The two REMs, and the journey from very early to middle, and beyond: McEwan at 75
Some passing thoughts and recommendations, and a New Statesman essay
Here is a link to a recent piece, which appeared as the New Statesman’s Weekend Essay:
https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2023/06/restless-storyteller-essay
And some additional thoughts on the changing composition – not as radical as it’s thought – of the writer’s world. . .
Ian McEwan, who turned 75 last week, has been famous to varying degrees since the appearance, in 1974, of First Love, Last Rites, a collection of eight stories which had already appeared in little magazines (Anthony Thwaite, writing in the Guardian, said he’d “read a few separately before”).* The book, and McEwan’s career in publication, begins with the whiskey-drinking fourteen-year-old petty criminal and soon-to-be incestuous rapist, in “Homemade,” describing a “cramped, overlit bathroom” in Finsbury Park. Looking back, with knowledge of what came later, one is struck by how far we are far from the 1890s baronial Gothic house where the Tallises live in Atonement, or the tall-windowed Gray’s Inn living room where the fifty-nineteen-year old High Court Judge Fiona Maye is lying at the start of The Children Act with its Renoir lithograph and its fireplace, or the “large and uncluttered” bedroom – with its, again, tall window – in the house in Fitzroy Square (“a triumph of congruent proportion”) where the minted neurosurgeon Henry Perowne wakes up at the start of Saturday and thinks about stuff like the miracle of “warm water coursing through cold pipes.” The narrator of Black Dogs (1992) is a balance (or embodiment of transition), during his teenage years at least, of the two Real Estate McEwans, being an orphan from a “middling income” background and resident in a dodgy part of Ladbroke Grove but with decent access, via the sympathetic parents of school friends, to “pale, stuccoed mansions” in places like Powis Square, in one of which he enjoys a sort of library containing Syrian daggers, a shaman’s mask, an Amazonian blow pipe with curare-tipped darts, another of which has an “American-sized fridge jammed with delicacies.” Meanwhile the complacent sons of these families prefer to pass their time in hell-holes like Shepherd’s Bush and Kensal Rise. (The opening sentence became briefly controversial, on the grounds that it wasn’t quite grammatical or at the very least invited confusion.)**
Yet while the furnishings improved, between what we might now designate very early McEwan and the celebrated middle period, there are always dangers lurking – corruption, calamity, decay. The Tallises’ house was slammed by Pevsner (or “one of his team”) for its wasted opportunities and by another writer as “charmless to a fault,” and serves in the novel primarily as the site of a tragic misunderstanding that ruins at least three lives. Fiona’s lithograph is probably a fake and the fireplace hasn’t been “lit in a year” – in fact she is so unhappily married that she wishes that all her fine things (the Bokhara rug, the baby grand, the recessed bookshelves, the chaise longue on which she is lying) were at “the bottom of the sea.” And Henry Perowne is soon to be ensnared by a psychopath following a traffic accident. He remains – or remained over the period I am basically concerned with – a novelist capable of sharply sinister effects, and a slippery fish of a storyteller (this was as true as ever in Sweet Tooth). McEwan certainly “mellowed” over the decades – though what verb would people use if he had just kept on writing about adolescent masturbation? – and he has by this point written a few frustrating books, but you have to tweak the evidence to suggest that he simply offers cozy, newsy lectures about secularism, rationality, and middle-class comfort. The best cases against McEwan in general terms, as far as I’m aware or can recall, were written by John Banville in the New York Review of Books, Ryan Ruby for the New Left Review’s website Sidecar, and Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books, the first on the occasion of Saturday (“dismayingly bad,” Banville claimed), the others recently when Lessons came out.
There are analogies, in the matter of sensibility and also to some degree interiors, with the trajectories of the film directors François Ozon and Pedro Almodóvar, who were initially associated – for their short films, in fact, and then a few early features – with the portrayal of violence and sexual transgression and now occupy similar positions in the ‘official’ culture of their respective countries, the national filmmaker of France and Spain to McEwan as “our national novelist”. The Ozon case seems closer – at least his shorts have a lot in common with First Love, Last Rights and he mutated into an efficient storyteller – though Almodóvar’s shadows McEwan in chronology and sort of cultural significance, and offers similar moments (Bad Education, Pain and Glory) where the old energies are revived, in a consciously retrospective or self-mythologizing – and you might add valedictory – spirit. Ozon has dabbled in meta-fiction, portrayed artists, and offers the occasional flash of his old mischief or bad taste, though they do not take the form of straight or near autobiography because he is less a storied figure, and is not identified, unlike the other two, by surname alone.
My pen pal Alan, who writes as John Self, recently did a ranking of McEwan’s novels. When I tried to do the same – so satisfying to see those unruly titles pegged with numbers – I found it a little difficult to compare books I revisited last Thursday with things I read one and a half times while at school (and, of course, the ones I couldn’t be absolutely sure I ever finished). But I think it’s reasonable to say that few people would feel that they have wasted their time if they were to read Atonement (2001) or The Comfort of Strangers (1981). And though it would be pointless to now mention everything he wrote, there is certainly evidence of McEwan’s narrative gifts, thoughtful engagement with political, historical, and scientific ideas, or descriptive powers, or all of these, in The Child in Time (1987), The Innocent (1990 – I should look at that one again), Black Dogs, Enduring Love (1997), the understandably divisive Saturday (2005), and On Chesil Beach (2007). Nothing since then has totally come off, in my view, though readers interested in McEwan’s career, sense of his vocation, and in meta-fiction need to engage with Sweet Tooth (2012), and those interested in how he views the era through which he lived should turn – with less enjoyable results – to Lessons, which appeared last autumn.
* McEwan recently told John Wilson – he’s noted this elsewhere – that the “big moment,” the most “exciting,” for him was receiving a copy of the New American Review – “a little paperback book” – with his name alongside Grass, Sontag, Philip Roth. Six of the stories were written in the first person, two in the third; of McEwan’s seventeen novels to date, only four have been written in the first person, though another pretends to be for virtually its entire length, and the coda to Atonement is in the voice of the aged Briony.
** “Ever since I lost mine in a road accident when I was eight, I have had my eye on other people’s parents.” If you don’t notice the potential ambiguity, then McEwan was right.