To capture the spirit of our turbulent times in their myriad manifestations, we can hardly miss reading the works of Ian McEwan, who has been a major voice in contemporary British fiction since his first collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.
He is often called the finest writer of his generation which includes Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro. In 2008 The Times featured him on their list of the 50 greatest writers since 1945 and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 on their list of the 100 most powerful people in British culture.
Few people can string together words as beautifully as McEwan. When one reads an Ian McEwan novel, one can almost hear the pauses in the clacking of his keyboard as he comes up with a beautiful idea and a beautiful way to put it to paper. To get a real feel of our times and of McEwan’s writing, we can resort to his latest novel Nutshell where the narrator is extremely unusual, a male foetus in its third trimester who overhears plans for a murder. His mother Trudy is sleeping with his uncle Claude and they are planning to kill his father. The plot resembles Shakespeare’s Hamlet, until halfway through, after the murder is committed and Trudy feels remorse, when she starts quoting Macbeth.
The plot also reminds one of Abhimanyu. Locked inside his mother’s womb — as one version of Mahabharata story runs — Abhimanyu overhears his father Arjuna discussing a well-known battle strategy with his wife. It involves a military formation called the “disk” — a murderous rank of enemy soldiers forms around a warrior in a perfect spiral, and seven steps, carried out in precise sequence, can penetrate that deadly labyrinth, permitting escape. Abhimanyu listens intently — at times, the thumping drone of his mother’s aorta next to his tiny ear is near-deafening. But as Arjuna speaks, his mother dozes off to sleep. The conversation stops. The final route of escape — the seventh step — is left unmentioned.
The idea for the extremely unusual narrator of Nutshell first came to him while he was chatting with his pregnant daughter-in-law,“We were talking about the baby, and I was very much aware of the baby as a presence in the room”, McEwan reminisces. He scribbled a few notes, and soon afterwards, daydreaming in a long meeting, the first sentence of the novel popped into his head, “So here I am, upside down in a woman”.
McEwan has written novels, screenplays, children’s stories, and a libretto for an oratorio on the topic of nuclear annihilation. His subject matter is as varied as his choice of genre, alternating between sadomasochism (which earned him early in his career the title of “Ian MacAbre”) and feminism, between historical fiction and contemporary psychological intrigue. But there is a distinctive element in his works. His writing has been called “the art of unease”, an apt term for the discomfort and disquiet his works invoke.
In The Child in Time, McEwan’s protagonist realises that his marriage ended, as “there had been a malevolent intervention”. McEwan’s works brilliantly portray “malevolent interventions” — child snatchings, hot-air balloon disasters, and car crashes. His characters’ attempts to make sense of such incidents and to regain or to maintain some kind of security in the incidents’ aftermath often motivate his plots. The novels’ occasional failures to coalesce into more than distinct set pieces may say less about McEwan’s skill in plotting than about his reluctance to give coherence to a world that he says “distresses me and makes me anxious”. He made his name as a writer of dark short stories in which disturbing subject matter (incest, murder and violence) is rendered in stark, unemotional prose.
For example, in Homemade, an adolescent boy rapes his ten-year-old sister and is proud of the act, while Dead as they come describes a man’s erotic obsession with a store mannequin. McEwan’s later works widen their scope, taking on political topics (government propaganda, patriarchy, terrorism) and a greater cast of characters and historical time periods.
What Kiernan Ryan has sceptically called the “received wisdom” about McEwan’s career is that he began as a “writer obsessed with the perverse, the grotesque, the macabre”, but grew out of this adolescent style of writing “to a more mature engagement with the wider world of history and society”. But this easy division fails to account for important continuities of McEwan’s work, overstating the sensationalism of the earlier stories while underestimating the eroticism and perverse power games still at large in the later works.
Ian Russell McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, though he spent much of his childhood abroad, in Singapore and in Libya, where his father, a Scottish sergeant major in the British Army, was stationed. McEwan has said that he was mentally an only child, since his stepsiblings were a decade older than he, and his early stories and his first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), seem fascinated by potential sibling relationship.
The Cement Garden has been described as a modern Lord of the Flies, wherein four siblings, recently bereft of both parents, first bury their mother’s body in cement in the basement, and then unsuccessfully attempt to reconstruct a “normal” family life. Another element of his childhood that reverberates thematically throughout their works was his experience of being gathered for safety into armed military camps when Britain and France invaded Egypt over the Suez Canal in 1956. He has remarked that his childhood realisation that political changes intimately affect individuals’ experiences underscores the political engagement in his works.
