Can literature survive the consumer age? Acclaimed Glasweigan author Ewan Morrison answers that question by giving fiction itself a reboot: in Tales from the Mall, observations around the history of shopping are woven together with short stories to create a compelling meditation on contemporary society.
Here the mall – more a generic idea than an actual
place – serves as a human cross-section, taking in young and old,
locals and newcomers alike. Thus we have the hapless I Dunno Dave, Starbucks
junkie, on a bittersweet NLP self-help ‘mission’ to the mall to get a girl’s
phone number; we see the jobless advertising exec in her forties attempting to
save a disintegrating relationship in a powerful account of ageing in an
increasingly youth-driven world, or the former Soviet Union émigré attempting
to adjust to life in a western city centred around shopping. Confusion,
insecurity and alienation thread their way through all their lives.
Morrison’s skill lies in his ear
for natural dialogue, his human empathy, and his facility for teasing out the
fears and conflicted desires that drive human behaviour. A sense of
powerlessness permeates the stories, which are sometimes horribly funny – as in
the tale of the scabrous, racist ‘Rena the Cleana’ whose bigotry inadvertently
saves a suicide case – but often very sad, too, like the pensioner escorted off
the mall’s premises for the crime of consuming an unpurchased snack. Perhaps
most interesting of all though are the non-fic accounts of consumer
manipulation (did you know that shoppers are corralled using techniques
originally developed for cattle? Or that the most expensive display space in
the complex is the panel opposite the ladies’ shoe shop – ‘windowlicking’ raised to spatial science?)
Tales from the Mall is best when it evokes the terrifyingly
‘liquid’ condition of modern life, where the modern citizen is encouraged to
eschew traditional bonds and roles in favour of shopping around for something
better. As such, it’s a trenchant comment on the effect that contemporary
capitalism has on us all – the ‘mall without walls’ that increasingly serves as
a model for all our social relations. The book ends by evoking the mall as junk
space, an airless and disembodied limbo, with a character selling spec
apartments inside it barricaded against the poverty and riots outside – but for
how long?
That, along with much of the rest
of the book, serves as an indictment of a society that puts malls at the centre
of civic life. If only all novelists were as keen to peel back the brand names
and find the stories beneath.
