IAN MCEWAN

2nd Edition

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Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Peter Childs, Sebastian Groes and
Sean Matthews
Guides in the Contemporary Critical Perspectives series provide companions to reading and studying major contemporary authors. They include
new critical essays combining textual readings, cultural analysis and
discussion of key critical and theoretical issues in a clear, accessible style.
Each guide also includes a preface by a major contemporary writer, a
new interview with the author, discussion of film and TV adaptation
and guidance on further reading.
Titles in the series include:
J. G. Ballard edited by Jeannette Baxter
Ian McEwan edited by Sebastian Groes
Kazuo Ishiguro edited by Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes
Julian Barnes edited by Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs
Sarah Waters edited by Kaye Mitchell
Salman Rushdie edited by Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan
Ali Smith edited by Monica Germana and Emily Horton
Andrea Levy edited by Jeannette Baxter and David James

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IAN MCEWAN
Contemporary Critical Perspectives
2nd Edition

Edited by
Sebastian Groes

L ON DON N E W DE L H I N E W Y OR K SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3DP
UK

1385 Broadway
New York
NY 10018
USA

www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2008 by Continuum
This 2nd Edition Sebastian Groes and Contributors, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization
acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this
publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN: 978-1-4411-6984-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India

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For Imogen

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Contents

Foreword: Ian McEwan and the Rational Mind, Matt Ridley

ix

Series Editors Preface

xiii

Acknowledgements

xiv

Contributors

xv

Chronology of Ian McEwans Life

INTRODUCTION

A Cartography of the Contemporary:

Mapping Newness in the Work of Ian McEwan
Sebastian Groes (University of Roehampton)

CHAPTER ONE

Surrealist Encounters in Ian McEwans Early Work

Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University)

CHAPTER TWO

Profoundly dislocating and infinite in possibility:

Ian McEwans Screenwriting
M. Hunter Hayes (Texas A&M UniversityCommerce) and Sebastian Groes (University of
Roehampton)

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

xviii

1
13

26

The Innocent as Anti-Oedipal Critique of

Cultural Pornography
Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University)

43

Words of War, War of Words: Atonement and

the Question of Plagiarism
Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University)

57

Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in

Atonement
Alistair Cormack (Greshams School, Norfolk)

70

Ian McEwans Modernist Time: Atonement

and Saturday
Laura Marcus (New College, Oxford University)

83

Ian McEwan and the Modernist Consciousness

of the City in Saturday
Sebastian Groes (University of Roehampton)

99

CHAPTER EIGHT

On Chesil Beach: Another Overrated Novella?

Dominic Head (University of Nottingham)

115

CHAPTER NINE

Solar: Apocalypse Not

Greg Garrard (Bath Spa University)

123

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viii

CONTENTS

INTO THE ARCHIVE: Untitled: A Minute Story

Ian McEwan
AFTERWORD:

Ian McEwans Sweet Tooth: Put in porphyry and

marble do appear
Peter Childs (University of Gloucestershire)

137

139

Journeys without Maps: An Interview with Ian McEwan

by Jon Cook, Sebastian Groes and Victor Sage

144

References

156

Further Reading

166

Index

177

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Foreword
Ian McEwan and the Rational Mind
Matt Ridley

The novelists privilege, according to Ian McEwan, is to step inside the

consciousness of others, and to lead the reader there like a psychological
Virgil. Again and again in McEwans books, it is the interior monologue
of the characters, and that monologues encounter with the truth in the
outside world, that grips us. Whether paralysed, obsessed, filled with
guilt or operated on, the brains of McEwans protagonists construct
their mental world as we, the readers, watch and empathize.
It is this ability to replicate consciousness in text that distinguishes a
literary novelist from a writer of potboilers. Dan Browns plots are ingenious, but his characters never feel like rounded people. For McEwan that
is what a novelist does, at least since Samuel Richardson wrote Clarissa,
or perhaps since Shakespeare wrote Hamlet: he gives you a full sense
of what it is to be someone else. What he is in effect doing, is milking
the human instinct for what psychologists call a theory of mind, which
explores our innate tendency to construct an understanding of what
others are thinking. In a good novel not only does the reader know what
the character is thinking; the reader knows what the character thinks
that another character is thinking.
The theory of mind is one of evolutionary psychologys favourite
notions. People spend a large part of their waking day guessing what
others are thinking. Indeed, they go so far that they anthropomorphize
their pet rabbits, they impute malign intentionality to intransigent tools
and thunderstorms, and they believe in gods. Human beings are not
unique in having a theory of mind, but they are far more sophisticated
than any other creature. Monkeys can easily handle second-order intentionality I think that you are angry. Maybe chimpanzees will prove
to be capable of a third order I think that you think that I am angry.
The zoologist Robin Dunbar reckons that modern humans can handle
fifth-order intentionality I think that you think that he thinks that she
thinks I am angry. Dunbar is cleverer than me.
In Enduring Love, McEwans most scientific novel, Jed thinks that Joe
does not realize that he really loves Jed, and Joe thinks that he understands Jeds delusion as a medical condition, while Clarissa, the Keats
scholar, is eventually exasperated by Joes attempted rationalization of

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FOREWORD

emotion. The book is explicitly about the neo-Darwinian idea that emotions evolved for adaptive purposes. Anger, for example, emphasizes
your commitment to punish a wrong, even at some irrational cost to
yourself, and thus has a deterrent effect; love enables somebody both
to monopolize and to reward the loved one, keeping rivals at bay while
keeping the object of affection interested. However, it is also a warning against hoping that reason will be able to bring closure, redemption
or happiness in a world of messy relationships and contingent choices.
Joes destiny is to be disillusioned by reasons inability to resolve the
horror in which he finds himself.
Ah, horror! On the few occasions when real, gut-clenching dread
pervaded my mind, it felt no different in kind from the horror I remembered from reading The Comfort of Strangers, the disgust in The Innocent,
the dread in Atonement and the shock of Enduring Loves balloon scene.
Somewhere in the readers mind, when reading those books, neurons
fire in such a way as to produce a conscious experience. That mental
experience, presumably in the cerebral cortex, causes probably the
activation of circuits and the release of neurochemicals in the amygdala,
triggering real fear. It actually alters the heart rate, the skin conductance
and even the adrenalin content of the blood through the sympathetic
nervous system. The author reaches into the minds of his willing readers and alters their synapses what a power! McEwan even switches
genes on and off in his readers genomes: as we now know, the expression or repression of genes happens throughout our lives in response to
experiences, which is mainly why nature and nurture are not opposites.
Research in New Zealand, for example, demonstrates that one version
of a serotonin gene raises the chance of clinical depression but only in
those who suffer stressful life experiences.
Does McEwans interest in the human mind make him a scientist? I
think so. Science is, or should be, a state of mind rather than a professional elect. McEwan is motivated by curiosity and rational inquiry,
not to mention a sense of wonder and hard-nosed scepticism. He uses
fiction to understand the mind and to explore human nature, as well
as uses words to alter readers consciousness. Now that neuroscientists can tentatively begin to understand how thought works, McEwan
argues that psychology is in a sense only catching up with fiction, that
neuroscience may be about to trespass on the territory of the writer.
Imagine, for example, a neurosurgeon (Henry Perowne in Saturday?)
deliberately stimulating a patients brain to induce a thought he is
merely doing clumsily and invasively what a novelist does from a distance. Some outrageous comparisons: Shakespeare was a better psychologist than Freud, Jane Austen has more to say about human nature
than Margaret Mead, Dostoevsky than Pavlov, Proust than Piaget. (An
exception: the philosopher-psychologist William James was at least the
equal of his novelist brother Henry in terms of insight into the human
mind.)

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FOREWORD

xi

To many artists of the modern age other than writers, science has
seemed philistine. It is unimaginatively spoilsport: explaining things
that are better left unexplained, scornful of things it cannot explain.
Newton unweaves Keatss rainbow and is mocked by Blake. Reason, so
artists mutter under their breath, is pedestrian, mundane and profane
compared to the ethereal wonders of the imagination. It must have been
especially sweet for rationalist McEwan to trick so many reviewers into
arguing that Enduring Love was a duller book because it was based on a
real case study of a rare mental disorder, De Clrambaults syndrome. If
the real is duller than the imaginary, then Enduring Love is a better book
because the case study, too, was imaginary and its authors, Wenn and
Camia, were an anagram of Ian McEwan. Deception, too, is a favourite
topic of evolutionary psychology.
Yet for writers, the chasm that opened between the two cultures of
science and art in the Romantic movement is surely now closing as
more and more writers come to believe that there is, in Charles Darwins
words, grandeur in this view of life that there is more mystery and
imaginative space in quantum mechanics and deep geological time
than there ever was in folk tales and creation myths. Science does not
destroy mysteries. It creates new and deeper ones.
Playwrights lead the way this time, not poets. Michael Frayn and
Tom Stoppard are doing what Alexander Pope and Erasmus Darwin
did in the eighteenth century: to philosophize and speculate, to explore
ideas and discoveries through writing. Caryl Churchill and Timberlake
Wertenbaker have followed suit, as have novelists from A. S. Byatt and
Penelope Fitzgerald to Margaret Atwood and David Lodge. Indeed, so
fashionable is it for novelists to plunder science, and biology in particular, that it caused the critic Cressida Connolly, reviewing Enduring Love,
to call for an immediate, worldwide moratorium on novelists reading
works of science (Connelly 1997: 3).
McEwan is less direct than some in his scientific eavesdropping.
The evolutionary psychology in Enduring Love, or the neurogenetics in
Saturday, are servants rather than masters of plot and character. But
there is no doubt that McEwan is a groupie of Enlightenment rationalism so long as science subjects itself to the same rigorous scepticism
that it does to myth. As he once told me, he is fascinated by the moment
when Voltaire, exiled in London in 1727, attends Isaac Newtons funeral
at Westminster Abbey, and professes himself amazed and thrilled
that a country should so celebrate a mere man of reason. With the
help of Emilie de Chatelet, Voltaire then devoted much of his Lettres
Philosophique to exploring and explaining Newtons ideas to a French
reading public, becoming, in McEwans eyes, almost the first science
writer.
Let me get personal. As an irredeemably male, technophile man (and
it seems to me that McEwan is much more popular among my male than
my female acquaintances), at home with British logical positivism and

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xii

FOREWORD

steeped in neo-Darwinian ultra-rationalism, as an almost Aspergerish

systemizer rather than a touchy-feely empathizer, as somebody who
consumes far more non-fiction than fictional writing (I get much of
my fiction from the screen) as such a creature, I am bound to find
McEwans philosophical bent to my taste. Then as somebody slightly
less stereotypically male who loves to be told stories, is fascinated by the
power of words to conjure images, and is transfixed by the great mysteries of life what is consciousness? I salute a great image-conjuring
storyteller exploring human nature.

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Series Editors Preface

The readership for contemporary fiction has never been greater. The
explosion of reading groups and literary blogs, of university courses
and school curricula, and even the apparent rude health of the literary
marketplace, indicate an ever-growing appetite for new work, for writing which responds to the complex, changing and challenging times
in which we live. At the same time, readers seem ever more eager to
engage in conversations about their reading, to devour the review pages,
to pack the sessions at literary festivals and author events. Reading is an
increasingly social activity, as we seek to share and refine our experience of the book, to clarify and extend our understanding.
It is this tremendous enthusiasm for contemporary fiction to which
the Contemporary Critical Perspectives series responds. Our ambition in
these volumes is to offer readers of current fiction a comprehensive
critical account of each authors work, presenting original, specially
commissioned analyses of all aspects of their career, from a variety of
different angles and approaches, as well as directions towards further
reading and research. Our brief to the contributors was to be scholarly,
to draw on the latest thinking about narrative, or philosophy, or psychology, indeed whatever seemed to them most significant in drawing
out the meanings and force of the texts in question, but also to focus
closely on the words on the page, the stories and scenarios and forms
which all of us meet first when we open a book. We insisted that these
essays be accessible to that mythical beast, the Common Reader, who
might just as readily be spotted at the Lowdham Book Festival as in a
college seminar. In this way, we hope to have presented critical assessments of our writers in such a way as to contribute something to both of
those environments, and also to have done something to bring together
the important qualities of each of them.
Jeannette Baxter, Peter Childs,
Sebastian Groes and Sean Matthews

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Ian McEwan for his generous and continued support
for this book, which is partly the result of the Perspectives on Ian
McEwan conference held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, on
15 November 2003. I want to thank Ian particularly for giving me permission to reprint his minute story Untitled, and hope bringing this
story back into circulation will be useful for McEwan scholars around
the world. Vic Sage and Jon Cook are also thanked for giving permission to publish their conversation with Ian McEwan, which was part
of UEAs International Writing Festival in conjunction with the 2003
conference. Special thanks are due to Matt Ridley, whose preface in
this volume gives a unique insight into the perception of literature
from a science writers point of view. Many thanks also to my fellow
Series Editors Jeannette Baxter, Peter Childs and Sean Matthews, for
their careful attention and editorial help during the preparation of this
book. Thanks are also due to research assistant Nick Lavery for his
contribution to updating this book. I would like to thank David Avital
at Bloomsbury Academic for his assistance. I thank the University of
Roehampton for their support of the wider Contemporary Critical
Perspectives project. Finally, I would like to thank Imogen Tilden for
leading me out of the labyrinth.
SG
London-Amsterdam, January 2013

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Contributors

Natasha Alden is Lecturer in Contemporary British Fiction at

Aberystwyth University. She wrote her doctorate on contemporary historical fiction, war and memory, focusing on second generation memory
in the work of Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Adam Thorpe and Graham Swift
at the University of Oxford, and has published articles on McEwan and
Barker. She is currently working on a monograph on postmemory in
contemporary British fiction.
Jeannette Baxter is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia
Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is the author of J. G. Ballards Surrealist
Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Ashgate 2009); editor of J. G. Ballard:
Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury 2008); co-editor of Visions
and Revisions: Essays on J. G. Ballard (Palgrave 2012) and A Literature of
Restitution: Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald (Manchester 2013), and author
of articles and essays in the areas of literary modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary British fiction. She is Series Co-Editor of
Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury Academic), and is writing a monograph entitled Exquisite Corpse: Literature/Surrealism/Fascism.
Peter Childs is Professor of Modern English Literature at the Newman
University, Birmingham. He has written extensively on contemporary
and modern fiction, most recently Texts (2006), Modernism and the Postcolonial (2007) and Modernism (2008). The second edition of Contemporary
Novelists was published in 2013.
Claire Colebrook is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at the
Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of, amongst others, New
Literary Histories (1997), Ethics and Representation (1999), Gilles Deleuze
(Routledge 2002), Irony in the Work of Philosophy (2002), Gender (Palgrave
2003), Irony (Routledge 2004), Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum
2008), Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum 2010), and William Blake
and Digital Aesthetics (Continuum 2011). She has written articles on visual
culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture.
She is completing a book on human extinction.
Jon Cook is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of East
Anglia. He has written on poetry, culture, creativity, and the links
between literature and philosophy. His most recent book is Hazlitt in
Love (Short Books 2007).

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xvi

CONTRIBUTORS

Alistair Cormack is the author of Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and the
Reprobate Tradition (Ashgate 2008) and essays on contemporary British
writers including Monica Ali and J. G. Ballard. He lives and teaches at
Greshams College in Norfolk.
Greg Garrard is Reader in English Literature and the Environment
at Bath Spa University. He is the author of Ecocriticism (2004), Teaching
Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (2011) and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. He is currently writing a book on Ian
McEwan and science.
Sebastian Groes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University
of Roehampton, London, UK. He is the author of The Making of London
(Palgrave 2011) and has edited collections on authors including Ian
McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes. He is currently finishing
British Fiction in the Sixties (Bloomsbury Academic 2013) and preparing a
study into the relationship between literature and surveillance.
M. Hunter Hayes is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M
University-Commerce (USA), where he specializes in twentieth-century
and contemporary British literature. He is the author of Understanding
Will Self (University of South Carolina Press 2007).
Dominic Head is Professor of Modern English Literature at the
University of Nottingham. He has published numerous books on
modern and contemporary fiction, including The Modernist Short
Story (Cambridge 1992), Modern British Fiction, 19502000 (Cambridge,
2002) and a Blackwell Manifesto, The State of the Novel: Britain and
Beyond (Oxford 2008). He is the author of books on Nadine Gordimer
(Cambridge 1994), J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge 1997) and Ian McEwan
(Manchester 2007), and has published on literary ecocriticism.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature and Fellow
of New College, University of Oxford. She is author of Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994); Virginia Woolf: Writers
and their Work (1997) and The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the
Modernist Period (2007). She has edited a number of volumes, including
The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (1993); Sigmund Freuds The Interpretation
of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays (1999); and Mass-Observation as
Poetics and Science (2001). She is also one of the editors of the journal
Women: a Cultural Review.
Matt Ridley is a science writer whose books include The Red Queen
(1993), The Origins of Virtue (1996), Nature via Nurture (2003), Francis Crick
(2006) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010). His work
has been shortlisted for nine major literary awards and translated into
30 languages. He lives near Newcastle where he was the first chairman

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CONTRIBUTORS

xvii

of the International Centre for Life. Matt Ridley is also a fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Victor Sage is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of East
Anglia. His books include The Gothic Novel: A Casebook (Macmillan
1990), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) and
Le Fanus Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness (PalgraveMacmillan 2004). His
novels include A Mirror for Larks (Secker & Warburg 1993) and Black
Shawl (Secker & Warburg 1995).

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Chronology of Ian McEwans Life

1948

195159
195966
196770
197071

197172

1973
1974
1975
1976

1978
1979
1980

Ian Russell McEwan born on 21 June in the garrison town

of Aldershot, Hampshire, England, to the Scotsman David
McEwan, a soldier and later Major in the British army, and
Rose Lilian McEwan, (ne Wort), whose husband had died
in the Second World War and by whom she already had
two children.
McEwan grows up as an only child on military bases in
the United Kingdom and at military outposts abroad
(Singapore, Libya and Germany).
Sent from Tripoli, Libya, to attend state-run boarding
school Woolverstone Hall in Suffolk whilst parents continue to live abroad.
Reads English and French at the University of Sussex.
Begins writing fiction.
Enrols for the MA in English Literature at the University
of East Anglia. McEwan is the first student on the creative
writing course, taught and mentored by Malcolm Bradbury
and Angus Wilson. Works on a collection of short stories,
First Love, Last Rites.
Spends part of this post-MA year travelling the hippy
trail to Afghanistan, the North West Frontier Province,
and Greece; consumes psychotropic drugs. First story
(Homemade) sold to New American Review.
Finds a literary agent, Deborah Rogers, for representation.
Moves from Norwich to an attic room in Stockwell, South
London.
Debut collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites published. Writes Conversations with a Cupboardman for BBC
Radio.
Wins Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites.
Jack Fleas Birthday Celebration (Dir. Mike Newell) transmitted on television in Second City Firsts series. Travels to
the USA.
In Between the Sheets (stories) and first novel The Cement
Garden published.
Production of Solid Geometry (Dir. Mike Newell) for TV
halted by BBC over grotesque and bizarre sexual elements
in the play.
The Imitation Game broadcast as a BBC Play for Today.

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CHRONOLOGY OF IAN McEWANS LIFE

1981
1982
1983

1984
1985
1987

1988
1989
1990
1992
1993

1994
1995
1997

1998
1999
2000
2001

xix

The Comfort of Strangers published and nominated for Booker

Prize. The Imitation Game (television plays) published.
Marries spiritual counsellor and healer Penny Allen, with
whom he has two children.
Or Shall We Die?, an oratorio with a score by Michael Berkeley,
performed at the Royal Festival Hall, London, by the London
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Included in Grantas list of
Best Young British Novelists. Writes script for The Ploughmans
Lunch (Dir. Richard Eyre), wins the Evening Standard Award
for Best Screenplay. Elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society
of Literature.
Adapts Last Day of Summer (Dir. Derek Banham) for Channel
Four.
Rose Blanche, a childrens book with illustrations by Roberto
Innocenti, published.
The Child in Time published and awarded the Whitbread Novel
Award and the Prix Fmina Etranger (France). Visits the
Soviet Union as part of a delegation from European Nuclear
Disarmament (END).
Writes screenplay Soursweet based on Timothy Mos 1982 novel.
Awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Sussex.
Travels to Berlin with his wife to watch the fall of the Berlin
Wall.
The Innocent published. The Comfort of Strangers (Dir. Paul
Schrader), adapted by Harold Pinter, released.
Black Dogs published.
The Cement Garden (Dir. Andrew Birkin) released, winning several nominations and prizes. The Innocent (Dir. John
Schlesinger), adapted by McEwan himself, released. The Good
Son (Dir. Joseph Ruben) released. McEwan refuses further
involvement after original screenplay was rewritten to suit
Macaulay Culkin, who was cast in starring role.
Novel for children, The Daydreamer, published.
Divorce from Penny Allen.
Enduring Love published and shortlisted for the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize. Marries Annalena McAfee, journalist and editor of Guardian Review. First Love, Last Rites, adapted by David
Ryan, released, winning director Jesse Peretz the Fipresci Prize
at Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Amsterdam published, winning the Booker Prize.
Awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer
Foundation (Germany). Custody battle over sons with Allen.
Awarded CBE.
Atonement published and shortlisted for the Booker Prize;
shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award.