McEwan earned his Master’s from the University of East Anglia under the auspices of two famous literary figures, Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. Stories from his thesis became his acclaimed first collection First Love, Last Rites. By 1983, having published another collection of stories and two novels, he was named one of the Twenty Best Young British Novelists by Granta.
Meanwhile, McEwan felt the need of rising above the label of being “the chronicler of comically exaggerated psychopathic states of mind or of adolescent anxiety, snot and pimples”. The difference between The Comfort of Strangers (1981) and The Child in Time (1987) seems to be a thematic watermark in McEwan’s oeuvre. While The Comfort, reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, is a horrifying tale, examining a young couple’s boredom while on holiday until they meet two strangers.
The strangest characteristic of this dark tale may be the young couple’s apparent complicity in their doom, the similarity between their erotic rejuvenation and the fatal “comfort” provided by their new psychopathic friends.
The Child in Time turns away from this earlier Gothicism, and although the tale presents the regression of an aspiring statesman to childhood, this regression is beautiful, as the man carefully builds his tree house, and begins to live like a boy. McEwan’s other works of this middle period include The Innocent (1990), a spy thriller set in Berlin, and Black Dogs (1992), wherein a young man tries to stitch together his family’s memories.
McEwan’s admiration for Nabokov’s remark that readers must first “learn to fondle the details” certainly applies to the appreciator of McEwan’s own clear prose. Undoubtedly one of the most powerful images in his works is that of the man clinging to the hot-air balloon at the beginning of Enduring Love, “He had been on the rope so long that I began to think he might stay there until the balloon drifted down or the boy came to his senses and found the valve that released the gas, or until some beam, or god, or some other impossible cartoon thing, came and gathered him up… Even as I had that hope, we saw him slip down right to the end of the rope…. You could see the acceleration. No forgiveness, no special dispensation for flesh, or bravery, or kindness. Only ruthless gravity… . He fell as he had hung, a stiff little black stick”.
Apart from his brilliant prose, McEwan can also assimilate vast quantities of knowledge for the benefit of his fiction. His three most recent novels, Amsterdam, Atonement and Saturday demonstrate this ability of McEwan. Amsterdam, which tells the story of three men who reconnect at their former lover’s funeral, is a cutting social satire, sending up the sixties generation who seem to have resigned their former rebelliousness for creature comforts. In this short book McEwan demonstrates his copious knowledge of music and journalism in order to describe the occupations and preoccupations of his characters.
Although Amsterdam received the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998, Atonement was a true best-seller, receiving rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. McEwan’s research at the Imperial War Museum bears fruit in the careful descriptions of Briony Tallis’s experience as a nurse trainee at a London hospital during World War II and of Robbie Turner’s bewilderment during the British Army’s retreat from Dunkirk. The novel asks why Briony, a young girl who would be writer, pinpoints an innocent neighbour as the criminal who assaulted her cousin, and why she clings to her story even in the face of doubt. McEwan writes, “Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream — three streams! — of consciousness?”
The most autobiographical of McEwan’s works, Saturday has been hailed as the best post-9/11 work of fiction. A book set over the course of one twenty-four-hour period, it shares characteristics with earlier masterpieces of the genre including Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, and it is also McEwan’s first effort at writing entirely in the present tense, a quality that explains Saturday’s occasional resemblance to John Updike’s Rabbit novels.
Henry Perowne, the protagonist, is a brain surgeon — a profession that lends well to the novel’s absorption in the mental health of individuals in current society. Perowne dislikes literature, but he shares McEwan’s love of wine, squash, and his wife, “What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife”, Perowne muses. Saturday strives to capture and present current society as it is, in all its ambiguities and anxieties, while also depicting what a man is willing to do when his family falls under threat. Although it received mostly glowing reviews, the display of scientific knowledge and terminology has led some critics to despair, whereas others have feared that its political agenda overwhelms the plot.
McEwan himself is not unaware of such a concern as he states, “I am aware of the danger that in trying to write more politically, I could take up moral positions that might pre-empt or exclude that rather mysterious and unreflective element that is so important in fiction”.
However, the reading public and critics concur — no matter whether they prefer the early, brutal stories, or the later, longer novels of ideas — that McEwan has mastered the “mysterious and unreflective element”, which creates great fiction.