Ewan Morrison likes to write about sex. Even when it’s not sexy. Even though we are, he says, too obsessed by sex.

His first collection of short stories, The Last Book You Read, hailed as an exploration of modern urban relationships, marked Morrison as a new voice on the scene and since then he’s shown no desire to move away from sex. His first novel, Swung, explored the swinging scene; his second, Distance, turned to look at long-distance relationships and in his third, Ménage, due to be published on 2^nd July , Morrison has focused his attention on the threesome.

Originally a film director, Morrison began writing novels only after a script-writing job in New York fell through. In 2000, having won a Royal Television Award and been nominated for three BAFTAs, Morrison was being hailed as the next director who’d make it in Hollywood. Within a year he’d been approached by a group of venture capitalists, handed a million-pound budget and offered the opportunity to write a film script in New York.

Planning a sardonic take on US industrial relations, he arrived in New York two days after 9/11, only to find himself in a city unreceptive to criticism. As he organised his cast, funding dwindled, and three years later, he found himself back in Glasgow, without work and without a partner. Hoping to resurrect his pride he started writing; hoping to resurrect he personal life, he started internet dating and a few months later, found himself swinging. His first novel, Swung, was the result.

He began writing it, he explains, not in order to produce a novel, but just to make sense of his experiences on the scene. As a result, the book wasn’t just a story about swinging. It was a story about the effect swinging has on a couple; a novel less concerned with orgies than with the emotional and sexual obstacles a couple must negotiate when they invite others to have sex with them.

Morrison’s new book, Ménage, follows a similar tack: while sex is its starting point, it’s not its sole subject. Indeed, despite its title, Ménage is more a story about co-dependency than it is a story about sexual excess. Brought together by youthful nihilism and mental instability, Dot, Saul and Owen find themselves entangled in an awkward threesome. Sharing a grubby Hoxton basement together, they’re afforded little space outside their relationship. Yet they push on blindly, unwilling or unable to confront the situation head on.

The thing that pushes them on, however, isn’t just sex, it’s something else. Interweaving the story of their grubby student days, with their later middle class lives, Morrison asks the question: can the threesome work, long-term? Each of the characters needs the other two, but the sexual jealousies mean we’re never certain whether the ménage can work. Much like in Swung, sexual desire in Ménage figures as both a catalyst and a problem: it’s part of the initial drive that brings them together, but it’s also part of that which drives them apart.

Indeed, for Morrison, sex is never straightforward. Talking about writing the sex scenes in Ménage, he refers to Nicolas Roeg’s famous scene in Don’t Look Now, in which footage of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie having sex is intercut with footage of them getting dressed afterwards. “It shows all the awkward bits in sex,” he says. “It shows them changing positions and elbowing each other... the intimacies in awkwardness.” He wanted to capture some of that, he explains, to counterpose the unrealistic expectations we have of sex with the awkward physical reality. Why?

Although sex has been a constant concern for Morrison, it’s the problems that come with it that provoke his interest, not the sex itself. Sex, he insists, can be an incredibly boring technical exercise, if there’s no emotion and no jeopardy involved. Promiscuous sex, he says, is “a real problem in terms of story-telling ... because it’s repetitive. If you’ve spent twenty years having casual sex your life hasn’t got a narrative to it. It’s a series of short stories.” For good sex, as much as for good stories, you need obstacles; you need emotion.

For the sex in Ménage, he wanted to show the emotion, but also the obstacles. It’s not often acknowledged today that sex is rarely perfect; that more often than not it’s beset by anxiety and awkwardness, by drunkenness, intoxication and/or plain clumsiness. Morrison aimed to put a bit of that back into his depiction of sex.

And the sex in Ménage is awkward. It’s full of false starts and early finishes. It’s grubby and it’s not very arousing. As Morrison says, if someone picks the book up expecting it to be sexy, they’ll be disappointed. But his aim wasn’t to produce something that follows the usual formula. Indeed, if there’s one thing Morrison wants to get away from, it’s the idea that sex is faultless fucking. A bit like Pavlov’s dog, he complains, we’re used to a stimulus-response model of arousal; we’ve lost the idea that sex is about drama and emotion and anticipation. Grand passions, he says, seem to belong to another era. Today, “with all these websites you can go on to get a fuck buddy for the night, there are no obstacles”. Increasingly, sex resembles a live-action replay of contemporary pornography; cynical and formulaic, with format points to make you hard
and make you come. Morrison compares “dirty talk” to the strings section they use in a film to make you cry.

Nevertheless, much as Morrison might rue the demise of grand passions, he’s not suggesting we go back to the fifties. Promiscuity might be boring, but monogamy is another matter.

Quoting Simone de Beauvoir, ‘marriage finds its natural fulfilment in adultery,’ Morrison points out that his parents “were hippies... they read de Beauvoir and they were adulterers.” Monogamy has been a ‘real and ongoing concern” for him; the book, he says, is “an exploration of what the other ... possibilities are”.

Like, Swung and Distance, it’s an attempt to see how we can keep desire alive in daily life; how we can negotiate a pathway between sexual desire and emotional intimacy. An attempt to ask how important sex is and what we’re willing to risk for it. And, more importantly, what we’d be left with if we risked nothing at all.

Ménage is published on 2^nd July 2009, by Jonathan Cape, £12.99