Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is one of the finest writers of his generation, and amongst the most controversial.

He has achieved unbroken popular and critical success since, on graduating from Malcolm Bradbury’s Creative Writing Programme, he won the Somerset Maugham Award for his collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975). Shortlisted four times for Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize for Fiction, he secured the honour with Amsterdam (1998), confirming his position with Graham Swift, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, at the forefront of contemporary British writing. Although primarily a novelist and short story writer, McEwan has also written three television plays published as The Imitation Game (1981), a children’s book, a libretto Or Shall We Die? (1983), a film script The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985), and a successful film adaptation of Timothy Mo’s novel Sour Sweet (1988). Across these many forms, his writing nonetheless retains a distinctive character, perhaps best summed up in Kiernan Ryan’s phrase, ‘the art of unease’.

McEwan’s early pieces were notorious for their dark themes and perverse, even gothic, material. Controversy surrounding the extreme subject matter of the first four works, which are concerned with paedophilia, murder, incest and violence, was exacerbated by their troubling narrative framework, the way in which conventional moral perspectives are disrupted or overturned, the reader frequently drawn into prurient involvement with the characters. McEwan’s perpetrator-narrators draw us into complicity with their crimes, whilst his victims seem strangely collusive in their own exploitation and destruction. Three tales in First Love, Last Rites recount episodes of child sexual abuse: an adolescent boy’s rape of his younger sister; a man’s molestation and murder of his neighbour’s nine-year-old daughter; and a schoolboy’s submission to his aunt’s transvestite fantasies. In Between the Sheets (1978) offers further exploration of sado-masochistic, vicious and exploitative sexual relations, extending the range (in ‘Psychopolis’) into a troubling examination of the moral contradictions within so-called ‘consenting’ relationships. McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), is the story of siblings who bury their mother in the cellar rather than acknowledge her death, then slowly revert to a feral state, avoiding the outside world until, in a powerful conclusion, the authorities simultaneously discover the body, and the elder children locked in incestuous climax. McEwan evokes a disquieting sense of inevitability in the unfolding of these events, generating an odd suspension of standard moral and narrative expectations. In the final work of this period, the exquisite short novel The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan also crafts an eerily convincing tale from bizarre materials. A haunting account of the murder of an English couple during their holiday in Venice, it is striking for its portrayal of the victims’ dreamlike collusion with their charismatic assassin.

Although McEwan’s subsequent writing has moved away from the more disquieting of these themes, he continues to explore the impact on ordinary people of unusual or extreme situations, as they face sudden and shocking violence, or slip into acute psychological states. At the same time, his writing has begun to address broader themes, examining how social and political issues determine our personal lives. In The Child in Time (1987), which centres on the abduction of the protagonist’s daughter, a further subplot explores the psyche of a (fictitious) senior politician, and a repulsive Margaret Thatcher figure makes a memorable appearance. The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992), both set in Berlin, probe the impact of the Cold War, the former (set at the outset of the division of Europe), representing McEwan’s unique approach to the spy thriller genre; the latter following the story of a man struggling to compile his memoirs as the Wall comes down. McEwan has also focussed increasingly on issues of sexual politics, most prominently in the television plays published as The Imitation Game, which specifically addresses the position of women in contemporary society. This aspect of his work has generated some disapproval: Adam Mars-Jones, for instance, teasingly described McEwan as ‘one of the few successful literary examples of the New Man’. In fact, such comments ignore the consistency of McEwan’s writing. In these texts, his preoccupation with unexceptional protagonists wrenched from their conventional sense of reality or self is reiterated, even magnified, as the claustrophobic settings of the early pieces are extended into the familiar but dislocated contexts of modern life.

Despite its success, Amsterdam occupies a curious place in McEwan’s oeuvre. Finely if rather predictably plotted, it functions almost as a pastiche of those common themes: two lifelong friends/rivals conspire to murder each other, each convinced that he is in fact fulfilling the other’s real desire. The novel is readable, even entertaining, but lacks the moral menace and disconcerting mood of the previous tales. Its flavour is a sort of ‘McEwan-Lite’: the approval of the Booker jury seemed, in effect, to signal the domestication of the artist formerly known as ‘Ian MacAbre’, the integration of a radical presence into the comfortable contemporary mainstream. Atonement (2001), however, is an altogether more challenging and ambitious work. Hugely acclaimed, this is writing on a new scale, recognisably McEwan in the well-wrought prose and fine articulation of character, the cool precision of moral nuance, the adept and surprising effects of plot, but also a revelation in the new and powerful sense of history, of the pattern of individual lives and actions within the sweep of great events – in this case, the 1939-45 War. The narrative voice itself is an astonishing achievement: we read the words of an elderly novelist, in 1990, writing the perspective of her own younger self in first 1935, then 1940. Her story hinges on a crucial error of perception, which may have been an act of malice, with which she effectively destroys the harmony of her childhood home. The atonement to which the title refers becomes the goal of her life, and her text, as she struggles somehow to make amends for the irrevocable damage she has caused. The dark, closing ambiguities of the book call into question the very possibility of achieving such grace, and express a troubled awareness of the complexities of responsibility and agency – in writing as in life. Few British novelists have matched the seriousness and sustained force of Atonement: it is the work of a unique imaginative voice demanding our attention and respect.

Dr Sean Matthews, 2002

For an in-depth critical review see Ian McEwan by Kiernan Ryan (Northcote House, 1994: Writers and their Work Series).

'I have contradictory fantasies and aspirations about my work. I like precision and clarity in sentences, and I value the implied meaning, the spring, in the space between them. Certain observed details I revel in and consider ends in themselves. I prefer a work of fiction to be self-contained, supported by its own internal struts and beams, resembling the world, but somehow immune from it. I like stories, and I am always looking for the one which I imagine to be irresistible. Against all this, I value a documentary quality, and an engagement with a society and its values; I like to think about the tension between the private worlds of individuals and the public sphere by which they are contained. Another polarity that fascinates me is of men and women, their mutual dependency, fear and love, and the play of power between them. Perhaps I can reconcile, or at least summarise, these contradictory impulses in this way: the process of writing a novel is educative in two senses; as the work unfolds, it teaches you its own rules, it tells how it should be written; at the same time it is an act of discovery, in a harsh world, of the precise extent of human worth.'