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xx

2002

2003
2004
2005

2006
2007

2008

2010

2011
2012

CHRONOLOGY OF IAN McEWANS LIFE

Solid Geometry adapted and directed by Denis Lawson for television. WH Smith Literary Award for Atonement. Discovers
he has a brother six years older, bricklayer David Sharpe, who
had been given up for adoption during the Second World War.
Sharpe was born to Rose from an affair with David McEwan
whilst her husband Ernest was fighting in the war. The story
becomes public knowledge in 2007.
Wins National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award and Los
Angeles Times Prize for Fiction for Atonement. Perspectives on
Ian McEwan conference held at UEA (Norwich, UK).
Associate Producer of the film Enduring Love (Dir. Roger
Michell), adapted by Joe Penhall. Wins Santiago Prize for
European Novel for Atonement.
Saturday published, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Butterflies
adapted and directed by Max Jacoby for television, winning
Prix UIP at Venice Film Festival for European Short Film.
McEwan part of an expedition of artists and scientists on a
ship near the North Pole discussing climate change.
Wins James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday.
On Chesil Beach published. DVD about the novel, Ian McEwan:
On Chesil Beach, released. Film of Atonement (Dir. Joe Wright)
released, with seven Oscar nominations including Adapted
Screenplay, winning for Score. Steps in to defend his friend
Martin Amis who is accused of Islamophobia.
Libretto, For You, set to music by Michael Berkeley, premiered at
the Royal Opera House, London, 28 October. Named Readers
Digest Author of the Year. On Chesil Beach named Galaxy Book
of the Year.
Solar published, wins the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse
Prize and McEwan is presented a locally-bred Gloucestershire
Old Spot pig. Receives the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished
Author Award.
Awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual
in Society. His acceptance speech addresses criticism of his
accepting the prize in light of his opposition to Israeli policies.
Sweet Tooth published, dedicated to his friend Christopher
Hitchens who died of cancer earlier that year. Supports the
charity SolarAid.

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INTRODUCTION

A Cartography of the Contemporary:

Mapping Newness in the Work of
Ian McEwan
SEBASTIAN GROES

The literary imagination has a significant contribution to make in

mapping the workings of the private life and the personal imagination,
and the wider concerns of the nation and the world, and Ian McEwan is
the foremost cartographer of our time. Over the past three decades, his
books have been critically- and academically-acclaimed and embraced
by audiences across the world. Since his debut collection of short stories
First Love, Last Rites (1975) was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award,
McEwan has won almost every existing national and international literary award and Fellowship, including the Whitbread Novel Award for
The Child in Time (1987), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday
(2005), the Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998) and the Bollinger Everyman
Wodehouse Prize for Solar (2010). His popular appeal was boosted considerably by the critically and commercially successful adaptations of
his fiction for the screen Harold Pinter adapted The Comfort of Strangers
(1990), Joe Penhall rewrote Enduring Love (2004) for Roger Michell, and
Christopher Hampton received an Oscar nomination for his direction of
Joe Wrights Atonement (2007).
McEwans work has also, almost continuously, provoked cultural
debates and moral outcries. The exploration of grotesque and disturbing themes (such as the breaking of social conventions, codes and
taboos, incest, sado-masochism, rape, pornography and the murder of
children) in the early work earned him the illustrious nickname Ian
Macabre. McEwans alignment with the feminist movement in the seventies and eighties led to his being co-opted and derided as the male
feminist (Haffenden 1985: 176). His investigation and portrayal of science and scientists in later novels such as Enduring Love (1997), Saturday
(2005) and Solar (2010) has evoked hostile responses from the liberal,
Guardian-reading section of his critics and readership, a fire he fed with
statements in which he declares that [g]ood science will serve us well
[. . .] Leave nothing to idealism or outrage, or even good art we know
in our hearts that the very best art is entirely and splendidly useless

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(McEwan 2005b). And because of his tentative support for the war in
Iraq, he was deemed to be part of the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives [. . .] the Blitcons (Sardar 2006). As his status and reputation as Britains most successful living author has grown, so have
the revelations about his private life. In 1995, there was a messy divorce
from his first wife, the spiritual healer and therapist Penny Allen, which
caused what McEwan described as mayhem at street level (Leith 1998:
8). In 2007, it became public knowledge that McEwan, who had grown
up as an only child, had discovered in 2002 that he had a full brother,
the bricklayer David Sharpe, which for McEwan provoked a forced and
continuing reappraisal of the past (McEwan 2008c). These controversies
about his private life too have contributed to anchoring McEwan in the
popular imagination.
Another unique characteristic of McEwans output is its creative versatility: although primarily a novelist, McEwan has also successfully
written short stories, a novel for children, The Daydreamer (1995), and
several television scripts and screenplays. Amongst his collaborative
outings we find two librettos with composer Michael Berkeley, Or Shall
We Die? (1983) and For You (2008) and an illustrated childrens book,
Rose Blanche (1985), which tells the story of a young German girl resisting the Nazis. McEwan has also delivered numerous lectures, amongst
which are the prestigious Dutch Van der Leeuw Lezing (2002), on the
relationship between science and literature in understanding human
nature, and the Royal Society of Arts/New Writing Worlds lecture
(2007), End of the World Blues, a damning statement against the perils
of religious fundamentalism. John Haffenden called him a man for
all media (Haffenden 1985: 168). Across these many forms his work
retains a distinctive character which explores questions of morality,
nationhood and history, sexuality, and the nature of the imagination
and human consciousness. As Matt Ridley suggests in his Foreword to
this collection, McEwan is one of the few writers able to step inside the
consciousness of others, and to lead the reader there like a psychological Virgil.
Contemporary readers are looking to McEwans work precisely for
his continued quest for the contemporary, that slippery term comprising the distinctive elements that make up the elusive Zeitgeist, the spirit
of our times. Since the very beginning of his career in the mid-seventies,
McEwan has been highly conscious of the state of the world. As a cultural
commentator, he has written on a wide range of topical issues, including feminism, the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons during
the Cold War, religious fundamentalism and millennialism, terrorism,
and the condition of the post-9/11 world. Since the early eighties he has
engaged with climate change: in Or Shall We Die? (1983) McEwan compares mans assault on nature with rape, and indicts all governments
who have not contemplated the redirection of its economy in the face

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of these problems, asserting that no major political party of the left or

right has begun to think of breaking with the doomed fixation on endless economic growth (McEwan 1989: 23; xxiii). McEwans desire to be a
witness of history and chronicler of the present has also spurred him on
to chase major global events. In 1987, McEwan visited the Soviet Union
as part of a delegation from European Nuclear Disarmament (END), and
two years later he witnessed the collapse of the Iron Curtain in Berlin. In
Saturday, he captures the anxious and uncertain post-9/11 climate while
anticipating the terrorist attacks on London, 7 July 2005, that followed
shortly after the novels publication. The next day he commented that
we have been savagely woken from a pleasant dream and that we as
citizens again had to renegotiate that deal we must constantly make
and remake with the state how much power must we grant Leviathan,
how much freedom will we be asked to trade for our security (McEwan
2005c).
He is similarly aware of the culture and literature within which he
works, and within which he is highly likely to endure as a central figure. He has commented on the death of the novel in the seventies, on
the state of British television and cinema in the early eighties, and the
state of the arts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. McEwan
has written on fellow writers including James Joyce, George Orwell,
Graham Greene, John Updike, the German novelist Peter Schneider, and
Salman Rushdie, whom he calls the dissenting fabulist (McEwan 1989:
xvii). He has acknowledged drawing inspiration from William Goldings
Lord of the Flies (1954) the very stuff of my fantasy life (McEwan 1986:
157) for The Cement Garden (1978). Saul Bellows work is an enduring
influence, and McEwans novels too are not simply set in the twentieth
century, they are about that century its awesome transformations, its
savagery, its new machines, the great battles of its thought systems, the
resounding failure of totalitarian systems, the mixed blessings of the
American way (McEwan 2005c). He has written about the changing perception of Darwins work and his admiration of Richard Dawkins The
Selfish Gene (1976), which he finds one extended invitation addressed
to us non-scientists to enjoy science, to indulge ourselves in the feast of
human ingenuity (McEwan 2006c).
McEwans debate with the modern world and his ability to capture
newness only truly begin when he transforms such concerns into carefully crafted and historically acute literary works of art. The collapse of
the Berlin Wall is transfigured in Black Dogs (1992) and in 2005 he joined
team of artists, scientists and journalists during the Cape Farewell Art/
Science Expedition to travel to Tempelfjorden to experience the Arctic
environment and to debate climate change, inspiring Solar (2010).
The trajectory of McEwans later work should be read as his increasing engagement with the canon of English literature, and the Western
literary tradition, as McEwan acknowledges in the interview included

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here: I want narrative authority. I want Saul Bellow, I want John

Updike, I want Chekhov, I want Nabokov and Jane Austen. I want
the authorial presence taking full responsibility for everything. This
realignment starts with Enduring Love (1997) and its open attention to
the work of John Keats, and the engagement with the satirical novel in
Amsterdam (1998). Atonement (2001), a complex and moving historical
narrative set before, during and after the Second World War, which
continuously wrong-foots the reader, brutally punishing us for our
willingness to suspend our disbelief, continues McEwans alignment
with English fiction. As Alistair Cormack suggests in this collection,
this novel evidences McEwans interest in the work of English literary
critic F. R. Leavis (18951978), while Laura Marcus explores the influence of Virginia Woolf in McEwans Atonement and his circadian novel
Saturday (2005). The latter also brings to the fore a renewed interest in
the Victorian critic and poet Matthew Arnold (18221888), as Sebastian
Groes argues. McEwans virtuously composed and bold novella On
Chesil Beach (2007) and libretto For You (2008) continue this arc as meditations on the moral questions surrounding the creative and destructive powers of the imagination, and the relationship between literary
ethics and aesthetics.
The past decade has seen a growing and overtly expressed uneasiness about McEwans story-telling ethics, and especially his tendency to
pull the rug from underneath the readers feet by introducing narrative
twists that upset established readerly expectations has raised concerns.
The admission of Briony at the end of Atonement in particular has vexed
critics because our emotional and intellectual investment in characters
is exploited and leaves us behind as gullible fops. In an astute reading
of McEwans oeuvre, James Wood confesses the following:
I dislike strong narrative manipulation, but McEwans Collins-like surprises
certainly work. They retain our narrative hunger, though perhaps at a cost.
His addiction to secrecy has a way of playing us, and if his withholdings
ultimately seek to contain trauma, they also have the effect of reproducing,
in plotted repetitions, the textures of the larger, originating traumas that are
his big subjects. I dont mean that his books traumatise us that would be
grossly unfair. Just that we finish them feeling a little guilty, having been
exiled from our own version of innocence by a cunningly knowing authorial manipulator. (Wood 2009)

Woods hedging shows the emotional and intellectual contradictions

and dilemmas McEwan presents us with as readers, and pinpoints the
concern over the curious paradox that we, particularly as experienced
McEwan readers, enter into when reading McEwan: not reading we dont
desire as manipulation, but reading as manipulation we voluntarily and
happily invite. In her novel Clear (2004) Nicola Barker captures this paradox and unease in a fiction of her own when the protagonist, Adair, falls

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INTRODUCTION

in love with an idiosyncratic girl and his best friend, Solomon, suggests
that he is being manipulated by her:
She just Ian McEwaned you, man, and youre still none the wiser!*
[. . .]
*I once loaned Solomon a copy of Ian McEwans The Comfort of Strangers where
a couple on holiday get drugged, tied up and tortured by an apparently genial pair of bogus holiday-makers. Solomon called the book, morally void. A
pointlessly sadistic exercise in controlled, middle class degeneracy.
But did you like it? I asked. (Barker 2004: 51)

The rhetorical question in the footnote sides with McEwan, and

reminds us that we, as readers, offer ourselves up for manipulation and
exploitation we invite the narrative authority McEwan speaks about
above. McEwan never simply bullies us into submission, but his carefully plotted narratives suggest the ways in which we, in an increasingly
complex world, are subjected to more and more complexly deceptive
forms of knowledge and power: the work is our modern condition,
human or not. Sweet Tooth (2012) seems both an extension of, yet also
a partial retrenching from, McEwans hardcore readerly manipulations
partly because of the narrative violence enacted is on McEwan himself.
As Peter Childs explores via a biographical-intertextual reading of Sweet
Tooth and a re-reading of an early, minute story by McEwan here
reprinted for the first time since 1976 McEwans novel is an introspective, self-scrutinising assessment of his writerly origins.
McEwans authorship emerges, indeed, from a profound questioning
of himself, and of the possibilities of fiction. In late May 1978, while
writing his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan stayed
three nights at the cottage of Angus Wilson in Felsham Woodside,
Suffolk, which is reworked in Sweet Tooth. McEwan, who had been a regular guest at Wilsons home since embarking on his postgraduate studies at the University of East Anglia, was restlessly walking the woods
during the day, contemplating his latest writing project and struggling
with questions that had come up in talks with his mentor: Could the
contemporary world be rendered in fiction at all, McEwan asked himself? (Drabble 1995: 523). In a recent essay, McEwan confirmed his
ongoing uncomfortable relationship with fiction: Like a late Victorian
clergyman sweating in the dark over his Doubts, I have moments when
my faith in fiction falters and then comes to the edge of collapse. I find
myself asking: am I really a believer? And then: was I ever? [. . .] Novels?
I dont know how or where to suspend my disbelief (McEwan 2013).
To understand this inquiry into himself and fiction-making, we have
to situate it within both McEwans personal background and the wider
historical context. McEwan was raised on army bases across the world
(Tripoli in Libya, Singapore, and Germany), instilling a great sense of

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geographical and psychological dislocation. At the age of eleven he was

sent alone to a state boarding school, Woolverstone Hall in Suffolk, continuing his cultural and linguistic displacement, the fecund ambivalence of which he traces in a short essay, Mother Tongue (2002):
Exile from a homeland, through obviously a distressing experience, can
bring a writer into a fruitful, or at least usefully problematic, relationship
with an adopted language. A weaker version of this [. . .] is the internal exile
of social mobility, particularly when it is through the layered linguistic density of English class. (McEwan 2002b: 37)

It was because of his unusual upbringing that McEwan took his

cue from a set of twentieth-century, bohemian writers who embodied
alienation and displacement, and who were part of a European tradition of Diasporic writing. McEwan had fallen under the spell cast by a
wide range of experimental, mainly continental writers who included
Modernists (Kafka and Beckett in particular); Existentialists; radical and
experimental authors such as Jean Genet, Louis Ferdinand Cline and
William Burroughs; writers part of the nouveau roman movement (Alain
Robbe-Grillet); the Theatre of the Absurd; and Literature of Exhaustion.
As Stephen Lewis (whose name recalls Joyces alter ego Stephen
Dedalus) notes in The Child in Time (1987): As a potential Joyce, Mann
or Shakespeare he belonged without question to the European cultural
tradition, the grown-up one (McEwan 1988: 30). McEwans early writing the short story collections First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between
the Sheets (1978), the novels The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of
Strangers (1981) show traces of a dissatisfaction with fiction-writing as
a means of representing what seemed an unceasing military, technological and cultural crisis in modernity.
At the time he also wanted to break the isolation of writing fiction,
which he described as the essentially crackpot activity of sitting down
alone several hours a day with an assortment of ghosts (McEwan 1981:
9), and he started writing for television and film here explored by
Hunter M. Hayes and Sebastian Groes in Chapter Two which he saw as
the medium to engage with the contemporary world while giving him a
new means, and audience, to express his left-wing political views.
McEwans uncertainty about the potential of fiction should, however, be called into question. The early work forms an intricate part of
the entire oeuvre, and an important foundation without which the later
work could not have emerged, and it also contains many of the thematics
and obsessions that he continues to explore, in a more subtle and refined
way, in the later works. This volume re-evaluates McEwans early work
which, as Lorna Sage notes in a review of The Comfort of Strangers, captured a new cultural energy: McEwan has exactly touched the obscure
nerve that registers newness in English fiction, and it may be a measure of the oddness of the cultural climate it ought to be the measure of

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something that this is all about regression (Sage 1981: 1145). McEwans
fear of regression is, however, countered by his exploration of its counterpart, transgression, the breaking of social and moral boundaries and
taboos, as displaced desire for transcending the limitations of the self.
In Chapter One, Jeannette Baxter picks up and develops McEwans
interest in Freudian psychology by rereading the early work through
the lens of the French philosopher and dissident surrealist Georges
Bataille (18971962). Baxter posits that McEwans unnerving short stories
can be read as experiments in a form of dissident Surrealism, and she
points out how McEwans engagement with this tradition allows him to
challenge received social conventions in relationship to individual identity and sexuality. Three lines of inquiry are offered to illuminate the
early work: Baxter traces McEwans use of the pornographic imagination to criticize the commodification of sexuality in First Love, Last Rites
(1975), his exploration of base materialism as socio-historical critique
in In Between the Sheets (1978), and the creation of a sense of vertigo in
McEwans first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), as a troubling resource
for breaking through the limits of consciousness.
Hunter M. Hayes and Sebastian Groes continue this reappraisal of the
early work in Chapter Two by exploring McEwans screenwriting not as a
form of apprenticeship or as groundwork for the novels, but as works that
stand in a dialogic relationship to his fiction. In the seventies, McEwan
turned to television because it allowed him to shed the constraints associated with fiction writing, and to experiment with the generic conventions of another medium. We locate an important hinge moment in the
transition from The Imitation Game (1980), in which McEwan broadens
out his thinking by connecting his personal preoccupations (the troubled family life, feminism) with political events of the time by embedding these concerns within a wider historical perspective a feature
which has become central to McEwans mature writing. His subsequent
move into writing features for film has provided him with the medium
to investigate his socio-political and cultural concerns in an even more
overt and direct manner, leading to a powerful anti-Thatcherite triptych:
The Ploughmans Lunch (1985); McEwans only direct engagement with
the problems of ethnic identity and the multicultural society, Soursweet
(1988); and his unhappy Hollywood outing The Good Son (1993).
The key problem of McEwans writing at this early stage of his career
lies not in his use of fiction as a means of expression, but in his interest in
psychoanalysis as a structure for understanding the self and the world.
In a story such as Dead As They Come (1978), in which a wealthy narcissist falls in love with a fashion dummy, McEwan taps into a Gothic
vein by reworking the German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmanns novella
The Sandman (1816) which Freud uses as a key story to illustrate the
uncanny in his famous essay of the same name (1919). McEwans subversion of social conventions, however, reaffirms and locks him into the
stable geometry of Freudian psychology that reinforces male-dominated

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and capitalist ideologies. It is the mature, historically aware McEwan

emerging from his work in other genres and media who breaks free
from the constraints of what he himself describes as the simple oppositions (Haffenden 1985: 172), by deconstructing such familial relationships. From the orphan Jeremy and his surrogate parents in Black Dogs
(1992) to Henry Perownes fatherless upbringing in Saturday (2005), one
hardly ever finds representations of the nuclear family (or its subversion) after The Comfort of Strangers (1981). This mode arguably reaches its
extreme in Enduring Love (1997), which has an astonishing lack of father
figures: the one father is killed off in the opening scene. This new mode
of thinking, first present in The Child in Time (1987) and developed in
the late eighties, also allows him to renegotiate his vision of the world,
yielding a more intricate and profoundly disturbing engagement with,
for instance, family, the relationship between the private and public, and
the historical dimension of the contemporary. McEwan acknowledges
this cultural shift in the fascinating interview included in this volume:
As the influence of Freud in literary and intellectual culture has faded,
we have returned to the idea that childhood is a form of innocence [. . .]
They come into the world not responsible for it, and they are sometimes
acted upon by people with terrible intent.
This complex process is examined by Claire Colebrooks reading of
McEwans Cold War spy novel, The Innocent (1990), as criticism of the cultural pornography of the child. In Chapter Three Colebrook continues,
and reframes, Baxters exploration of McEwans pornographic imagination by arguing that McEwan is a profoundly anti-oedipal writer
who destroys the organic wholeness of his novels to liberate his narration from the tyranny of fixed meaning and closed interpretation. For
Colebrook, The Innocent anticipates our society at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, when the circulation of images of missing or murdered children evokes a collective but false fantasy about our own lost
innocence. Colebrook begins by demonstrating how McEwan exploits
the complex temporality involved in such fantasies, and she takes us
through The Innocent, which represents sexuality as a double and conflicting tendency within those who would once again be a child, and
the adult who (always remaining a child) lives adult life as a fantasy of
mature mastery.
His writing too has remained under continuous attack. The publication of Atonement (2001) was followed by accusations of plagiarism
in 2006. McEwan had, it was claimed, lifted material from manuscripts by novelist Lucilla Andrews and a nurse, Mrs A. Radloff. The
scholar whose doctoral research was at the heart of the row, Natasha
Alden, here sets the record straight by publishing her findings in detail
for the first time. In Chapter Four, Alden suggests that McEwan has
used historical material in order to demonstrate what fiction can do
with history that history cannot rather than maliciously, or carelessly,
copying from the text of Andrews and Radloff. Alden recounts and

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contextualizes the plagiarism affair by drawing attention to the ethical

dimension of the questions and by embedding these within a revision
of postmodern accounts of historiographical metafiction. Alden takes
us through Atonement and its source material, explaining in detail the
motives behind McEwans inclusion and exclusion of information, and
his alteration, highlighting or suppression of atmospheric details. Alden
concludes that Atonement reaffirms McEwan as a novelist acutely aware
of his ethical responsibilities to history, while underscoring his continued attempts at reinventing the novel form.
The ethics of fiction-making are also central to Alistair Cormacks
analysis in Chapter Five of Atonements wide variety of novelistic discourses. He agrees that McEwan rejects postmodern relativism, but
whereas Alden argues that McEwan is looking forward to finding a new
form of historical fiction after postmodernism, Cormack argues that
McEwans later work arrives back at the Leavisite moral tradition of the
realist novel, the Humanist tradition, and empiricism. Cormack starts
off by taking the reader through F. R. Leaviss The Great Tradition (1948),
then through modernism and postmodernism, after which he examines
the myriad of intertexts and discourses by means of a critical examination of the novels form. Cormack concludes that throughout McEwans
novel the imagination is portrayed as dangerous, untrustworthy and
originating in self-interest. What is more, Atonement forms an attack on
the imagination itself: Fiction is presented as a lie a lie that, if believed,
comforts, distorts and finally produces unethical action.
In Chapter Six Laura Marcus examines McEwans interest in the
modernist aesthetic by focusing on modernist time the explosion of
interest in dynamic temporalities and variable time caused by scientific
progress in Atonement and Saturday. Her analysis introduces modernist time by examining The Child in Time (1987) and moves on to explore
McEwans narration of time via his engagement with Virginia Woolf,
whose writings have been instrumental in the formation of McEwans
later work. Marcus continues Colebrooks exploration of temporality by
investigating the irony and pathos of Atonements posthumous ironies,
but she also draws attention to McEwans representation of the many
different, and gendered, ways in which we experience time. Although
McEwan presents Woolfs texts as evasive denials of human acts and their
consequences, he brings her work back into the fold because she plays out
the dissolution and the recreation of character in the novel, and the separation between, and interrelationship of, individual consciousness. She
concludes that McEwan brings to the fore a new interest amongst writers in neuroscience and the relations between mind and brain. The novel
would appear to be committed to a new way of aligning narrative and
mental processes, and the forms of knowledge and enquiry associated
with both literature and science, underscoring both McEwans continuous quest for newness and his role within this developing field, which
includes the currently burgeoning Darwinian literary studies.

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Attacks on McEwan have been increasingly common, as the publication of McEwans most urgent engagement with newness in the
twenty-first century, Saturday (2005), demonstrates. The novel engages
with a variety of concerns, attempts to capture the anxious and uncertain post- 9/11 climate of terror, and is particularly interested in debating
the war in Iraq. John Banville accused the connoisseur of catastrophe
of having written a New Labourite neoliberal polemic gone badly
(Banville 2005). In an extraordinary episode, a commissioner from the
Equality and Human Rights Commission, Ziauddin Sardar, conflated
Henry Perowne (a fictional character) with Ian McEwan (writer of fiction) and accused the author of producing orientalist propaganda for
Western culture, literature and ideology. Sardar proceeded to lump
McEwan together with the outspokenly pro-American Martin Amis and
Salman Rushdie, who, together with Christopher Hitchins, had already
been proclaimed George W. Bushs bed-fellows in the New Statesman
(Lloyd 2002). McEwan did not respond to these accusations, but he did
jump to the defence of his friend Martin Amis, after he was accused of
being a racist by Terry Eagleton in autumn 2007 (Eagleton 2007). After
an Italian journalist misrepresented McEwans thoughts on the extreme
fringes of Islam in Corriere della Sera, British newspapers and the Muslim
Council of Great Britain portrayed McEwan as anti-Muslim (Martin
2008). This prompted McEwan to publish a statement on his website,
explaining that he had spoken out against Islamism and jihadists, not
against Islam: It is merely to invoke a common humanity which I hope
would be shared by all religions as well as all non-believers (McEwan
2008b).
McEwan wrote Saturday (2005) because, he suggested, he felt some
responsibility to the present. The times have become horribly interesting (Bragg 2005), and the novel gives us an image of ourselves at
the beginning of the twenty-first century. In Chapter Seven Sebastian
Groes argues that we can use McEwans ideas about the contemporary
city to understand his complex, uncertain meditation on the state of the
world at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the divorce of the
private and public realms, the relationship between science and the arts,
democracy, and the war in Iraq. These debates are traced through the
complex but carefully orchestrated intertexts the novel contains, with
a particular focus, first, on the hypercanonic modernist texts of Kafka,
Joyce and Woolf, and, secondly, on the Victorian cultural critic and poet
Matthew Arnold. While McEwan rejects the radical experiments of high
modernism, and appears to revert to classic Arnoldian conceptions of
culture, both the form and content of his novel remain ambivalent.
Saturday attempts to reinvigorate the novel as an important imaginary
space where dialogues about politics, society and morality can be held
in a democratic fashion.
In Chapter Eight, Head investigates McEwans provocative use of the
novella form in Amsterdam (1998) and On Chesil Beach (2007), arguing

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11

that he stretches the genre by incorporating discussions of society and

history that we normally associate with the novel. Head corrects the
initial, rather superficial reception of the novella as an exploration of
pre-Swinging Sixties themes and events, by pointing out the darker subtexts embedded in the work. Although it is set in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible (McEwan 2007:
3), McEwans novella sets out to provoke a debate about morality, sexuality, and taboos in contemporary society. Unlike Amiss writing, which
equates pornography with the obscenification of everyday life and a
loss of innocence (Amis 2003: 289; Groes and Amis 2004: 49), McEwans
work is ambivalent, emasculating the power of pornography by appropriating its imagery and ridiculing it, and by reminding us that repressive morality, idealizations of innocence and a lack of communication
can in equal measure lead to disaster. Head thus rounds off Baxters and
Colebrooks discussion of McEwans pornographic imagination, while
also engaging with the debates about McEwans experimentation with
genre.
An important conclusion reached by Head is that McEwans stretching of the novella genre points to an exhaustion of the genre, and perhaps
even a dissatisfaction with writing as a means to represent experience
itself. In Chapter Nine ecocritic Greg Garrard also takes issue with
McEwans choice of genre for engaging with climate change in Solar
(2010). Rather than choosing the apocalyptic-disaster route which we
find in a wide range of ecocritical fiction, from J. G. Ballards The Drowned
World (1962) to Margaret Atwoods The Year of the Flood (2009), McEwans
mildly satirical comic novel circumvents an admission of our collective moral and political failures because of McEwans alignment with
liberal humanist progressivism. Garrard uses his disappointment with
Solars failure to provoke a revolution in thinking about climate change
in the popular consciousness instructively: the novel, a series of parables structured around a central allegory, captures the complex political
problems in the noughties, whilst also suggesting that the global scale
and complexity climate change poses a major problem for artistic representation and human imagination. One wonders whether McEwans
disruptive plotting actually captures quite aptly our experience as a distracted generation of helplessly selfish individuals who have lost their
capacity for extended, deep contemplation. Although Michael Beards
overpowering hunger for pleasure and dominance is so strong that it
conveniently makes us forget his self-destructive actions, and this inertia is also a profoundly human characteristic.
This critical volume also sees the reprint of an early short story that
suggests the coherence of McEwans oeuvre: this concentrated story
Untitled about a womans strategy of infantilisation through the
perverse revenge on the promiscuous mans body suggest this is a
study for the short story Pornography (1978) and a screen play such as
Jack Fleas Birthday Celebration (1976), but the involvement of a doctor

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already anticipates neurosurgeon Perowne in Saturday. This experimental piece, to which McEwan refers in his interview in this book, could
have been written by Tom Haley, the alter ego of McEwan in Sweet Tooth.
In the Afterword, Peter Childs explores how his fifteenth book gives
the reader a distorting lens through which to see McEwans early career
as a newly published writer. Through an exploration of intertextuality
and contorted autobiography, Childs shows how complex the narrative
games of McEwan have become. The world of the novel is, as McEwans
Toms Serena notes warped in its frame (McEwan 2012a: 134).
As a reflection of a complex, paradoxical world whose multiplicity
constantly perplexes and confounds us, McEwans fiction and Sweet
Tooth in particular is confusing and ambiguous too. This uncertainty
reflects the troubled state of the world at the beginning of the twentyfirst century but McEwans work will continue to explore the answers
to the question asked by Perowne at the beginning of Saturday: And
now, what days are these? (McEwan 2005a: 4).

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CHAPTER ONE

Surrealist Encounters in
Ian McEwans Early Work
JEANNETTE BAXTER

Chapter Summary: This chapter reassesses McEwans first three published works First Love, Last Rites (1975), In Between the Sheets (1978)
and The Cement Garden (1978) in the light of George Batailles radical
Surrealist writings. Tracing the formal and thematic aspects of McEwans
surrealism, it focuses on the pornographic imagination and its interrogation of culturally-prescribed notions of obscenity within contemporary culture; on the challenges posed by base materialism and
formlessness to socio-cultural and aesthetic constraints on form; and
on McEwans creation of vertigo in relationship to eroticism, transgression and taboo. Rereading McEwans early work within the tradition of
dissident Surrealism offers a different set of critical and creative contexts
for confronting and understanding these compelling detours into the
more disturbing textures of the modern imagination.

McEwans shocking tales of incest, paedophilia, erotic violence, sex and

death in First Love, Last Rites, In Between The Sheets and The Cement Garden
not only demand that we, the readers, immerse ourselves imaginatively
in every disturbing texture of each narrative, but they also insist, in a
sense, that we stay there. As Kiernan Ryan has pointed out, one of the
strengths of McEwans early fictions is the way in which they force the
reader into a disquieting process of self-reflection: Far from disguising the tainted pleasure they take in their more lurid themes, his best
tales confess the ambiguity of their attitude and oblige us to reflect on
the mixed motives governing our own response as readers (Ryan 1994:
13). This essay concerns itself with this unsettling aspect of reading
McEwans early work. How is the reader expected to respond to tales
of rape (Homemade, Dead as They Come); child abuse (Disguises,
Butterflies, Conversation with a Cupboard Man); sado-masochistic
torture (Pornography); and incestuous desire (The Cement Garden)?
Should we refrain from indulging in these tales of violent transgression,

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or should we allow ourselves to fall into the textual abyss? How do we

even begin to negotiate, or reconcile, our own shifting responses to
McEwans fictions when initial waves of shock, disgust and nausea give
way somehow to feelings of confusion and fascination, and laughter?
The uncertainty of response entailed by McEwans early writing
points to a troubling aesthetic of provocation. Although critics have
gone some way to exploring this Ryan labels McEwans writing an
Art of Unease the creative and critical impulse behind McEwans aesthetics are better understood when his first three published works are
read as experiments in a form of dissident Surrealism. A literary, artistic
and political movement born out of the historical and social circumstances of post-First World War Europe, Surrealism set out to subvert
established understandings of the modern world as rational, ordered
and homogeneous. Through a diverse range of experimental narrative
and visual techniques (including collage, photomontage, dream association and psychic automatism), the Surrealist Group, headed by Andr
Breton, developed an aesthetic repertoire with which they could dismantle socially constructed ideas of identity, subjectivity, sexuality and
reality, and, in turn, open art, literature, history and politics to unique
ways of seeing.
One aspect of the human condition with which the Surrealists were
particularly concerned was desire in all of its manifestations. Influenced
by Freudian theories of sexuality, Surrealist art and literature engaged
in various ways with the polymorphous perverse (masturbation;
incest) and, specifically, with the troubling intersection of art, sex and
death (Freud 1920: 79). The reader of Surrealist literature was confronted
repeatedly with disturbing and often violent imaginary scenarios which
jolted him or her into a radically new way of reacting to and thinking about sexual desire. It was precisely this disturbance of the readers historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of
his tastes, values, memories (Barthes 1990: 14) which constituted the
uneasy pleasures of the Surrealist text.
Although the exploration of sexual desire formed a central part of the
Surrealist project, it was also a site of contestation and eventual rupture.
Hal Foster notes how Andr Bretons and Georges Batailles diverging
philosophies on sex, death and art led to a split in the Group in 1929. At
the heart of Bretonian Surrealism lay the notion of sublimation, namely
the diversion of sexual drives to civilizational ends (art, science) in a
way that purifies them, that both integrates the object (beauty, truth)
and refines the subject (the artist, scientist) (Foster 1993: 110). Whilst
Bretons recuperation of subversive desire encouraged the transformation of matter into metaphor in an ascending movement of sublimation, Batailles dissident Surrealism encouraged a descent into the dirt.
Rejecting Bretonian idealism, Bataille posited a philosophy of base
materialism (Breton dismissed this as vulgar materialism), which
refused to rise above mere matter, sheer shit, to raise the low to high, to

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SURREALIST ENCOUNTERS IN McEWANS EARLY WORK 15

proper form and sublimated beauty (Foster 1993: 12), and which risked
elaborating on the intersection of sex and death.
This willingness to descend imaginatively into the precarious territories of desublimation is a hallmark of McEwans early work. McEwans
admission that that which compels him to write is not what is nice and
easy and pleasant and somehow affirming, but somehow what is bad
and difficult and unsettling (Ricks 1979: 526) aligns his early aesthetic
and philosophical impulses squarely with Batailles dissident Surrealism.
Bataille keeps company with those Surrealist (or quasi-Surrealist) writers, including Jean Genet, Louis Ferdinand Cline, William Burroughs
and Franz Kafka, whom McEwan acknowledges as literary influences
(Haffenden 1985: 169). I want to explore the formal and thematic aspects
of McEwans Surrealism as they manifest themselves in three distinct
yet related areas: the pornographic imagination and its interrogation of
culturally-prescribed notions of obscenity within contemporary culture; the desublimating drives of base materialism and their informe, or
formlessness, and the challenges which they pose to socio-cultural and
aesthetic determinations of form; and the dizzying presence of vertigo as
it relates to eroticism, transgression and taboo, and to the troubling conjunction of art, Eros and Thanatos. By (re)reading McEwans early work
within the tradition of dissident Surrealism, I hope to reveal a different
set of critical and creative contexts for confronting and understanding
these compelling detours through the more disturbing textures of the
modern imagination.

The Pornographic Imagination in First Love, Last Rites

In The Pornographic Imagination (1967), Susan Sontag identifies three
kinds of pornography within contemporary culture: pornography as
a commodity or an item in social history, an idea explored by Claire
Colebrook in relation to The Innocent (see pp. 4356); pornography as
a pathological symptom which, according to traditional views, is a
sign of sexual deficiency or deformity in both the producers and the
consumers; and literary pornography, a minor but interesting modality or convention within the arts (Sontag 2001: 83). It is in the light
of this third form of pornography the pornographic imagination
that I want to review McEwans early fiction. According to Sontag, one
significant difference between commercial pornographic novels or
pot-boilers, and serious works of literary pornography, is the latters
compulsion to elaborate on extreme forms of human consciousness
(Sontag 2001: 84). The power of literary pornography is not to be measured by the power to titillate, then, but by the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as
incarnated in a work (Sontag 2001: 94). For Sontag, this urgent need to
explore the most disturbing states of human feeling and consciousness

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16

is articulated in the pornographic writings of Georges Bataille: The

Story of the Eye (1928), Madame Edwarda, (1941), and Ma Mre (published
posthumously in 1962). Focusing on Batailles first novella, Story of the
Eye (1928), a provocative meditation on sexual perversion (paedophilia,
necrophilia and incest amongst others), which is intertextually resonant with McEwans own pornographic writings, Sontag argues that
works of literary pornography should not be seen as tokens of radical
failure or deformation of the imagination (Sontag 2001: 98). Instead,
she insists that literary pornography boasts an imagination which is at
once creative and critically mobilizing; the pornographic imagination
risks taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness, in other
words, in order to place our conventional thinking about sex, death
and art on trial.
In Cocker at the Theatre, McEwan makes a dramatic feature of one of
the key issues raised in Sontags polemic, namely, the nature of obscenity. The story offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a group of actors as
they prepare to simulate a series of sexual encounters; its content flaunts
the characteristics we commonly associate with pornography. What is
striking about this pornographic tale, though, is not so much its salacious content, but its tone:
Dale the choreographer moved a girl from the middle and replaced her with
a girl from the edge. She did not speak to them, she took them by the elbow,
leading them from this place to that place [. . .] She fitted the legs together of
each couple, she straightened their backs, she put their heads in position and
made the partners clasp forearms. (McEwan 1997a: 67)

The reader is ineluctably cast as a voyeur. Whilst the third-person narrative voice establishes a detached and neutralized tone, the repeated
collective pronouns (they and them) strip the actors of any semblance
of personal identity, so reducing these nameless human agents to interchangeable components within an anonymous sexual collective. The
choreographers schematic attempts to stylize the sensuous emphasizes,
furthermore, the insensate nature of the reified and sexualized body;
assembled and reassembled like mannequins for voyeuristic consumption, McEwans pornographic troupe are mere prototypes in a potentially inexhaustible and largely affectless sexual exhibition.
I say largely affectless because McEwans deadpan presentation of simulated sexual encounters is designed to provoke the reader to laughter by
means of parody. A common form of pornographic writing, parody works
in Cocker at the Theatre to interrogate conventional notions of obscenity,
and to open up a line of questioning about the imbrication of sex, art and
consumer-capitalism. In an extremely funny turn of events, for instance,
two actors transgress the boundaries of pretence by engaging in a real
and sinuous sex act (McEwan 1997a: 69). The artistic directors response
is telling: Its disgusting and obscene [. . .] Well, Cocker, you and the little

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man stuck on the end of you can crawl off this stage, and take shagging
Nellie with you. I hope you find a gutter big enough for two (McEwan
1997a: 70). The director posits a skewed sense of moral outrage, and, in
so doing, gives weight to Sontags suspicion that obscenity is nothing
more than a fiction imposed upon a society convinced there is something
vile about the sexual functions and, by extension, about sexual pleasure
(Sontag 2001: 103). Furthermore, a resonant irony is born out of the directors continued attempts to couch his own sex show, a cheap pornographic
commodity which spectacularly lacks imagination and desire, in artistic
terms This is a respectable show (McEwan 1997a: 65). As the directors
hilarious address to the actors offending member confirms, this particular kind of commercial pornographer is only used to dealing in well-worn
clichs and a style of personification which aggressively dehumanizes
and fetishes the sexualized body.
McEwan advances this line of enquiry by exploring the standardization and commodification of sexuality in Homemade, a disturbing tale
of violent sexual fantasy whose title smacks of the ready-made forms
of sexual desire in circulation within the contemporary consumer culture. A self-confessed consumer of pornographic literature top shelf
magazines, under-the-counter videos, and the more interesting parts
of Havelock Ellis and Henry Miller the anonymous narrator boasts
a connoisseurs taste for violence and obscenity (McEwan 1997a: 27).
Indeed, his first experience of masturbation occurs in the cellar of a
bomb-site (McEwan 1997a: 26). In the absence of any longings or private fantasies (McEwan 1997a: 27) of his own, the adolescent narrator
feeds his imagination on a diet of timeworn puns and innuendo, formulas, slogans, folklore and bravado (McEwan 1997a: 30) which he
inherits from popular literary and visual forms, and from the workmen
who gather to exchange salacious tales in the local caf. The missing
ingredient from the narrators self-styled sexual education, however, is
knowledge: All the way home I thought about cunt [. . .] And for all this
I still did not know just exactly what a cunt was. I eyed my sister across
the table (McEwan 1997a: 35). This last sentence jolts the reader, for now
the full implications of the title of this story become clear; Connie, the
narrators ten-year-old sister, is the homemade object of her brothers
sexual obsessions.
The suggestion that the adolescent narrator will seek sexual knowledge in his younger sister (her name is a translinguistic pun on knowledge connaissance [see Broughton 1991]) is clearly unpalatable to the
reader, and yet the text only proceeds by exacerbating our developing
sense of unease. Inviting her to play Hide and Seek, for instance, the
boys transgressive thoughts manifest themselves in a double discourse
which is playful and insidious I covered my eyes and counted to
thirty [. . .] I shouted Coming and began to mount the stairs before
it collapses into unequivocal intent: I had decided to rape my sister
(McEwan 1997a: 367). It is this uncompromising move to advance one

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step further in the dialectic of outrage that marks McEwans early writings out as explorations of the Surrealist pornographic imagination.
McEwan strives to make his work revolting and aims to trigger the
readers rejection of it by confronting him or her with the promise of
incestuous rape.
By immersing his readers in this offensive textual scenario, McEwan
sets out to defamiliarize and disorientate us. What quickly emerges
from the siblings game of Mummies and Daddies is that McEwan not
only foregrounds the boys filial desires, but he simultaneously offers
this uneasy desire up as an antidote to conventional socio-sexual relations. At the same time that readers are horrified by one of the most
desolate couplings known to mankind, involving lies, deceit and
humiliation (McEwan 1997a: 43), we are also unnerved by the dreary,
everyday, ponderous banalities, the horrifying niggling details of the
life of our parents and friends (McEwan 1997a: 38), all of which are subverted by the central incestuous encounter. It is this transgressive drive
to counter-repressive cultural systems which McEwans writings inherit
from Bataille. Reading Homemade, and McEwans provocative early
fictions in general, is akin to reading Batailles meditation on transgression and taboo, Eroticism (1957). Situated within a dialectic of interdiction and transgression, eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation,
which always entails a breaking down of established patterns [. . .] of
the regulated social order (Bataille 2001: 816). In tension with this is
the prohibitive mechanism of interdiction, a repressive and regulating
force which maintains the equilibrium through order and restraint.
Oscillating between transgression and interdiction, the reader of
Homemade experiences a range of ambiguous emotions. Initial waves
of shock and disgust give way to fascination and even laughter when the
sexually inept narrator struggles to wriggle from his underpants in order
to achieve a gnats orgasm (McEwan 1997a: 43). The readers ambivalent response is indicative of the disquieting energies of McEwans writing, and of a rupture of the conventional paradigm of reader and text
(within which the reader is in control) when, out of incredulity, horror
or curiosity, the reader feels compelled to read on. It is at this point of
re-engagement with the text that the process of reading is pushed to its
limits and becomes something resembling performance. In the act of
(re)reading, each disturbing textual/sexual scenario is repeated as the
reader becomes a participant and performer in McEwans erotic texts.
We are invited to test the limits of our own imaginations and tolerance by staging repeated scenes of incestuous rape. Such a process of
performative reading has significant consequences: when does readerly
participation cross over into complicity?
McEwan foregrounds this question in Disguises, a disturbing
tale of paedophilia and performance, which also boasts a contest of
narrative forms at its heart. On the one hand, the reader encounters

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the memories of Mina, a retired grand dame of the theatre and surreal mother (McEwan 1997a: 124) to her orphaned nephew, Henry.
Pitched against Minas disjointed and discontinuous surreal narrative is Henrys sequential and conventionally realist narrative, which
eschews randomness and chaos in favour of details and facts: Henry
was not the kind to see the unseen (McEwan 1997a: 125). It is Henrys
faith in surface realities and his inability to perceive the power of the
hidden, however, which secures his fate as the object of Minas perverse desires. Henrys new life resembles a costume drama of sorts,
for instance when, each night, Mina dresses him variously as a soldier,
lift-boy, monk and shepherd (McEwan 1997a: 128). What the young boy
gradually begins to realize, though, is that his surreal mothers sartorial rituals are games which are not really games: he sensed some compulsion in it for Mina, he dared not contradict it, there was something
dark (McEwan 1997a: 132). In this context, game reveals itself to be a
euphemism for paedophilia.
The intersection of performance and paedophilia is explored most
compellingly towards the end of the story when Mina hosts a fancydress party for her friends, who come disguised as ordinary people
(McEwan 1997a: 153). The events of the party are narrated from Henrys
point of view as he wonders and watches from behind a monsters mask.
Yet his is not the linear, realist voice which the reader encountered at the
beginning of the story. Rather, intoxicated by fear and alcohol, Henrys
narrative becomes non-sequential and chaotic as he witnesses his friend,
Linda, a bewildered Alice in Wonderland, being abused by one of the
male guests:
Was it the monster who fell to the ground or Henry, who was to blame? it
came back to him now, dressed like somebody else and pretending to be
them you took the blame for what they did, or what you as them do . . . did?
(McEwan 1997a: 1567)

Henrys fractured syntax not only belies the trauma of witnessing sexual abuse, but it also sets up a series of intricate questions about agency
and moral responsibility. Henrys own sense of complicity (he invited
Linda to the party), together with his subsequent desire to shift the
blame from his proper to performative self, manifest themselves in a
linguistically fraught narrative. The temporal collapse of the verb to
do emphasizes the boys confusion about where culpability lies. Is he
to blame, or is the monster? And who, precisely, is the monster? Is it the
boy in the Mummy mask, the paedophile hiding in plain sight, or the
reader of the story who, however vicariously, participates in and indeed
performs the texts disturbing events? It is precisely this line of selfquestioning which makes the act of reading McEwans early dissident
fictions so disquieting and so necessary.

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In Between the Sheets: Vulgar Materialism and

the Politics of Formlessness
McEwans early writings are littered with waste of every kind. Whilst
traces of urine, vomit, semen, snot, spit, pus and blood wet and stain
almost every page of his short prose fictions, accumulations of refuse,
shit, abandoned buildings and rotten organic forms threaten to clutter the readers vision. Critical attention has only been paid so far to
McEwans cataloguing of waste and excess within the context of male
adolescent sexuality (earning him the title of chronicler of snot and
pimples [Haffenden 1985: 173]). In this section, I want to read McEwans
materialism within a dissident strain of Surrealist writing, advanced
by Bataille, known as base materialism. Batailles fascination with
waste, rot and decay Story of the Eye (1928) is sodden with semen,
urine, tears, egg yolks and cats milk, whilst his writings on La Villette
Slaughterhouse are saturated with images of blood and unidentifiable
bundles of visceral excess led to Breton deriding him as an excremental philosopher: M. Bataille professes to wish only to consider in the
world that which is vilest, most discouraging and most corrupted [. . .]
so as to avoid making himself useful for anything specific (Breton 1972:
181). I would like to challenge the accusation that base materialism is
nothing more than an act of apolitical indulgence, suggesting rather that
this dissident Surrealist practice is a form of socio-historical critique
which disconcerts idealist aspirations before something base precisely
in order to place received notions of order and form on trial.
It is in the notion of the informe, or formlessness, that base materialism finds its most suggestive expression. An assault on the conventional
organization of knowledge and reality into neat and definable terms,
formlessness is a term serving to declassify and dismantle traditional
notions of form by affirming on the contrary that the universe resembles nothing at all and is only formless (Bataille 1995: 27). One of a number of terms (including abattoir, dust, eye, materialism) which Bataille
included in his parodic Critical Dictionary, formlessness is nonetheless never defined. Rather, it is given a function: informed by the task
of bringing things down in the world, formlessness will challenge all
formal constraints and reject structure and procedure. Repudiating the
idealist trajectory of sublimation, formlessness confronts the reader
with a variety of difficult and disquieting encounters which can only
be experienced on their own, desublimating terms. As Rosalind Krauss
has argued, formlessness does not propose a higher, more transcendental meaning through a dialectical movement of thought. The boundaries of terms are not imagined by the dissident Surrealist artist as
transcended, but merely as transgressed or broken, producing formlessness through deliquescence, putrefaction, decay (Krauss 1986: 65).
The post-apocalyptic landscapes of Two Fragments: March 199 provide a fitting point of entry into this discussion. In these bleak, proleptic

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tales, McEwan presents the reader with a radically defamiliarized vision
of London:
The Ministry rose from a vast plain of pavement [. . .] The stones were cracking and subsiding. Human refuse littered the plain. Vegetables, rotten and
trodden down, cardboard boxes flattened into beds, the remains of fires and
the carcasses of roasted dogs and cats, rusted tin, vomit, worn tyres, animal
excrement. An old dream of horizontal lines converging on the thrusting
steel and glass perpendicular was now beyond recall. (McEwan 1997b: 39)

A dialectical tension is present within this urban snapshot, namely a tension between architecture, which connotes order, system and structure
(the Ministry is a metonym for Government), and formlessness, which
erodes any sense of structure and regulation. What is particularly striking about this description of urban excess, however, is what we might
call the trajectory of its energy. Everything is collapsing downwards:
buildings are subsiding; rotten matter is trodden down; boxes are flattened; fires have burnt down; car tyres are worn down. The dominant
movement in this passage charts a fall from a vertical axis (sublimation)
on to a horizontal axis (desublimation). Indeed sublimation, the idealist
promise that, in the context of this narrative, governing structures will
lift society up and out of the dirt, is nothing more than an old dream
(McEwan 1997b: 39). In reality, the Ministry is a massive public convenience which the citys inhabitants visit daily to squat on the wide concrete rim of the fountain and defecate (McEwan 1997b: 40).
With its imaginative descent into formlessness, Two Fragments can
be read as a biting indictment of the social, economic and historical contexts of the storys production. Certainly, McEwans bleak imagery is
consonant with the apocalyptic tone of social and cultural commentators of the time. As Tom Nairn put it, the 1970s was a decade of rapidly
accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay, and cultural despair; in short, British society had decayed to the point of disintegration (Nairn 1977: 51, 67). One thing to stress about Nairns response
is that it does not merely operate on a metaphorical level. During the
Winter of Discontent (19789), a year-long period of widespread strikes
by trade unions contesting pay restraints, the British landscape was in
a literal state of decay: sewage disposal ceased, rubbish piled on the
streets, the dead lay unburied (Bradbury 1993: 418).
These historico-social realities manifest themselves imaginatively
throughout McEwans early fictions. In the second of the Two Fragments,
for instance, one character bemoans the declining state of British industry: We no longer craft things [. . .] Nor do we manufacture or massproduce them. We make nothing (McEwan 1997b: 49). Meanwhile, the
protagonist, Henry, is placed in a socially compromising situation when
he realizes that his act of kindness towards a Chinaman is to be paid
in food which the immigrant family simply cannot spare. Embedded

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22

in this awkward encounter are complex narratives of economic migration, social deprivation and cultural difference which McEwans own
narrative refuses to sublimate. Rather, the food which Henry is forced
to eat out of politeness is a formless, dun-coloured mass which the
Chinamans daughter variably identifies as muck and piss (McEwan
1997b: 57). Holding back his own vomit, the only response available to
Henry is to depart the scene, to descend the steep flight of stairs and
turn out the paraffin lamp, thus plunging himself and the reader down
into the darkness of the black street (McEwan 1997b: 578).
Another critical impulse behind McEwans explorations of formlessness speaks to the condition of British fiction (and especially the
novel) in the 1970s. As Malcolm Bradbury so bluntly put it: After the
Swinging Sixties, the Sagging Seventies (Bradbury 1993: 416). Such was
the anxiety surrounding the fate of the British cultural imagination in
1970s Britain that a New Review symposium took place which focused
exclusively on the quality of novelistic practices (Moore-Gilbert 1994: 2).
Artists, commentators and writers, including McEwan, gathered to
express their doubt over the future of the novel form. McEwan believed
fiction to be less vital than other cultural forms in contemporary Britain
(Moore-Gilbert 1994: 2), an authorial anxiety which resides at the heart
of Reflections of a Kept Ape:
Was art then nothing more than a wish to appear busy? Was it nothing
more than a fear of silence, of boredom, which the merely reiterative rattle
of the typewriters keys was enough to allay? In short, having crafted one
novel, would it suffice to write it again, type it out with care, page by page?
(McEwan 1997b: 32)

McEwans short prose can be read as a deliberate strategy for revitalizing the state of British fiction. As Bradbury points out, not since Angus
Wilson [McEwans teacher] had a major career started with two volumes
of stories rather than a novel (Bradbury 1993: 437). As I have been arguing throughout, though, it is McEwans reinvigoration of British fiction
along Surrealist lines of influence which distinguishes his fictions as
so innovative and imaginative. Following a small number of British
writers, including J. G. Ballard and Angela Carter, who also turned to
literary and visual Surrealism in varying ways in the post-war period,
McEwans early work gives body to Moore-Gilberts assertion that the
1970s was not a decade of closure, but a period alive to the influences
and innovations of the previous decade. The avant-garde of the 1960s,
he argues, had given shape to what he terms a post-avantgardism of
the 1970s in which traditional aesthetic models and more radical formal
innovations co-existed (Moore-Gilbert 1994: 15).
McEwan makes a dramatic feature of this formal convergence in Dead
as They Come, a snapshot of sadistic and fetishistic desire which derails
the circumlocutory direction of postmodernism in order to take art in

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another direction altogether. Dead as They Come boasts the desublimatory account of representation which lies at the heart of the dissident
Surrealist project. Representation is less about formal sublimation than
about instinctual release or, as Bataille put it: Art [. . .] proceeds in this
way by successive destructions. To the extent that it liberates libidinal
instincts, these instincts are sadistic (quoted in Foster 1993: 113). This
compulsion to deform traditional aesthetic form, to bring art down in
the world, reaches a powerful climax at the end of Dead as They Come
when, having raped and vomited over the corpse of his mannequin
lover, the narrator destroys his precious art collection: Now I was
running like a naked madman from room to room destroying whatever I could lay my hands on [. . .] Vermeer, Blake, Richard Dadd, Paul
Nash, Rothko, I tore, trampled, mangled, kicked, spat and urinated on
(McEwan 1997b: 77). Notably, this particular act of artistic deformation
is not absolute. Indeed, in the style of Andy Warhols Oxidation Art, an
artistic practice which promoted formlessness by demoting the canvas
from a vertical position (wall, easel) to a horizontal one (floor) in order
to piss on it, McEwans dissident artist creates a post-avant-garde site
of aesthetic contestation as formless expectorated bodily fluids (spittle, urine) and base matter (dirt) mix with traditional materials and violate accepted form (Martin 2005). Whilst these radically altered works
of art provoke new ways of seeing in a literal sense (the spectator must
now look downwards, at the floor), they also initiate radical methods
for thinking differently and disturbingly about art, sex and death, and
the point at which these energies converge. This is a line of disquieting
interrogation which I want to pursue further in the final section.

The Cement Garden: Vertigo and the Surrealist Turn

As David Lomas has argued, the term vertigo appeared with remarkable frequency in the writings of the dissident Surrealists. From the
French vertere, meaning to turn, vertigo is defined as a perturbation in
the subjective orientation to space which generally takes the form of a
gyratory or oscillatory sensation but can manifest as feelings of ascent
or descent (Lomas 2007). Common symptoms of vertigo include loss of
balance, light-headedness and the feeling of the ground moving, or giving way, beneath ones feet. I want to trace symptoms of vertigo as they
manifest themselves across McEwans short debut novel, The Cement
Garden. I will focus upon the complex interplay between vertigo and
Batailles notion of eroticism, that transgressive and disequilibriating
form of sexual desire which, in assenting to life up to the point of death
(Bataille 2001: 11), elaborates on the marriage of sex and death.
The Cement Garden pivots on the ambiguous conjunction of Eros and
Thanatos. Whilst Jacks opening flirtations with parricide I did not kill
my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way (McEwan

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2006: 9) gesture to the sons growing sexual energy and the demise of
his emotionally sterile father (who drops dead at the moment at which
Jack achieves his first orgasm), the death of his mother initiates a descent into a series of erotic transgressions. Rereading the science fiction
fantasy which his younger sister, Sue, had given him for his birthday,
Jack alludes to the erosion of order which his mothers death signifies:
Now that we do not have gravity to keep things in their place [. . .] we
must make an extra effort to be neat (McEwan 2006: 82). This loss of stability manifests itself most strikingly in the makeshift tomb which the
children construct in the cellar of their house in order to bury the traumatic memory of their mothers death and simultaneously preserve her
as an invisible foundation of their lives (Ryan 1994: 20). The ambiguity
of the home-made tomb is not confined to the childrens psychic need to
intern their mother, however. In French, the word for tomb, tombe, has a
double-meaning: on the one hand it refers to a large underground vault
for the burial of the dead; on the other hand, it means fall.
When he first learns of his mothers death Jack succumbs to an
experience of vertigo: For a moment I thought of snatching the key, but
I turned and, lightheaded, close to blasphemous laughter, followed my
sister down (McEwan 2006: 52). Oscillating between fear and desire,
tears and laughter, Jacks ambivalent response reflects the uncertainty of
knowing how to negotiate trauma. Equally, though, his vertiginous descent of the stairs (he is close behind Julie) also gestures symbolically to
the siblings imminent fall into incest. This act of filial desire is couched
in vertiginous terms: I [Jack] felt weightless, tumbling through space
with no sense of up or down. As I closed my lips around Julies nipple a
soft shudder ran through her body (McEwan 2006: 135). In violating the
incest taboo, Jack and Julie transgress the limits of what Bataille would
call their discontinuity. It is important to recognize that this excursion
into eroticism is asking that the erotic lure in things that are vile and
repulsive is not dismissed as mere neurotic aberrations (Sontag 2001:
1034). Rather, in contrast to Dereks stock response Its sick [. . .] hes
your brother [. . .] Sick! (McEwan 2006: 136) the reader is provoked
into considering the possibility that extreme sexual practices might just
be understood as troubling resources for breaking through the limits of
consciousness. The whole business of eroticism is, after all, to destroy
the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives (Bataille 2001: 17).
The suggestion that McEwans imaginative transgressions into the
domain of eroticism could also be read in terms of a socio-cultural critique is borne out in the pages which describe Julie and Jack having sex.
Notably, the emphasis is not placed on the sexual act itself they both
end up laughing and forgetting what we were about (McEwan 2006:
137). Importance is placed, instead, on the fact that brother and sister
talk urgently and incessantly to one another prior to, during and after
sex (McEwan 2006: 1336). Having stripped naked, an act which is the

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decisive action [. . .] shorn of gravity (Bataille 2001: 18), Jack and Julie
share their memories and fears in a vertiginous verbal exchange (For a
long time we talked about ourselves [McEwan 2006: 134]) which stands
out against the rest of the predominantly flat narrative. In this context,
nakedness reveals itself to be a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence [. . .] it is a state of communication revealing a quest for
a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self (Bataille
2001: 18).
Within McEwans version of eroticism incest is offered up as a disquieting antidote to the acute levels of physical, emotional and psychological isolation which characterizes this desolate, familial tale. Whilst
the moral implications of this are potentially troubling for the reader,
it is important to note that McEwan is not imagining transgression as
a merely subversive act. Rather, he presents transgression and taboo
as inherent components of one another: transgression does not deny
the taboo but transcends and completes it (Bataille 2001: 62). In other
words, transgression ensures the effectiveness of taboo by demonstrating an awareness of the law of sexual prohibition. In The Cement Garden,
this formulation translates into a dissident narrative that risks breaching the incest taboo in order to prevent stagnation and, at the same time,
to maintain stability. The intrusive sound of two or three cars pulling
up outside, the slam of doors and the hurried footsteps of several people
coming up [the] front path (McEwan 2006: 138) which breaks the childrens dream-like existence suggests that a sense of moral and social
order will be reinserted into the narrative. This is not to say that the
ascendancy of interdiction at the end of The Cement Garden should be
read in dialectical or sublimatory terms. Instead, the text demands to be
read in dynamic and desublimatory terms or, as Bataille puts it, when
a negative emotion has the upper hand we must obey the taboo. When a
positive emotion is in the ascendent we violate it (Bataille 2001: 64). This
vertiginous process of reading is borne out in the readers final ambivalent response which, oscillating between relief and frustration, dares
to imagine the creative and critical implications of the children falling
back asleep and tumbling once more into the domain of eroticism.

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CHAPTER TWO

Profoundly dislocating and

infinite in possibility: Ian McEwans
Screenwriting
M. HUNTER HAYES AND SEBASTIAN GROES

Chapter Summary: A considerable proportion of McEwans creative energy, above all in his early years, was channelled into original
screenplays and adaptations. Yet it has become commonplace to view
McEwans screenwriting as a process of apprenticeship or as an excuse
for collaboration. In contrast, this chapter explores the dialogic relationship between the tele- and screenplays and the prose fiction. It analyses
the postmodernism practised by McEwan in the seventies, considers the
hinge provided by The Imitation Game (1981) within the wider oeuvre,
and argues for the recognition of a powerful triptych directed against
Thatcher and Thatcherism: The Ploughmans Lunch (1983), Soursweet (1988)
and The Good Son (1993).

Introduction: Moving Abroad

In the foreword to A Move Abroad (1989), the volume containing his
libretto Or Shall We Die? and the screenplay for The Ploughmans Lunch,
McEwan compares writing in other genres or forms to visiting a foreign
country:
Choosing a new form in which to write bears some resemblance to travelling
abroad; the sense of freedom is no less useful for being illusory and temporary. The new place has its own rules and conventions, but they are not really
yours, not quite yet. What you first notice is the absence of the old, familiar
constraints, and you do things you would not do at home. (McEwan 1989: xxi)

Other nations have subtle and distinct cultural and social characteristics,
McEwan suggests, just as different forms or contexts for writing entail

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divergent rules of representation. By 1989, it was certainly the case that

McEwan had become established as one of the pre-eminent novelists
of his day, so the analogy between writing for the screen or stage and
a journey to a distant land seems apt. Yet it is also the case that during
the years of his emergence as a writer he was, as it were, a well-travelled
writer, working widely across a variety of genres, and he was particularly ambitious in terms of his writing for television and film. I thought
it would be a simple matter of sending it to the BBC and theyd send me
a cheque by return of post (Hamilton 1978: 15), he remarked sardonically of a television play written during his time as an undergraduate
at Sussex University. An adaptation of a Thomas Mann story, the work
joined several other early projects including a stage play, a radio play
and a novel, in never finding either publication or production, but the
anecdote is instructive. A considerable proportion of McEwans creative
energy, above all in his early years, was channelled into original screenplays and adaptations, ranging from short television projects such as
Jack Fleas Birthday Celebration (1976) to Hollywood productions such
as Joseph Rubens The Good Son (1993).
One way of approaching McEwans relationship with television and
film would be to note the readiness with which McEwans work has been
adapted for the screen Harold Pinter adapted The Comfort of Strangers
(1990), McEwan adapted his novel for John Schlesingers The Innocent
(1993), which McEwan called the only real dud (Edemariam 2008), Joe
Penhall rewrote Enduring Love (2004) for Roger Michell, and Christopher
Hampton received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Joe
Wrights Atonement (2007). Alternatively, one might argue that screen
projects were an expression of McEwans interest in the representation
of complex historical reality marked by his fierce attack on Thatcherism
in The Child in Time (1987), the attention to the politics of gender and
sexuality which saturates his fiction during the late 1970s and early
1980s, and his explorations of the Second World War in The Innocent
(1990), Black Dogs (1992), and ultimately Atonement (2001). One might also
suggest that formally and stylistically the attention to detail, above all
visual perspective and point of view, which is the hallmark of McEwans
writing, from the gruesome specificities of First Love, Last Rites (1975)
and The Cement Garden (1978) to the tour de force of the balloon scene
at the opening of Enduring Love (1997), and the elaborately constructed
episode by the fountain in Atonement (2001), suggests an imagination
schooled in the demands and conventions of visual media. All these
approaches view McEwans screenwriting as a process of apprenticeship, or as a writerly exercise, or even as an excuse for collaboration.
This approach regards the scripts always as something of a subsidiary
interest, which increasingly falls away as his reputation and income
as a novelist becomes secure. In the 1970s the novel form seemed in
many ways exhausted as a means to explore the kind of subversive
and disturbing themes which were his preoccupation (the breaking of

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conventions, codes and taboos, an attention to incest, sado-masochism,

rape, pornography and the murder of children); it is only with hindsight
that his work for other media appears marginal.
In this chapter, we will argue that McEwans writing for the screen
provided far more than the mere groundwork for his central concern,
the writing of novels. Although by the later 1980s it is already clear that
it is as a novelist that he will make his mark, McEwans fascination with
television and cinema is nonetheless longstanding and intense. In this
account, the early experimental work, which includes Jack Fleas and
Solid Geometry (1978), gives way eventually to the masterful antiThatcherite triptych described previously. We will explore how the teleand screenplays not only share the socio-political and cultural concerns
which characterize the novels and short stories, but, in the range of
generic and formal possibilities and challenges they present, they have
served to invigorate and even determine McEwans (re)turn to the novel
with The Child in Time in the mid-1980s.

McEwan the Postmodernist: Jack Fleas Birthday

Celebration and Solid Geometry
McEwans earliest published screenwriting produced two teleplays: Jack
Fleas Birthday Celebration (1974), and an adaptation of his own short
story, Solid Geometry (1978). Both these plays are archetypal contributions to what we now consider postmodernism in that these works
problematize history, address their own status as fiction via playful
metafictional commentary and self-reflexivity, decentre received conceptions of social categories (class, ethnicity and gender), and highlight
the ways in which power is embedded within writing and discourse.
Jack Fleas Birthday Celebration tells the story of David Lee, an infantile
young-looking twenty who lives with his lover, a 36-year-old teacher
called Ruth (McEwan 1981: 23), having run away from home. Davids
parents, both in their fifties, are attending his birthday party, at which
they meet Ruth for the first time. After hesitant, petit-bourgeois chit-chat,
wine is consumed in abundance, and David pretends to read a chapter
(called A Birthday Celebration) from his semi-autobiographical novel,
Jack Fleas Birthday Celebration. David makes it clear that the stifling, sinister attentions of his mother have driven him into the arms of an older
woman (Hermione, who clearly is Ruth), who makes Jack Flea into her
fantasy child (McEwan 1981: 38). However, when Mrs Lee snatches the
piece of paper from David, it is completely blank (McEwan 1981: 39),
creating the sense that David is making it up on the spot. Indeed, there is
a fundamental uncertainty about the extent to which the reader/viewer
must treat the narrative as a game: when David during dinner enacts
his role as the archetypal Oedipal child by offering food to his mother
and throwing a spoonful into his fathers face, RUTH smacks him and he

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drops the spoon. He starts to cry and nuzzles against RUTH. Imperceptibly his
crying and her comforting noises turn to laughter (McEwan 1981: 46). The
story swings back and forth between subverting conventional family
relationships, and being a mere fantasy thereof. When the mother and
Ruth fight for possession of David, Ruth clearly triumphs:
He doesnt let anyone else put him to bed. Only me [. . .] Hes my little boy
now. Im his Mummy now. I play with him for hours, I take him for walks, I
give him his tea, I change him, I tuck him up at night. Sometimes he comes
and curls up in my lap and closes his eyes and I feed him milk (MRS LEE
gasps) [. . .] from a babys bottle [. . .] yes, my little Jack Flea sucks and remembers hes only a tiny little boy, my little boy. (McEwan 1981: 46)

Although this appears to be a teasing, drunken fantasy, at the end of the

play Ruth does tuck up David, after his parents have left; he is lying in
a large cot (McEwan 1981: 49). This final twist locates Jack Flea in the
context of the early, dark stories, as McEwans own later reflections on
the piece suggest:
[I] felt familiar with televisions grammar, with its conventions and how
they might be broken. [. . .] [I] was attracted by its scale, its intimacy. The
possibilities and limitations presented by the thirty, fifty, or even seventyfive minute television play seemed very close in some ways to those presented by the short story: the need for highly selective detail and for the
rapid establishment of people and situations, the possibility of chasing one
or two ideas to logical, or even illogical, conclusions, the dangers of becoming merely anecdotal. (McEwan 1981: 9)

The close relationship between short fiction and teleplay is immediately

apparent. Short stories are conventionally determined by temporal and
spatial singularity, and have relatively flat characters and a clear building of narrative tension towards either a final closure, or a disconcerting
twist.
However, Jack Flea also contains moves away, in significant ways,
from both the recurrent patterns and the concerns of McEwans stories,
and from what one might expect from television as a medium, namely,
relatively short and realistic programmes with domestic topics and a
production value rooted in pragmatism, aimed at a wide, general audience. The teleplay contains two distinct but opposing visual discourses;
McEwan argued that his objective had been to take a television clich
a kind of family reunion, a dinner party and to transform it by degrees
and by logical extension to a point where fantasy had become reality
(McEwan 1981: 11). Social-realism in the manner of directors such as
Ken Loach and Tony Garnett is yoked together with the techniques
of self-conscious, self-reflexive or absurd drama more readily associated with Bertolt Brechts alienating epic theatre (with its distinctive

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undermining of realist convention and challenges to naturalist expectations), or Samuel Beckett. Indeed, Jack Flea contains several allusions
to Becketts work. Mr and Mrs Lee (Yesterday? Yesterday? [. . .] What a
memory [McEwan 1981: 31]) are reminiscent of Nag and Nell in Endgame
(1957). There is an overt reference to Malone Dies (1951) in the presence of
a certain Mrs Malone (McEwan 1981: 44).
The teleplays opening makes a bravura use of mirrors as a device
for moving between the storys two locations: Mr and Mrs Lees bedroom and Davids bedroom. The mirror above Mrs Lees dressing-table
reflects both her husband and the sheet of paper displaying the title of
Davids novel, an autobiographical novel which offers a metafictional
commentary on the story we are watching. The title refers at once to
Davids novel-in-progress and to the teleplay itself, further disrupting
any easy division between fiction and reality and thwarting the audiences capacity to suspend disbelief.
In this respect, the teleplay differs significantly from the short stories
of the same period, even while approaching similar themes. The latter
contain surrealist elements, but they are written predominantly within
the bounds of realistic representation, in naturalistic language, and take
place in specific geographical locations (Londons Soho and Finsbury
Park; the River Ouse in East Anglia). This appearance of quotidian normality and domesticity serves to heighten the impact of the child rape,
incest and castration which the narratives describe. The realism of the
teleplay is subverted from the outset, which is also evident in the disparate collection of street names mentioned by Ruth: Outside here I
cross the road and go down Bluebell Lane, and then I turn right into
Kabul Avenue till I come to the roundabout, straight over and down
Rawalpindi Road, past the Lamb and Flag and into Khyber Pass Road
(McEwan 1981: 29). The names actually refer to places McEwan visited
after completing his Masters degree, but it is evident that he exploits
televisions inherently naturalistic aesthetic both to challenge its conventions and to defamiliarize the habitual viewing experience and expectation; in short, to kick over the traces (McEwan 1981: 10).
The complex relation between teleplay and short story in McEwans
early career is thrown into particular relief by examining his adaptation of his own short story Solid Geometry (1975). The tale is unique in
McEwans early phase for its concern for the status of an earlier, historical narrative. It is concerned with the failing relationship, in the present
day, between Albert and Maisie, and the issues in sexual and gender
politics this involves; it is also a mystery story, a gothic reworking of the
Faustus story concerning the hubristic ambition of nineteenth-century
scientists, an aspect of the tale which also questions the underlying gender politics of scientific knowledge. Albert is editing the diary of his
great-grandfather, a Victorian amateur scientist, with a view to solving the mystery of the disappearance of his (the great-grandfathers)
close friend and collaborator Maxwell, and, before him, of an obscure

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young mathematician from the University of Edinburgh, David

Hunter (McEwan 1981: 75). The disappearances seem to be connected
to an obscure series of calculations relating to the possibility (logically
impossible) of the plane without a surface (McEwan 1981: 78), the discovery of which would invalidate everything fundamental to our science of solid geometry (McEwan 1981: 75). As he becomes increasingly
obsessed with his eccentric ancestor, Albert neglects Maisie, behaviour
which prefigures the pathological rationality of Joe Rose in Enduring
Love (1997). In the penultimate scene he re-enacts the convoluted set of
actions delineated in his great-grandfathers diary, and Maisie herself
disappears. The final scene, which resolves the mystery of Maxwells
disappearance, returns us to the Victorian sages study, in which the
bemused great-grandfather simply sways slightly before the empty settee (McEwan 1981: 93). Central to the narrative is a jar that contains a
penis acquired by Alberts great-grandfather at an auction an ambivalent metaphor for power relationships between the sexes. The phallus
stands both for Alberts admiration of masculinity and the dominance
of male scientific discourse, but also for female power and the processes of castration and emasculation, which McEwan also explored in
the story Pornography (1978). Ironically, given McEwans reputation at
this time, his exploration was seen as introducing additional grotesque
and bizarre sexual elements in the play (McEwan, 1981: 14), presumably
the discussion of the position of the clitoris, which love-making positions give the best orgasm, onanism and menstruation, which ultimately resulted in the BBC calling a halt to production. Twenty-five years
later the story was filmed by Denis Lawson, starring Ewan McGregor
and Ruth Miller, and the film premiered at the Edinburgh International
Film Festival in 2002.
McEwans changes to the story during the process of adaptation are
subtle but revealing, and reinforce its underlying themes. First, there is
a shift from the first-person, subjective narration by Albert to the objectification, or third-person narration, that comes with the cameras point
of view. Whereas the reader of the story, to an extent tricked into, perhaps naively, identifying with the narrator, is forced to make decisions
about the ways in which Albert controls his story and the reader (and
about how the great-grandfathers diaries in turn control Albert), the
television audience is given a different but equally problematic position.
Although the viewer stands outside the narrative, which would allow
for a more independent position, the passivity associated with television as a hot medium (in that it uses both sound and vision), on the
contrary, would perhaps lead to a more inactive role, which is precisely
what McEwan is attempting to challenge. Second, there is a clear shift
from Alberts diegetic narrative (his narration of the historical actions)
to the plays mimesis (it directly shows the actions) within the opening
scene: whereas Albert narrates the great-grandfathers acquisition of the
penis, the teleplay shows this, thus giving an urgency and immediacy

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to the event. Although the short story is unspecific about the details of
the auction, the teleplay shows the great-grandfather entering a frenzied bidding war that not only suggests his own eccentricity, but also
adumbrates Alberts own psychotic behaviour, thus linking the two
men. However, whereas the story notes that the great-grandfather was
keen on also purchasing Lady Barrymores private parts (McEwan 1976:
25), the teleplay shows Alberts relative being ushered away by Maxwell
while protesting.
This shift from diegesis to mimesis heightens the sense of realism,
which is then subtly undercut and problematized within the teleplay.
The scene depicting mathematicians at a convention in Vienna in the
late nineteenth century, for instance, ends with Maisie interrupting
Albert, who is reading the diary account of the convention. When she
knocks on Alberts door to bring him some tea, all the mathematicians,
HUNTER included, drop their guise and become interrupted actors. They
turn towards the door (McEwan 1981: 79). Although it appears that the
present intrudes upon the past, the viewer actively engaged in the story
should here assume that it is Alberts reading of the diary that is interrupted. Whereas in the story the great-grandfathers diary is a story
buried within McEwans text, the teleplay self-consciously emphasizes
that it is the diary that acts as the bridge between the historical period
and the contemporary narrative: The same diary. A different table, one
hundred years later (McEwan 1981: 57). McEwan further foregrounds
the diary as a connection between two worlds by giving directions
such as the following: Through the medium of the diary we are back in
ALBERTs study (McEwan 1981: 76). Both the short story and teleplay
thus argue, in a typical postmodern fashion, the principle that the past
is a discursive construct only accessible through the great-grandfathers
writing, which is interpreted subjectively by Albert. In both versions,
then, Alberts editing of his great-grandfathers manuscripts is a way
of recuperating an apocryphal narrative ignored by the mathematicians whose knowledge and scientific materialism is questioned:
when Hunter disappears, The mathematicians are stunned. [. . .] Uproar
(McEwan 1981: 834).
However, whereas the relationship between writing and reading as
a creative and imaginative act is implicit within the short story, the teleplay portrays the writer-reader relationship as fantastic and magical.
McEwans teleplay is much clearer about the parallel between, on the
one hand, writing and reading as imaginative acts of creation and, on
the other hand, the plane without surface theory as an imaginative
form of the de-creative. Yet the visualization of the disappearance of
Hunter, Maxwell and, finally, Maisie defies the rules of the screen: He
lies on the couch and with GOODMANs help puts his body through a series
of contortions. These must seem improbable use tight close-ups and other
peoples legs! (McEwan 1981: 83) Similarly, the transition from the present to the past, set up with a special effect rendered by The page glows

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whiter . . . (McEwan 1981: 60), suggests McEwan at one and the same
time exploits televisions technical possibilities and overcomes the problem of the improbable: televisions dazzling electronic techniques were
on hand [. . .] in moving us from one time level to another through the
medium of the glowing page of the diary (McEwan 1981: 13).
The levels of the improbable are foregrounded also by the important
rewriting of the original storys ending, which alters the narrative structurally, but obscures its historical concerns. In the short story Maisie is
folded into the plane without a surface by Albert, but the play ends
with Maxwells disappearance in the great-grandfathers study. This
intervention perfects the structural symmetry between the relationships of, on the one hand, Albert and Maisie and, on the other, the greatgrandfather and Maxwell, but it also stresses the historical continuities
between the great-grandfather and Albert, and Maxwell and Maisie,
as characters. Thus, again McEwan uses the mirror as a metafictional
device that flaunts the artifice of the structural neatness, simultaneously
exposing the anti-mimetic nature of the representation. McEwans adaptation is useful, then, for offering him the opportunity to emulate his
own material, while it also confronts him with the question of how to
address and structure historical reality in relationship to the present
a question he was to explore in a more directly political context in the
early eighties.

McEwans Historical Turn: The Imitation Game

Towards the end of the seventies, McEwan refocused his ambitions by
writing a full-length television film, The Imitation Game (1981). This play
forms an important hinge in McEwans wider oeuvre, because it allowed
him to break away from both the solipsistic protagonists and narrow
subject matter, and the temptation towards experimentation, that were
part of the early writing. McEwan also exploited the possibilities offered
by the feature film, the more intricate plotting and development of characters, in order to break out of his engagement solely with the private,
domestic sphere and to refocus on historical subject matter and public
concerns, and he later acknowledged that this was the novel [he] had
wanted to write (McEwan 1981: 20).
McEwans ingenious transplantation of a contemporary issue the
possibility of womens emancipation into a past setting complicates
the topical narrative of feminism, suggesting that the emergence of new
aspirations and hopes which attended what has been called first wave
feminism, in fact involved contradiction and even regression in the
specific historical context of the war. In his introduction to the teleplay
McEwan argued: The Womens Movement had presented ways of looking at the world, both its present and its past, that were at once profoundly dislocating and infinite in possibility (McEwan 1981: 16).

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The play opens in the summer of 1940, in the modest, suburban house
of the Raines, on the edge of a small southern town (McEwan 1981: 99), amid
widespread unease about the possibility of a German invasion, a public
discontent that forms an allegory for the personal aspirations of the protagonist, the piano player Cathy Raine. She abandons a job in a munitions factory [m]aking shells and bombs (McEwan 1981: 101) in order to
join the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), which, despite its promise of
gender equality during wartime service, entails only an illusive appeasement of the women who threaten to invade the ranks and privileges of
male soldiers. Although Cathy imagines herself as our special operator
behind enemy lines (McEwan 1981: 129), she never makes it beyond her
role as wire operator writing down Morse codes for her male colleagues
to decipher. After a scrap with a publican, who assumes she is a prostitute
using his public house to pick up clients, Cathy ends up doing general
duties at Bletchley Park, the centre of Allied code breaking operations
symbolic of male-dominated knowledge and power. Cathys attempt to
enter this male bastion, and to obtain access to knowledge, is thwarted
after a sexual encounter with a young code breaker, John Turner, who
might have been able to assist her in this objective, leads to her incarceration. The war, which has often subsequently been represented as a
period of womens emancipation, and which at the time seemed to offer
so much liberatory potential for women, in this case effectively perpetuates, and even exacerbates, the opposition between the sexes.
Cathy is frustrated by the lack of opportunity to use her talents and
intelligence for an active rather than a support role. Women must remain
passive, she says later, because it creates the illusion that invests wars
with their moral justification: The men want the women to stay out of
the fighting so they can give it meaning. As long as were on the outside
and give our support and dont kill, women make the war possible [. . .]
something the men can feel tough about (McEwan 1981: 174). Through
the plays conceptual pairing of conflict in gender-based social spheres
and a martial war the eponymous imitation game analogous to the
one that Turner describes, which involves a triangulated relationship of
strategic deception and assistance between men and women (McEwan
1981: 153) McEwan dramatizes the incongruity between men, who are
able to project and live out their fantasy within reality, and women, who
find a great divide between their reality and their imagination.
This conflict reaches a crisis precisely at the moment when Cathy
attempts to gain sexual knowledge. Instead of remaining passive
after agreeing to Turners clumsy proposal of sexual intercourse that
will lead to her defloration, Cathy becomes the aggressor. For Turner,
her actions appear inconsistent with his image of her as a virgin, a
fact that owes as much to his own virginity as to his perception of
sexual stereotypes, and this breach of the sexual order leads to an
embarrassing moment of impotence. The inversion of the gendered
innocence-experience dynamic between men and women resurfaces

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in The Innocent, while the disastrous consequences of an unsuccessful

deflowering adumbrates the wedding night of Florence and Edward in
On Chesil Beach (2007).
However, here McEwan, for the first time in his career, gives his
material a complex historical dimension. He engaged in extensive historical research into Alan Turing and Bletchley Park. The title of the
play is derived from Turings experiment on artificial intelligence, the
eponymous imitation game, which, as Dominic Head notes, is underpinned by a preconceived expectation of gender traits [and] clearly a
metaphor for the imposition of set gender roles (Head 2007: 55). Yet the
title also indicates that McEwans screenwriting again draws attention
to the artifice of its composition by means of metafictional commentary. McEwan thus declares Aristotles classic concept of imitation as
part of the construction of realism to be merely a game, and, as imitatio
is enshrined in Western rhetorical traditions, he undercuts the play with
an anti-realistic subtext. Indeed, the title points to McEwans interest in
natural history, and in particular to a book that McEwan has acknowledged he admires, which had a tremendous impact upon public debates
in the late seventies, namely, Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976).
Dawkins argues that human behaviour can be explained as an interplay
between ruthless selfishness and calculating altruism, driven by our
genetically programmed need to disseminate our genes. We hear echoes of Dawkins, for instance, in a shocking speech when an ATS officer
states to soldiers:
Women will always reciprocate once their trust is given. It is a natural instinct
with them to live up to what someone whom they like thinks of them. It
should be remembered that rumour plays a bigger part with women than
with men. Their capacity for magnifying and altering any rumour which
reaches them is incredible [. . .] Tears are natural with some women, and are
frequently genuine [. . .] The worst type is the woman who can turn tears
on and off, according to the effect gained. With these an attitude of slightly
amused detachment will work best, as it gets under their self-esteem. But do
not let them get away with it because they cry. Women have a fairly good
instinct for justice and respect it, even at their own expense. (McEwan 1981:
1245)

Building upon Dawkins assertion that ideas propagate themselves

by imitation through imitative units which Dawkins terms memes
(Hutcheon 2006: 176), one of the key theorists of the postmodern condition in an Anglo-American context, Linda Hutcheon, explains this idea
in relationship to textual imitation and transmission:
Memes are not high-fidelity replicators: they change with time, for meme
transmission is subject to constant mutation. Stories too propagate themselves
when they catch on; adaptations as both repetition and variation are

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their form of replication. Evolving by cultural selection, traveling stories

adapt to local cultures, just as populations of organisms adapt to local environments. (Hutcheon 2006: 177)

Whereas Cathy seeks to alter her environment so that it can accommodate her desires, her true challenge, according to Dawkins, is to adapt
her desires to the context. After Cathy is locked up in her cell, she begins
to read the score of her favourite piano piece, Mozarts Fantasia, K475:
We watch CATHY from a jailors point of view through the barred window of
her cell. She reads the score. The music plays (McEwan 1981: 175). We leave
Cathy forced to retreat into the realm of the imaginary, literally and figuratively imprisoned and excluded from reality.

The Anti-Thatcherite Triptych: The Ploughmans Lunch,

The Good Son and Sour Sweet
After The Imitation Game, McEwan begins to politicize the relationship between the present and the past by producing a series of works
that could be considered a triptych directed against Thatcher and
Thatcherism. The title of the first work, The Ploughmans Lunch, refers
to a grand historical deception: the invention by advertisers of the cold
meal comprising a piece of (local) cheese, pickle, bread and butter, as a
reminder of an authentic pastoral English heritage. This [t]raditional
English fare (McEwan 1989: 106) forms a controlling metaphor for selfserving fabrications of the past (McEwan 1989: 26). The film is set during the Falklands War a detail incorporated during the production
process to root the film into its period. Another sign of the filmmakers
engagement with the contemporary and the mixing of fact with fiction
occurred when the crew illegally shot scenes during the actual Tory
Party conference in Brighton. McEwan remembers:
[W]e sneaked in under the auspices of another organization. [. . .] I was
amazed how easily we could insinuate our actors. Jonathan Pryce was very
bold in walking under the platform where Michael Heseltine was speaking
(no one recognised him as an actor), and doing it about six or seven times,
since we had to do several takes. (Haffenden 1985: 185)

Whether McEwans actor refers to Jonathan Pryces Penfield or to

Heseltine is not clear, but the directness and urgency of the films portrayal of the cultural and socio-political climate in the early eighties is
striking.
The play narrated the story of a BBC journalist, James Penfield,
who is writing a revisionist account of the 1956 Suez crisis, a debacle
commonly regarded as the moment when the end of Empire, already
begun with the loss of overseas dominions at the end of the war, and

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the decolonization of India, became vividly apparent. Penfield does not

uncover historical facts but engenders facts which accord with his own
yuppie ambitions by expunging from the historical record all the moralising and talk of national humiliation that is now the standard line
on Suez (McEwan 1989: 5). The film appropriates Suez as a means of
criticizing the Thatcherite ideology of greed, materialism and individuality, with its concomitant but vacuous revival of moral values, another
example of a fabricated tradition.
Penfields falsification of the historical record diminishes him ethically, and the flaws in his revision of the Suez crisis serve also to expose
the moral and ideological failings of a contemporary justification of the
Falklands War. His lack of fidelity to history is reproduced in his personal life. In a move away from the Oedipal psychology that characterized the early work, Penfield neglects his dying mother in order to
pursue an ambitious young woman, the successful television researcher
Susan Barrington. Nonetheless, the film does not simply represent
Penfield as a lone egotist or as a foil for other characters goodness, as
such a schematic account might suggest, but positions him as no better
or worse than a whole cast of corrupt characters. Barrington herself has
little moral or political scruple when it comes to the position of other
working women. During a dispute about womens rights in the workplace, Barrington votes against her female colleagues:
[I]n many ways Im right behind the womens movement. But sometimes I
wish theyd get on with it instead on moaning on [. . .]. [As] a human being
and a television researcher, as a professional, I could just sense theyd got it all
wrong. I could see there were two paths I could go down, power and notpower. Down the no-power path was lots of sisterly feeling, masochism and
frustration. Down the other path, I could keep working. So of course I voted
with the men and the other women all resigned. I think theyre mad, dont
you? (McEwan 1989: 41)

Barringtons speech, which reinforces the stereotype of women as mad,

cleverly ends in a pernicious rhetorical question which prevents James
from answering. This undercutting of male power by silencing the man
is paradoxically reinforced by her siding with men and rationality:
Barringtons speech emasculates whilst ironically denying any grounds
of solidarity with her female colleagues.
Barringtons refusal to sleep with Penfield drives him, however, into
the arms of her mother, the famous historian Ann Barrington, who had
years before abandoned a book on Suez. Ann is one of a number of
characters, including anti-war protesters at an airbase in Norfolk, who
have not wholly surrendered their idealism in favour of Penfield and
Susan Barringtons greed and individualism. In 1985, McEwan said of
the character: I do still see Ann Barrington as a sympathetic character, one based loosely in her ideas around E. P. Thompson, but with the

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great difference that E. P. Thompson has in fact moved in the opposite

direction, from theory to practice (Haffenden 1985: 1889). Indeed, Ann
emphasizes the value of cultural memory and a deep historical awareness within all citizens:
If we leave the remembering to the historians then the struggle is already
lost. Everyone must have a memory, everyone needs to be a historian. In this
country, for example, were in danger of losing hard-won freedoms by dozing off in a perpetual present. (McEwan 1989: 47)

While Anns distrust of historians as curators of cultural memory

reminds us that the past affects everyone, her idealism is also curiously complicit with the manipulative actions of the other characters,
including Penfield and his aptly named publisher (and prefiguration of
Charles Darke in The Child in Time), Gold. Her analysis of Thatcherism
as symbolic of a post-historical condition, a perpetual present, is itself
flawed because the present is in fact harder to find or capture through
increased acceleration, and her longing to rewrite history to shift the
emphasis and alignment of perspective mirrors Penfields own actions.
However, Susans authority as a moral beacon in the film is undercut in
other ways: not only does she admit that her position as a research professor is motivated by the desire for bourgeois comfort, but her seduction of Penfield is itself driven perversely by his resemblance to her dead
brother (McEwan 1989: 1012).
Rather than asking viewers to identify with these characters, McEwan
seems to be provoking us into a wholesale rejection of Thatcherite ideology, and he represents Thatcherite Britain as a culture deprived of any
redeeming qualities. On the one hand, the representation of yuppie types
such as Penfield, Hancock and Barrington satirizes their modes of strategic partnership, and exposes the danger involved in their manipulation
of history. On the other hand, Ann Barringtons belief that an objective
history is nonetheless retrievable is undermined by McEwans ambivalent representation of her character. The Ploughmans Lunch insists that,
although history needs to be recovered and rewritten constantly to take
account of our changing times and perspectives on the past, and although
that it is every citizens duty to remember, these actual acts of retrieval
and narrative are always fraught with difficulties and uncertainties. In the
penultimate scene Gold proposes a toast to Penfields successful book:
GOLD

Its everything we wanted. A very good read. A terrific piece of

work. So, heres to you and Suez.
JAMES And to history. (McEwan 1989: 118)

Under Thatcher, history, memory and time have become commodities

that can be packaged, manipulated, and shaped for financial gain, which
is reinforced by the final scene, when we find Penfield at the funeral

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of his mother. While his father is immobile with grief, James remains
expressionless as he glances at his watch (McEwan 1989: 118). This grotesque ending suggests the dehumanizing effects of Thatcherism upon
the social fabric, its corrosive impact on traditional family structures,
on social and sexual relationships, but it also brings to the fore a fundamental change in our experience of the world through the death of
social connectedness, and the commodification of time, which is now at
the mercy of free-market forces.
Mourning also lies at the heart of The Good Son, completed by McEwan
in 1987, which continues with the political tone of The Ploughmans Lunch,
albeit in a less satirical mode. The film tells the story of an only son,
Mark Evans, who, following the loss of his mother to cancer, stays with
his cousins family. This family is coping with a loss of their own, the
death of the eldest son in mysterious circumstances. The aunt/mother,
Susan Evans, in particular, is inconsolable. Marks cousin, Henry Evans,
soon involves Mark in a series of increasingly dangerous, and ultimately deadly, games, which include threatening to shoot a dog, throwing a life-size doll on to a busy road, and Henrys accidental attempted
murder of his sister, Connie, by making her skate on thin ice. These
events lead to a solution to the mystery of the boys death.
McEwans screenplay provides a characteristically gothic critique
of the forms of masculinity and materialism which dominate middleclass family life in Reagans free-market America. Not only does Marks
father desert his son during the mourning process to close a deal in
Tokyo, but Henrys father, Wallace, urges his wife to give up her dead
sons bedroom, which she has turned into a museum, and to get on
with life in order to project a comfortable image of the family to smalltown America, the locale in which the film is set.
Henrys lust for torture and killing also forms a dark parallel to
the domineering and aggressive, deregulated capitalism of the 1980s,
whilst also reflecting the preoccupation with serial killers in literature
and films of the 1990s including Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho
(1991) and Jonathan Demmes Silence of the Lambs (1991). McEwans script
also anticipates the transgression of another taboo, namely the recent
phenomenon of the killing of children by children, such as the murder of the Merseyside toddler, James Bulger, in 1993; the massacres at
American high schools such as Columbine (1999); and the shooting of
11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool (2007).
The Good Son was critically unsuccessful for a variety of reasons.
The piece was rewritten to suit the commercial requirements of its
Hollywood producers, which banalized the films thematics. McEwan
withdrew from the project because of the predominant influence of
Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin and his family, whose demands distorted McEwans original objectives, trivializing his complex investigation of evil by appropriating the film as a vehicle for redirecting Culkins
stereotype as the goofy innocent to a darker character. The films most

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significant difficulty, however, lay in the way the complex and challenging renegotiation of the classic Oedipal scenario in McEwans original
script was destroyed by the realistic aesthetic of the movie, and the
absence of a knowingness demanded by the intricate narrative. The
disruption of the stable Oedipal triangle (see Claire Colebrooks analysis of The Innocent in the next chapter, pp. 4356) caused by the death
of Marks mother is restored by finding a substitute mother figure in
his aunt. The Good Son thus continues the psychological paradigm of
Jack Flea and The Ploughmans Lunch, in which the protagonists also
exchange their mothers for alternative maternal figures. This in turn
destroys the Oedipal relationships within Henrys family, and opens
up the possibility of rescuing the movie from the simplistic reading of
Henry and Mark as archetypal Oedipal children fighting for the sole
claim over their mother (figure): the film in fact goes beyond this logic
to express ideas about innocence and experience, justice and punishment that precede familial relationship. Indeed, at the climax of the
film, which mocks the Hollywood cliffhanger clich by presenting it
in a bizarre context, the mother is confronted with the counterintuitive
choice between acknowledging Henrys crimes and saving him. She
chooses the good son, and does so against an Oedipal psychology that
blinds us to potential harmful elements and dark issues within the family, society, and history, and which must be destroyed.
Soursweet (1988) returns us to McEwans comparison between writing
in a different form and moving to a different country. McEwans adaptation of Timothy Mos original novel, Sour Sweet (1982), occupies a distinctive place within McEwans oeuvre as his only extended engagement
with the problems of ethnic identity. Mos original novel narrates the
story of a Chinese family, the Chens, who in the 1960s emigrate to northwest Londons Burnt Oak, where they open a Chinese takeaway restaurant. They soon run into trouble with another family, the Chinese mafia,
the Triads, who control Chinatown through extortion and physical brutality, with an ultimately tragic outcome for the Chens.
Despite portraying himself as the hooligan builder who aggressively converts Mos novel, a splendid mid-nineteenth century mansion, into a roofless shack (McEwan 1988: v), McEwan remains faithful
to the spirit of Mos novel and its realistic mode. There are some minor
but significant changes, however, that draw attention to McEwans acuity as a screenwriter. McEwan contracts the two words of the original
title, which foregrounds both the novel and the film as a tragic-comedy,
re-emphasizing the familiar theme of food as a culturally specific way
of assimilation: while the protagonists Chen and Lily open a Chinese
takeaway and show no interest in the British society around them, her
sister, Mui, is pregnant with an illegitimate child by a British man, and,
at the end of the novel, opens a fish and chip shop. Soursweet is concerned, then, with the problems of socio-cultural integration and adaptation that Asian immigrants undergo in post-war Britain.

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Family is another important topos within Soursweet, and it presents a

problem that McEwan has frequently explored in his own work. Rather
than focusing on the three generations of the Chen family living under
one roof in relationship to the Chinatown community and its underworld, McEwans script foregrounds the relationship between Lily and
Chen as the vehicle for narrating the story. This alteration is established by McEwans incorporation of a sequence that depicts the Chens
wedding at the films opening, a watershed moment when the couple
change their social roles, but also move abroad and become geographically divorced from their wider family circle and culture. Yet, due to the
structural symmetry that exists in the novel between, on the one hand,
the Chen family and, on the other hand, the Triad family, McEwans
focus on Lily and Chen forces him to reduce the role of the Chinese
gang, by focusing on the actions of individual gang members such as
Jackie Fung, Red Cudgel and Night Brother. One further effect of this
opening sequence is a heightened sense of the characters origins, which
in turn clarifies the narratives trajectory.
McEwan also set the film in the contemporary period. This temporal
change is made clear at the outset, when Chen announces they have been
granted permission to move to the United Kingdom: The Secretary of
State, in exercise of the powers conferred by the British Nationality Act
1981, hereby grants this certificate of naturalization to the person named
below who shall be a British Citizen from the date of this certificate
(McEwan 1988: 5). One of the issues McEwans screenplay highlights,
then, is the discrepancy between the official and the unofficial, gradual
and sometimes unsuccessful inscription of the immigrant into Western
culture via their economic and cultural assimilation, which involves the
entire trajectory of the film. The narrative about opening a takeaway
thus inadvertently becomes a part of a tragi-comic, and critical, investigation of how a family from an ethnic minority group famous for its
entrepreneurial spirit inscribes itself into modernity, but also of how, in
Chens case, this may have destructive consequences. Similar issues are
foregrounded by, for instance, Hanif Kureishis screenplay for Stephen
Frearss My Beautiful Launderette (1985), and McEwans screenplay should,
together with The Ploughmans Lunch and The Good Son, be considered
as marking a specific moment within Britains wider cultural examinations and criticism of Thatchers Britain and Reagans America.
In conclusion, his screenwriting has been of great importance to the
development of McEwan as writer. The playful, postmodern work for
television in the seventies allowed him to redirect his creative energies
at a point in time when the possibilities of fiction seemed exhausted.
The screenwriting in the early eighties formed a catalyst within McEwans
trajectory towards the later work, with its interest in history, and its
continuous aptitude in exploring forms of realism. This change takes
place not only in screenwriting but also because of screenwriting. In
his Foreword to Soursweet McEwan stated that a novelist may play

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God with imaginary characters and situation. The screen writer has
the chance to play God with the real world (McEwan 1988: vi). It seems,
however, that his experimentation within, and mastery of, screenwriting, and his subsequent discovery of its limits, expedited a fruitful
return to the possibilities offered by fiction as both a freedom of expression, and an expression of freedom.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Innocent as Anti-Oedipal

Critique of Cultural Pornography
CLAIRE COLEBROOK

The lost child was everyones property.

Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (1987)

Chapter Summary: This chapter explores the meanings of childhood in

The Innocent (1990) by looking at the ways in which the problem of innocence understood as a collective fantasy informs McEwans work. The
Innocents images of childhood are read in the light of critical theories of
cultural pornography and anti-Freudian psychoanalysis. McEwans fiction argues that as long as we see adult life as suffering from the loss of
an original innocence, we will also always imagine politics as a relation
to a master or authority. McEwan also presents the work of art as the
consequence of a drive for an organic totality that is childish in its desire
for godlike control, and which therefore prevents rather than offers
self-knowledge. Therefore, McEwan is not a conservative or reactionary author. His anti-Oedipal narratives are a diagnosis of conservatism,
which McEwan subverts by historicizing and politicizing the image of
the child. In doing so, he deconstructs oppositions between adult and
child, between knowing and not-knowing, and between science and art,
by foregrounding the relationship between subjectivity, subjection and
the cultural pornography of the child.

Cultural Pornography: an Introduction to

the Geography of Childhood
Although much of McEwans work is concerned with innocence, The
Child in Time (1987) and The Innocent (1989) are explicitly about what it
means to be a child and what it means to lose one. The latter novel offers
a profound critique of what could be called the cultural pornography of
the child, an idea earlier explored through the prism of Surrealism in

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Chapter One (see pp. 1523). I will argue that The Innocent prefigures in
intensified form a collective fantasy that we have witnessed in the British
media over the past decade: the images of missing or murdered children, often displayed alongside images of grieving parents or suspected
perpetrators. In the case of Madeleine McCann (2007), for example, the
media offered viewers posters that could be downloaded and placed
in positions of prominence. Posters were displayed in areas as unlikely
as rural Scotland and suburban Melbourne, as though it were possible
through repetition and display of solidarity to create a form of vigilance after the event that might have prevented the initial trauma.
Such images effect a multiple investment in childhood as at once perfectly innocent a world unto itself of unreflective joy, rendered poignantly in the photographs of abducted children whose gaze (prior to their
loss) can bear no intimation of their now tragic disappearance and
horrifically fragile. There is a simple temporality at work in the intense
display in the media of the lost child: the repeated, circulated, downloaded images are rendered ceremonial and funereal through practices
of mourning and experienced as final, frozen and spectral presenting a paradoxical mode of life as at once fully open and yet tragically
unfulfilled. The collective viewing of these images of missing children
becomes a form of working through: following an irreparable loss, the
repetition of a mourned absence allows for an eventual recognition, if
not restoration, of the damage done to the psyche.
Cultural, or social, pornography is distinctly different from child pornography, which purveys erotic images of children for private, secret and
devalued enjoyment. The term cultural pornography describes the ways
in which a certain image, fantasy and structure of the child frames our
experience of time, history, cultural difference, violence and normativity.
Cultural pornography of the child is a public obsession with figures of
infant innocence that is also permanently threatened by the intrusion of
an adult world of suspicion. Jennifer Wicke defines social pornography
as the public and legitimized circulation of pornographic images that
has become increasingly intense in a putative and moralizing opposition to the threat of pornography. She already gestures to the way in
which the anxiety surrounding the sexualization of children, and the
adults relation to that sexuality, has allowed an increase in the dissemination of images of vulnerable, threatened and abused children:
Social pornography is the best phrase [. . .] for the substitutive collective
pornographies our culture produces; social pornography is the name for the
pornographic fantasies the society collectively engenders and then massculturally disseminates, usually in the cause of anti-pornography. The past
decades fascination with explicit and imaginary child sexual abuse is the
best example, although there are many others, not the least of which is the
public discussion of pornography, which allows for pornographic enactment in the most explicit if mediated forms. (Wicke 1991: 54)

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Wickes work is directed against an academic and high-brow moral

critique of the passive consumption of reifying images because the
intensity of cultural pornography, as a mode different from the conventional meaning of pornography, is intrinsically tied to its publicity and moral rectitude. Far from being a form of therapy that would
repair a wound in our collective psyche, we at one and the same time
enjoy the image of the innocent, unselfconscious and temporally frozen gaze of the child and we wallow in the pleasure of moral elevation
as we view the horrific possibility of a corrupter or intruder into this
necessarily fragile world.
This curious and complex figure of the child allows us to open
McEwans work away from the private realm of family relationships to
the public realms of politics and history. Deleuzes and Guattaris criticisms of psychoanalysis and ideology in Anti-Oedipus (1972) insist that
politics, in the sense of a power that produces an imaginary dimension
which structures society and masks oppression, begins with the world
of the child. For Deleuze and Guattari, and for McEwan, there is no such
thing as the dutiful Oedipal child who experiences life and history as
a series of familial submissions and repetitions. Instead, the familial
world of the child already involves ethnicity, history and culture, and
the child is therefore directly political.
This makes McEwan a profoundly anti-Oedipal writer, because
his work, at the level of form and narration, displays a libidinal economy that goes beyond the imaginary and the familial. Placed within
McEwans work is the Freudian image of bounded organic life, what
Freud refers to as His Majesty the Baby:
The child shall have things better than his parents: he shall not be subject to
the necessities which they have recognized as dominating life. Illness, death,
renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will shall not touch him;
the laws of nature, like those of society, are to be abrogated in his favour; he
is really to be the center and heart of creation, His Majesty the Baby, as we
once fancied ourselves to be. [. . .] Parental love, which is so touching and at
bottom so childish, is nothing but parental narcissism born again. (Freud
1959: 489)

McEwans work exploits this curious, seductive and paradoxical Eros by

tying the fantasy of the work of art to a fantasy of childhood. The child
gives us the image of a world closed in upon itself, not yet subject to the
imperatives of normativity, history, self-consciousness or the violence of
competitive adult life. In The Child in Time, this vision is voiced by one of
the members of a sub-committee on reading and writing, who states:
By forcing literacy on to children between the ages of five and seven, we
introduce a degree of abstraction which shatters the unity of the childs
world view, drives a fatal wedge between the word and the thing that the

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word names [. . .] It is in effect, Mr Chairman, nothing less than a banishment from the Garden, for its effects are lifelong. (McEwan 1988: 767)

The work of art including, and, perhaps, in particular, the narratives

that give sense to and order the world offers itself as a well-wrought
whole, and creates a pause in the chaotic movement of time and intensity to form a point of equilibrium.
However, it is precisely this Freudian and Oedipalized image of life
that McEwans process of narration challenges, for the child is not simply the object of nostalgic and parental fantasy; the child lives its position within the family as historically, politically and libidinally open.
In other words, McEwans narratives are fascinated by the image of a
world that is blissfully and autonomously enclosed, while, at the same
time, they tear such images of organic unity apart.
McEwans destruction of organicism intersects with a number of formal features and motifs, the most important of which is narration: the
narrative voice that presents a sequence of events also interprets those
events from a later point of view. The Innocent is retrospectively framed
by the postscript which narrates Leonards return to Berlin in 1987, from
which point the narrative looks back on a (putative) moment of plenitude from a fallen present, in which the loss in the present is recognized as having existed potentially in the past. This is not actually so:
temporality is established retroactively: the lived past is not closed, but
it is, through continual revisitation and memory, constantly disclosing
aspects of contamination and rupture. Childhood innocence is never
lived by the child as innocent, but constructed as such afterwards.
Paradise can be recognized as prelapsarian and completely self-present
only after its loss.
However, McEwans texts do not create a temporality in which the
origin is only lived as original after its loss or absence. On the contrary, the retroactively posited and fantasmatic origin is, in its constant
reinvention, invocation and re-living, shown to harbour an enigmatic
and seductive malevolence. The clearest example of this we find in
Atonement (2001), where Brionys desire to narrate, to tell stories, is simultaneously typical of the infantile sense of omnipotence that does not yet
acknowledge a world of negotiation and others, and an object of desiring spectacle for the adults viewing and reading narrations (including
the reader of Atonement), as Alistair Cormack explores in Chapter Five
(see pp. 7082). McEwan connects art with narcissism, but not in the
classic Freudian manner whereby the difference between the artists
fantasy and that of the everyday individual is that the artist manages
to give a form to his desire and present his narcissism in a consumable
form so that others can experience it. Rather, the artwork is an image of
self-devolving unity and an image of poised time, where the relations
among elements are internal, not part of or subject to a world other than
itself. Contemplation of the artwork is contemplation of a closure that

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every subject who has lost the world of childhood lives. In Atonement, as
elsewhere, McEwan shows the ways in which narration, composition or
performance present themselves as alluring images of a wholeness and
organicism that has liberated itself from a world of relations, negotiation
and ambiguity.
Therefore, McEwans fiction demonstrates that confusing childhood
with biological infancy is missing the true sense, and problem, of childhood innocence. As The Child in Time and The Innocent show, that state
of innocence is made possible only through a strangely retroactive temporality, a seductive relation of submission, and a dialectic between
narrative progression and regressive fascination. Whereas The Child in
Time presents the loss of the child and its connection with politics literally for the central characters search for his abducted daughter is
intertwined with an account of a government enquiry into child development The Innocent presents childhood as a transcendental condition:
we are always children in relation to authority, and authority establishes
its force through producing fantasies of subjection. These conditions
allow McEwan to pose the problem of infancy in a historical sense: just
as the child is a fantasmatic structure of adulthood, so understanding
oneself as human is intertwined with a mythic narrative of human, historical and civilized progression.
In The Innocent, the problem of innocence understood as a collective
fantasy informs McEwans other reflections on seduction, transgression, time and narrative. McEwan offers an aesthetic challenge to Oedipal
organicism that is deeply political: narrative is an alluring wholeness that
precludes our drive for comprehension, presenting a world unto itself that
resists all appropriation and demystification. In The Innocent, McEwan
intertwines and juxtaposes the drive to mastery through a totalizing
systematization (science, narration, communication) with the resistance
of that which holds itself apart from comprehension and consumption.
He continually presents the work of art at once as the consequence of a
drive for totalization that is childish in its desire for godlike control, and
as resulting in an object or wholeness that, as McEwan acknowledges in
the interview included in this volume (see pp. 1234), remains outside
self-knowledge, self-narration and temporal synthesis. McEwans writing deconstructs the opposition between knowing and not-knowing,
between science and art, between adult and child, between sexuality and
innocence, not so much because he fragments the subject but because he
foregrounds the profound relation between subjectivity, subjection and
the cultural pornography of the child.

The Innocent: Europe versus America

There is a tradition in modern English literature of exploring the structure of childhood through relations of distance, relations that are also

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historical, sexual and class-based. The clearest example of this figural complex we find in the fiction of Henry James, who presents the
new world of America as, in part, the regaining of the state of childhood. However, this regained state is always viewed, nostalgically
and longingly, from the point of view of a European adult who simultaneously yearns for that historically unburdened naivet, while, at
the same time, being disturbed by the tendency for that innocence to
fall all too easily into the corruptions of a late capitalism of unbridled
immediacy.
James often sublates this opposition between Europe and America
between the tired Old World laden with history, morality and propriety, and the new world that is nothing more than material for exchange
and self-promotion with the figure of woman or of the innocent
child. In Daisy Miller (1879), James presents the figure of the girl who
is alluring precisely because of her seeming ignorance of issues of propriety. Continental Europe acts as a site of an encounter between the
historic and class-conscious normativity of England and the liberated
world of American capital; Daisy is neither the restricted adult of manners who can only view the world as it is seen by morally-burdened
others nor the vulgar American whose world is so new and devoid of
sense that it is nothing more than a commodity. Daisy is seen as captivatingly unaware of social codes; she is incapable of acting improperly precisely because she fails to see the class and sexual connotations
that would render her actions her spontaneity and artlessness as
vulgar. Class identity in this scenario is a profoundly political phenomenon: for class is not a category of social analysis so much as an
experience of proper place ones already determined position in a
system of social meaning that transcends any action or perception of
the individual.
The historical context of The Innocent, set in post-war Berlin amid the
secret Anglo-American partnership that spies on the Communists by
tunnelling into the Russian sector in order to undermine Soviet communication, marks the point at which the child-adult relation between
Europe and America is reversed. Once seen as the very figure of a childlike origin of the world in relation to a historically over-burdened Europe,
America is now closer to being a street-wise and awakened adolescent
enlivened by knowledge acquisition. English culture is now presented
as being in a position of childlike subjection, puzzlement and seduction
in relation to the adult world of post-war America, which has become
self-creative, liberal and immediately intimate: He was suddenly a son
again, not a lover. He was a child (McEwan 1990: 157). The early days in
Berlin of the protagonist, Leonard Marnham, are marked by a series of
adjustments in his appearance that aim to reduce the difference between
his received English formality and the Americans open bravado: Like
Glass, Russell wore his shirt open to reveal a high-necked white T-shirt
underneath. As they pulled away, Leonard fingered his tie knot in the

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darkness. He decided against removing the tie in case the two Americans
had already noticed him wearing it (McEwan 1990: 37). When Leonard
returns to London he experiences the propriety and grammar of English
convention, making him yearn for the free self-creation of America,
embodied in his superior, the foul-mouthed Bob Glass: Leonard missed
the near rudeness of the Americans speech, the hammer-blow of intimacy, the absence of the modifiers and hesitancies that were supposed to
mark out a reasonable gentleman (McEwan 1990: 155).
The Innocent ties this position of infantile subjection to the specific
modes of post-war politics and sexuality. The English characters, and
Englishness in general, occupy a position of unwitting, dull and subjected naivety, while American characters and culture seem to open out
to the future, to sexuality and to knowledge. In the tunnel in which
electronics engineer Markham works, though built by the English,
American technology is used to decode and convey messages, messages
picked up and passed on by the English, but which only the Americans
can read, and this because of technology which they have kept secret.
As John MacNamee explains to Leonard:
So, very generously, we let the Americans into our tunnel, gave them
facilities, let them make use of our taps. And you know what? They didnt
even tell us about Nelsons invention. They were taking the stuff back to
Washington and reading the clear text while we were knocking our brains
trying to break the codes [. . .] Now that were sharing this project, theyve
let us in on the secret. But only the outline, mark you, not the details. Thats
why I can only give you the simplest account. (McEwan 1990: 93)

This is the structure of time and experience in The Innocent, where

Leonard receives information regarding relative disclosure and secrecy,
at once being privileged with knowledge while also knowing that he
remains distanced from the full story, held back by his American colleagues who are sexually, politically and technologically dominant.
It is only when he has left England that Leonard views himself as an
adult reader, but he does so both with a sense of simulation and with the
sense that the adulthood he is feigning comes from a primarily English
past: He could never read a paper, especially this one [The Times], without feeling he was imitating someone else, or in training for adulthood
(McEwan 1990: 146). One is always a child taking on the signs of adulthood, knowledge and mastery, but those signifiers of adult sophistication
are also always those of the child. McEwan not only locates the fantasy
and structure of childish innocence as an ideal that can be possessed by
wistful adults, who look back upon a time of unself-consciousness that
is no longer possible. He also sees the idea of adult knowledge, mastery and sexual competence as itself fantasmatic and political, and constantly traversed by unmastered and atavistic motifs that return us to a
past and aggressiveness not our own.

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Modern Power Structures of Infantilization

The structure of Cold War politics in The Innocent, very much like
todays War on Terror, is formed around secrecy. The world is lived
as threatened, monitored, and as subject to a logic one can never fully
grasp. That there is potential violence or destruction of ones being is
lived as certain, but just who or what might embody or represent that
possible transgression is unknowable. The Innocent at once presents a
new political logic of secrecy and seduction at the same time as this
specifically twentieth-century phenomenon is offered as an actualization of a deeper and more essential logic of subjection. Politics is not a
public domain of disputes, claims and contestation, but is lived asymmetrically: there is always the sense of an order, system, logic or command to which one is subjected but which will never be disclosed not
only because the logic is held in secret, but because the centre of command is no longer master of itself. Indeed, the novel itself offers a putative explication of its title, where the Americans regard themselves as
innocent or unknowing in relation to the disenchanted and overly formal Russians:
And thats how it went on. They never smiled. They never wanted to make
things work. They lied, they obstructed, they were cruel. Their language
was always too strong, even when they were insisting on a technicality in
some agreement. All the time we were saying, What the hell, theyve had a
crappy war, and they do things differently anyhow. We gave way, we were
the innocents. We were talking about the United Nations and a new world
order while they were kidnapping and beating up non-Communist politicians all over town. (McEwan 1990: 41)

Russells analysis of proto-Cold War relations indicates that a new structure of innocence replaces the initial frank openness of the Americans,
and their new world order that has been duped by the technical and violent Russians. Russell goes on to say, It took us almost a year to get wise
to them (McEwan 1990: 42), and it is that second wise position that is
encountered by Leonard. Knowing that they were innocent, facing an
opponent of centralized, executively violent and bureaucratized power,
the American mode of politics becomes one of decentred, distributed
and disciplinary tactics. Far from power operating in some sovereign
position above the body politic, where subjects would be childlike and
innocent citizens, power in its post-war and American mode abandons
the myth of innocence and bodies subjected to sovereigns. Instead,
power operates through local gestures, networks, tunnels, communicative routes and passages.
If, today, we use words such as Kafkaesque to describe a relation to
a bureaucracy that is present everywhere but visible nowhere, this is
because Kafka, like McEwan after him, recognized that modern power

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structures of infantilization express a tendency that may be exemplified

in specific institutions but that is also present in the very condition of
being a self in relation to a knowledge one does not have.
There is a directly sexual investment in this model of secrecy. It is
only once he returns to the torpor and self-evidence of an unknowing England that Leonard recalls the excitement of both the practices
and physical structures of networks and circuits; not the knowledge
or content of what he has received, but its mode of dissemination and
mediation: He missed the perfection of the construction, the serious,
up-to-the-minute equipment, the habits of secrecy and all the little rituals that went with it (McEwan 1990: 1545). This shift from an imposed
and external authority to a diffuse, silent, distributed power that is felt
everywhere but visible nowhere, mirrors a structure of sexual knowledge. Sexuality begins as an intrusive and alien signifier: as Freuds
notion of Nachtrglichkeit, or deferred action, makes clear, the child
experiences a scene that is initially enigmatic but that later takes on the
meaning of sexual content. At first sexuality is experienced as a domain
of knowledge and experience that is hidden, and one is seduced by this
very veiling or enigma of a knowledge held by a masterful and mature
other, an other who will grant me my desire.
In addition to Russells earlier definition of innocence, there is a later
use of the term (and its reversal) in a scene of sexual encounter. Leonard,
now the supposedly wiser and knowing sexual master, wants to warn
Marias friend Jenny about the predatory nature of Russells sexual
desire (and this scene in turn connects with the narratives eventual trajectory of men exchanging women, of mastery achieved and threatened
through networks of communication). Maria, as in the earlier scenes of
sexual initiation, laughs at Leonards innocence, for she is all too aware
of Russells sexuality. It is the woman who will play and control this
system and not, as Leonard naively thinks, be its victim:
Jenny looks after herself. Do you know what she was saying when the [sic]
Russell came into the room? She said, Thats the one I want. I dont get paid
till the end of next week and I want to go dancing. And, she said, he has
a beautiful jaw, like Superman. So, she goes to work, and Russell thinks he
did it all by himself.
Leonard put down his knife and fork and wrung his hands in mock
anguish. My God! Why am I so ignorant?
Not ignorant. Innocent. And now you marry the first and only woman
you ever knew. Perfect! Its women who should marry the virgins, not men.
We want you fresh [. . .]
Maria raised her glass. He had never seen her so beautiful.
To innocence. (McEwan 1990: 173)

Marias claim to mastery here is a seductive lure; for it is precisely at the

moment that one believes oneself to be in command of the system that

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one places oneself in a position of innocence. For all her laughter and
attributions of innocence in relation to a Leonard who is all too easily
seduced and lured, it is Maria who becomes the final token of exchange,
and who lives a life of married respectability in order to cover over the
scandal that occurs when Leonard murders her ex-husband. Indeed, far
from Leonard being a sexual and social tabula rasa, an innocent who can
only relate to the worldy-wise Americans in an attitude of wonder, he
finds himself becoming increasingly determined by desires for domination and mastery eventually finding himself to be a mirror or double
of Marias violent ex-husband. Those desires are lived by Leonard as
intrusive and alien, as radically other than his proper and innocent self.
McEwan thus represents sexuality as a double and conflicting tendency within those who would once again be a child, and the adult
who (always remaining a child) lives adult life as a fantasy of mature
mastery:
It was the sort of face, the sort of manner, onto which men were likely to project their own requirements. One could read womanly power into her silent
abstraction, or find a childlike dependency in her quiet attractiveness. On
the other hand, it was possible she actually embodied these contradictions.
(McEwan 1990: 59)

On the one hand, sexuality is an outward drive to take what is alien

into the self in order to reduce the selfs exposure, risk and vulnerability a principle of constancy where the selfs energy remains constant
insofar as its needs are met. On the other hand, sexuality is a return
to zero insofar as the self desires to end its state of living tension. The
adult is exposed to a world that must be read and mastered, while also
regarding him or herself as once having been a childlike unity before
such submission.

Between Knowing and Not-knowing: Fiction-making

Where is narrative in this relation? Narrative is both a work of art that,
like science, masters all that is other than itself, and also like music: an
alluring wholeness that stuns or precludes our drive for comprehension.
The opposition between science and art is analogous to an opposition
between adult communication and childhood secrecy, between a world
that is open to relations, systematization and mastery and some point
of stillness or resistance that holds itself beyond the mastery of narration. These oppositions are, however, exposed by McEwan as both deeply
embedded and impossible: just as the child lives its world as already
structured by adult desires, and the adult is always reliving its fantasized
lost childhood, so art and fiction strive to dominate and master the world,
while science possesses an irreducible mythic and imaginative drive.

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McEwan intertwines and juxtaposes the drive to mastery through

systematization throughout his oeuvre. In Amsterdam (1998), Clive
Linley composes a work that will synthesize the disorder and dissonance of existence, but that very act of composition is also a turn away
from life and the demands of others, and an awareness of his own position in relation to time and consequences. In Saturday (2005), Matthew
Arnolds poem Dover Beach (1851) enters the novel as a fragment from
a past time when art could still yearn for a lost plenitude. However, the
poem also acts as an object that disrupts the impending violence of the
present, against the disenchanted and violent perspectives of Perowne
and Baxter respectively. In On Chesil Beach, the relative sexual, social
and political maturity of Edward (the husband) is undermined when
he hears his wife, Florence, performing in a string quartet. Later, on the
train home, he was able to tell her with complete honesty that he had
been moved by the music, and he even hummed bits to her (McEwan
2007: 126). Edward has, until that point in the narrative, imagined her
as unaware and incapable of passion, but is then captivated and mesmerized by the musics expression of an intensity that appears beyond
comprehension.
Thus McEwans writing deconstructs the opposition between knowing and not-knowing, between science and art, between adult and child,
between sexuality and innocence. The condition for knowing, speaking, narrating or adopting an adult viewpoint of mature relations is a
recognition that the world is not ones own, that relations to others are
mediated and that we are subjected to a system not of our own making. The position of the adult is, therefore, an abandonment of childish
narcissism or omnipotence. At the same time, however, the very idea of
an original presence, a time before our subjection to relations, others,
language and secrecy the myth of the child is constitutive of the
adult world of resignation. In The Innocent, McEwan deploys a series of
ostensible oppositions only to show the ways in which each term will
always appear as the others parasite or supplement. McEwans work
constantly shows that our moments of supposed clarity and mastery are
our moments of greatest blindness.
In a similar manner, The Innocent shows that such political modes of
care and solicitation are also the moments of extreme paternalism and
violence, for it is precisely through monitoring, documenting and educating that one is creating the other as nothing more than an image of
oneself. The child is always the lost child from the point of view of adult
disenchantment, but the child itself that world of lost innocence is a
world already traversed by the fantasy of a father, sovereign or master
who knows the secret. The Berlin tunnel, now mastered by the more
knowing Americans, reminds Leonard of his childhood, where he
takes part in his fathers power while at the same time experiencing that
maturity as given by others. It is as though, for Leonard, the Americans
now take over the bestowal of authority and know-how that he had once

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received from his father:

It was hard not to feel proud of the tunnel. Leonard lent a childs token
assistance, fetching a trowel, taking a list to the hardware shop and so on.
When it was all finished, and before the breakfast table and chairs were
moved in, he stood in the new space with its plaster walls, electrical fittings
and homemade window, and he felt quite delirious with his own achievement. (McEwan 1990: 94)

The image of the circuit, the tunnel, the passage or the path all act as fantasy figures for communication, for communication is at once the creation
of relations or paths that allow for the circulation of sense and disclosure,
and also the very creation of a network that (like language) means that
sense, experience, privacy and secrecy are only possible because there is
already a system that allows one to figure the private and hidden to oneself. Leonard states: To confront her [Maria] he needed privacy and several hours. Then she could be furious, then accusatory, then sorrowful
and finally forgiving. He could have drawn an emotional circuit diagram
for her. As for his own feelings, they were beginning to be simplified by
the righteousness of love (McEwan 1990: 126). However, the supposed
position of mastery that the tunnel would enable is exposed, at the end
of the novel, to have been always already redundant. Politics takes on
the structure of the open secret; nothing is truly held apart, and there is
no ultimate sense or truth that is contested. What must be maintained,
though, is the fantasy of communication that tunnels, codes, passages
and networks are ultimately subtended by a prior truth. Similarly, sexuality is always promised as a scene that might disclose the truth or sense
of all the signs and suggestions one heard as a child. In The Innocent, the
sexuality that would ultimately yield the sense of the secret and allow
one to mature is always traversed by signs of an otherness one can never
master.
The broader political implications of this deconstruction are explored
in, for instance, The Child in Time and Saturday. In the former novel,
Stephen, an author of childrens books, has lost his daughter her absence
being a constant and haunting present throughout the narrative, which
prevents time from moving forward. Simultaneously, Stephens friend,
Charles Darke, moves from the world of publishing to politics, which
he eventually leaves to become a child again: Stephen finds him playing in a tree-house. On the one hand, we could see Charless becoming-child as a retreat from truth and politics. However, the narrative
destroys a series of borders that would make such a reading possible.
First, Stephens debut novel, initially intended as a novel of coming-toadulthood and transgression entitled Hashish, stalls in its first part and
remains a childrens book, called Lemonade. It is as though the forward
movement and time will always be drawn back to some already disturbed and lost childhood. The success of Stephens book demonstrates

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a mode of political infantilism, a refusal to face a world of contingency,

loss, otherness and destruction. Second, set in conservative Britain, The
Child in Time presents the politicians concern with childhood demonstrated in the government report on child development as ultimately
libidinal and infantilizing. The process of consultation and dialogue is a
deception, for the paternalistic solutions have already been determined.
Not surprisingly, the Prime Minister eventually seeks out the boyish
Charles as a forbidden love object (McEwan 1988: 188).
Finally, the opposition between science and childish myths of timelessness is destroyed in Stephens conversation with Charless wife,
Thelma. The physicists accounts of time also suggest that the forward
movement of chronological time is an illusion, and that time cannot be
grasped or mastered by the simple narrative or human forms. What
appear at first glance to be conservative and passive gestures turn out
to be a profound mode of politics of secrecy, authority and paternalism
that demonstrate our tendency to illusion, our seduction by authority,
and our fantasies of infantile omnipotence.
It is that childish belief in a world that could be just as one wishes that
McEwan often aligns with the artists belief in, or illusion of, omnipotence. In Saturday, the case for and against the Iraq war is seen as an
Oedipal battle between the musician-son and poet-daughter, on the
one hand, and the scientific and disenchanted father-surgeon, Henry
Perowne, on the other. In our youth we believe in the possibility of
saying no to violence and conflict, and in the pure present of aesthetic
enjoyment. From the point of view of Perowne the anti-war demonstration is a self-righteous and morally jubilant objection to Realpolitik, the
narcissism of which is exemplified in the placard slogan of Not in my
Name (McEwan 2005: 72).
As in all of McEwans oppositions between scientists and artists,
art stalls and freezes time, and presents the possibility of a liberation
from lifes inevitable and necessary destruction of bounded form. By
contrast, the fathers scientific point of view places the all too human
belief in individual life and organic beauty in a recognition of broader
unbounded processes that go well beyond agency, cognition, personality
and human historical narratives. It is therefore possible to read Saturday
simultaneously as a psychologization of a political content (rendering
the relation between resistance and conservatism as a relation between
fathers and children) and as a dehistoricization: in the face of the grand
evolutionary struggle between life and chaos the wars of nations matter
little. It is the neurosurgeon, not the street demonstrator, who grasps
literally in Saturday the truth of ethics. Only by attending to the forces
of life from which we are composed, and not through the narcissism of
political movements, can we achieve any form of amelioration. By displaying political struggles as familial dramas, and those dramas in turn
as consequences of some broader imperative of life, McEwan might
appear to be the most self-castrating of novelists: presenting art as a

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seductive deception that will ultimately preclude us from the recognition that poetry makes nothing happen.

Conclusion: To Remain a World unto Oneself

One of the charges that might be directed at McEwans fiction, today,
is its conservatism, both at the level of form and content. At the level of
content, a character such as Perowne seems to point to the futility and
atavism of political endeavour. At the level of form, we might note that
McEwans novels are hardly experimental, and usually bear a narrative trajectory that, through the use of flashbacks and shifting points of
view, may be rendered somewhat complex.
However, this conservatism presented in the novel and the conservatism of the fictions style is ultimately radical, especially if we consider the sense of the terms conservatism and radicalism. Conservatism
is a desire for remaining the same, for maintenance, for non-change,
for a being not subjected to threat, contingency, exposure or infraction.
Images of children dominate McEwans fiction precisely because he sees
that desire for perfect stillness and self-enclosure as ultimately political:
it charges all our images of humanity, of communication, of selfhood
and time. McEwans work is therefore a sustained political critique of
cultural pornography. True radicalism would not be the simple opposite
of this illusory closed and self-perfecting wholeness; radicalism would
not be the emergence from childhood into a position of mastery, progression, pure becoming and knowledge. Instead, mastery may be more
radical closer to the root of the political by examining the fantasies of
power, wholeness, domination and mastered time. Similarly, at the level
of form, it might be more radical to present and render explicit the drive
to conservation, the drive to remain a world unto oneself. This would
yield a fiction that could be read at one and the same time as the most
alluring and seductive of narratives, while also presenting the politics
and desire of being seduced into the image of organic wholeness.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Words of War, War of Words:

Atonement and the Question of
Plagiarism
NATASHA ALDEN

Chapter Summary: In 2006, Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarizing

parts of Atonement (2001) from the autobiography of the recently deceased
novelist Lucilla Andrews. The wider intellectual implications of this row
sparked questions about the relationship between history and fiction,
and the ways in which novelists can draw upon (historical) sources. By
reconsidering postmodern theories of historiographical metafiction, this
chapter responds to some of the issues by focusing on McEwans use of
source material in Atonement. The chapter argues that McEwans regard
for historical veracity is secondary to his desire to create a particular
atmosphere that affects his characters. Atonement demonstrates what fiction can do with history that history cannot. McEwan establishes these
narratives as a direct challenge to the national, still prevailing myth of
Dunkirk, and as a wider critique of a society at war, while invigorating
our understanding of the relationship between history and fiction.

Introduction: A Weighty Obligation to Strict Accuracy

Historical fiction tends not to make the front pages of national newspapers. Yet in 2006, when Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarizing parts
of Atonement from the autobiography of the recently deceased novelist
Lucilla Andrews (19192006), the nature of historical narrative suddenly
became news. In a lengthy Mail on Sunday article on Andrewss life, and
her reaction to discovering that Atonement (2001) was, in part, based on
Andrewss autobiography No Time for Romance (1977), Julia Langdon
detailed the parallels between the two texts. Andrewss agent and
brother were quoted voicing their disquiet at McEwans use of Andrewss
writing and about his not having contacted her (Langdon: 37). On the

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front page of the following days Guardian, McEwan responded by stating that he had used Andrews as an inspiration and a source, and that he
had recognized his debt to her in the Acknowledgements to Atonement,
but had not copied her writing (McEwan 2006: 1). His extensive use of
sources, he explained, was due to a concern for historical accuracy, born
out of respect for the suffering of the characters generation.
The Mail directly charged McEwan with plagiarism in a second article by Glenys Roberts, less than subtly titled Plagiarism (or Why I Need
Atonement) by Ian McEwan, whereupon a variety of academics and
novelists came to McEwans defence (Roberts: 26). Erica Wagner wondered if originality in literature was even possible, given that all stories
are to some extent recycled, and likened Atonement to novels that talked
to other novels, such as Zadie Smiths On Beauty (2005), which is in part
a response to Howards End (1910) by E. M. Forster (Wagner: 3). Smith herself took a different view; Atonement, she suggests, is not in dialogue
with Andrewss work, but only uses it for historical background information (Smith in Lyall, E1). Rose Tremain pointed to McEwans ability
to transform his source material into something singular and new as a
defence against the suggestion of improper usage, while Thomas Mallon
argued that the case raised two separate issues: whether McEwans use of
Andrewss phrasing amounted to plagiarism (he concluded that it does
not), and the less clear-cut issue of the ethics of using someone elses life
story without consulting them (Tremain in Lyall, E1. Talk of the Nation
2006). Writing in the Observer, Robert McCrumb argued that McEwan
only borrowed a few factual phrases, an entirely reasonable and laudable thing to do for a novelist concerned with the historical accuracy of
his text (McCrumb: 13).
The debate turned on the phrases of Andrews echoed in Atonement,
but also drew attention to the ways in which novelists use historical
material, particularly historical scenarios. In Atonement, McEwan inserts
Briony, and her point of view, into Andrewss narrative, which underlies
Part Three, to the extent that it arguably could not exist as it is without
that element. This means that McEwan relies on Andrews in a different
way to a different extent than he does on his other sources, and is
right to acknowledge her book (as he does). The way McEwan researched
and wrote Atonement thus raises important broader questions about how
novelists use historical material, and suggests that there are no clearly
defined rules about how writers can echo another text, about how much
of another authors work can be drawn on, or about the sorts of changes
writers can make. What can authors do with source material, and, perhaps more importantly, what can they not do?
McEwan himself points out that Dunkirk or a wartime hospital can
be novelistically realized, but they cannot be re-invented; writers of historical fiction are, he argues, necessarily dependent on memoirs and
eyewitness accounts (McEwan 2006: 2). This raises questions about the
importance of historical accuracy in historical fiction, and whether any

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rules could be established. McEwan made his views on such issues clear
in his defence against the accusation of plagiarism:
It is an eerie, intrusive matter, inserting imaginary characters into actual historical events. A certain freedom is suddenly compromised; as one crosses
and re-crosses the lines between fantasy and the historical record, one feels
a weighty obligation to strict accuracy. In writing about wartime especially,
it seems like a form of respect for the suffering of a generation conscripted
into a nightmare. (McEwan 2006: 1)

Although the media circus surrounding the debate moved on swiftly,

the significant ethical questions remain.
This essay engages with some of these questions. The central conceit
of Atonement that the novel is a fiction based on reality created by its
protagonist in an attempt to atone foregrounds questions about how
the historical novel creates a version of the past, and explores the narrative potential of this hybrid of history and fiction. The divide between
reality and fiction is firmly emphasized because, at the end of the novel,
we are told explicitly that the real Robbie and Cecilia are dead; we are
told which parts of the story we have just read really happened. Brionys
confession foregrounds the consoling power of narrative, while simultaneously emphasizing the difference between fiction and the reality it
is based on.
An analysis of Atonements engagement with historical sources, focusing on a few particular instances in detail, can help us to answer these
questions. This careful unpicking of the historical source material, and
an examination of the process by which it is translated into a new fictional work, pinpoint the issues that McEwan wants to emphasize, such
as the collective insanity of war (McEwan 2001: 353), or the strippingaway of personal identity that war inflicts on those involved. It also
allows us to trace how the novel practises the relationship between history and fiction, while revealing McEwans view of the creative drive of
Atonement, namely, to demonstrate what fiction can do with history that
history cannot. McEwan actively distances himself from narratives that,
true to the radical ontological doubt of historiographical metafictions
from the nineteen-eighties and nineties, suggest history and fiction
are inseparable, and as Brionys brutal revelation about Robbies and
Cecilias deaths emphasizes shows they are all too separate.

But What Really Happened? Historiographical

Metafiction Revisited
Atonement is a story about stories, our own and other peoples. It is a meditation on how we tell stories, and what they can do. Does Atonement have
a happy ending? It depends on your view of the power of story. Briony

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thinks it is not impossible that Robbie and Cecilia could be present at

her 70th birthday celebrations. This comes pages after the revelation
that both died in 1940. Any reader hoping for a happy ending should
also remember Brionys earlier question: [H]ow can a novelist achieve
atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is
also God? (McEwan 2001: 371). In her fiction Briony may be able to bring
Robbie and Cecilia back to life and grant them a happy ending, but, as
she notes, a certain kind of reader will be compelled to ask, But what
really happened? (McEwan 2001: 371).
The fact that the question what really happened? is being asked of
a novel at all is an indication of the complex metafictional nature of
Atonement. McEwan asks important questions about the ways in which
we write about ourselves and others, and, in particular, about the ways
in which we write about the past. The novel is a complex double hybrid:
firstly, Brionys novel is a forensic memoir (McEwan 2001: 370) dedicated
to demonstrating Robbies innocence. Secondly, it forms an attempt to
atone further by giving Robbie and Cecilia the happy ending in fiction
denied them in real life. McEwans novel is a novel-within-a-novel that
reveals the (rewritten) stories behind stories; it brilliantly shifts between
ontological levels and epistemological parameters, deliberately confusing the reader to the extent that we no longer know whose text we are
reading.
Recent critical work on historiography and the writing of fiction has
emphasized the constructed nature of narrative. This emphasis on artificiality challenges historys claim to empirical certainty and replaces it
with a doctrine of competing narratives. Linda Hutcheons The Politics
Of Postmodernism (1988) groups together recent novels such as Salman
Rushdies Midnights Children (1981) and Julian Barnes Flauberts Parrot
(1984) that self-consciously attempt to redefine the relationship between
fiction and history. Hutcheon labels them historiographical metafictions
and argues that, in contrast to traditional historical novels which are
less self-reflexive and do not question their ability to accurately relay
the past, such metafictional historiographies foreground the artificial,
and therefore problematic, nature of narrative, including historical and
literary stories.
Amy J. Elias revises Hutcheons work in Sublime Desire (2001), which
argues for a spectrum of ontological doubt within historiographical metafiction, ranging from profound radicalism to fiction that aims for verifiable historical accuracy. Elias suggests, for instance, that postcolonial
writers who use postmodernist historiography to explore forgotten or
marginalized voices have a political and often personal investment in
writing these forgotten narratives back into history, and tend therefore
towards the conservative end of the spectrum of ontological doubt.
As the son of a Second World War veteran who served at Dunkirk,
McEwan has a personal, biographical investment in the story told in
Atonement, trying to re-imagine what it was like to be a soldier, or to

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nurse the wounded. A second-generation post-war writer, McEwan

wants to tell a particular story and to put the record straight about
Dunkirk in particular, and about our nostalgic view of the war in general. He establishes these stories as a direct challenge to the national
myth of Dunkirk that still prevails, and also as a wider critique of any
society at war. As Alistair Cormack argues in the next chapter (see
pp. 7082), McEwan rejects a postmodernist relativism which suggests
that there is no difference between history and fiction because both are
mediated narratives. The form and plot of Atonement refute this thinking, as does McEwans own insistence on historical accuracy wherever
possible. In other words, the novel is not historiographical metafiction,
nor is McEwan naively unaware of the complex questions that the form
of its narrative raises.
However, this is not a clear-cut rejection of such postmodernist ideas.
McEwans text does not suggest we can have unmediated access to the
past, or to any form of reality. The creation of Brionys Dunkirk narrative,
for example, is dissected in London, 1999. Here we are shown how the
narrative is corrected, purged of factual errors and mistakes. Thus, the
constructed, mediated and fallible nature of the narrative is emphasized.
This, McEwan and Briony say, is what it might have been like. Atonement is
still a metafictional novel, but McEwan is reasserting the history/fiction
divide, broken down by postmodern historiography, in order to interrogate it, while retaining the freedom fiction gives the author to explore
the past to go beyond the factual record. Fiction allows McEwan to recreate these arenas of war, and enables readers to imagine themselves in
the past. Briony atones by using fiction to portray thoughts and events
she has no actual access to, and thus to reach Robbie and Cecilia. She
exploits, as McEwan does, the contradiction inherent in historical fiction,
that of being simultaneously fictional and based in reality.

Working Atmosphere to a Sufficient Pitch:

Atonements Use of Historical Source Material
As the son of a veteran, McEwan is especially concerned with presenting his vision of events in as historically accurate a way as possible;
therefore he uses a vast amount of research material of varying kinds
in Atonement. In Part One, set in the 1930s, Brionys prose style is modelled on that of contemporary writers Rosamond Lehmann (19011990)
and Virginia Woolf (18821941) in particular partly because Briony is
influenced by them, and partly because this modelling gives the prose
a period feel. Part Two, which chronicles Robbies Second World War
experiences and Brionys time as a probationer nurse at St Thomas hospital in London, has a more modern style: McEwan weaves into the narrative details about the retreat to Dunkirk from histories, letters and
diaries by eyewitnesses (including his father).

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The earlier part of Part Three, describing the discipline of Brionys

training, and particularly the terrible injuries sustained by soldiers from
Dunkirk, is based very closely on two memoirs. The first, Lucilla
Andrewss No Time for Romance (1977), describes the authors training at
St Thomas in 1941. (As McEwan needs Briony to be in London in order
to see Lola, Marshall, Robbie and Cecilia, as well as to create tension by
harnessing the readers awareness of the imminence of the start of the
Blitz in September 1940, he has Briony become one of the very last probationer nurses to be trained in London before the hospital was evacuated.) McEwan expands on Andrewss descriptions of the difficulty of
keeping up her writing in her limited spare time, and of needing to
be careful about what she wrote because she had nowhere to lock her
notebooks.
McEwans second source is The Memoir of Mrs A. Radloff, an unpublished typescript in the Imperial War Museums collection. This memoir
describes Radloffs training at St. Thomas in London and Basingstoke,
where, like Andrews, she looked after casualties from Dunkirk and
from the Lancastria, a Cunard liner which was sunk on 17 June 1940
while attempting to evacuate British soldiers from France. At the time
of the Dunkirk evacuation, Andrews and Radloff were both working in
the sector hospitals to which the majority of St Thomas staff had been
evacuated: Andrews near Salisbury Plain and Radloff in Basingstoke.
Both women are slightly older than Briony and they both write in
a pithy, clear-sighted manner that resembles the older Brionys prose
style. The sequence of events of the first four sections of Part Three is
based almost exactly on Andrewss autobiography it begins shortly
after Briony has begun her training, and demonstrates the hard work
and intense discipline required of her. Both memoirs chronicle the
steady build-up to the evacuation of Dunkirk. The details of wards
being cleared and extra supplies delivered come from Andrews. The
jaundiced sailors are the last patients before the arrival of the waves of
casualties in both hospitals, and both Andrews and Briony finally realize what is happening in France by reading between the lines in newspaper reports.
McEwan remains faithful to the chronology of Andrewss narrative
of nursing the wounded from Dunkirk, but rewrites history a little,
transplanting her experiences to London. In reality, both Radloff and
Andrews worked in outlying bases, and none of the wounded from the
evacuation of France were sent to St. Thomas. Briony herself explains
this conflation, describing how she merged her experiences of working
at Alder Hey, the Royal East Sussex and St Thomas in order to concentrate all my experiences into one place (McEwan 2001: 356).
However, in Part Three we are told that Briony intended to see Cecilia,
but that she actually never saw [Cecilia and Robbie] in that year. [Her]
walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common [and]
a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her

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recently bereaved sister (McEwan 2001: 3701). This places Briony in

London after Robbies death on 1 June and before Cecilia is killed in
the Blitz in September. Therefore Briony cannot be conflating her own
memories when she describes the men from Dunkirk and the Lancastria.
This shows that McEwans regard for historical veracity is secondary to
his desire to create a particular atmosphere, which becomes clear earlier
in the description of Robbies journey to Dunkirk.
McEwan creates the atmosphere in the hospital the depersonalization, the relentless hard work, the incomprehensible rules almost
entirely by means of details taken from the two memoirs. The stripping
away of identity Briony experiences is, for instance, illustrated by a story
from Radloff:
The dragon who met us (sister) thrust a tray of labels disdainfully at my
front and without looking at me [. . .] It was marked N. Reeves. