact that critical reviews for this novel seemed to think it was the best thing since sliced bread, I found it annoying and dull with a pair of central characters who were completely self-absorbed and unsympathetic. I just wasn't interested in their relationship and whether it succeeded or not. I guess it was meant to be edgy and post-modern a la writers like Irvine Welsh, who the author obviously idolised as Tom mentions him and his work often. The critics' praise for Morrison didn't sway me, I found it a mess. So glad I didn't buy a copy.
So why did I bother reading it? Well, it was a selection for one of my reading groups and I felt that in order to discuss it I needed to give it a chance. Overwhelmingly this novel received a 'thumbs down' from the group with only one member giving it a half-way thumb.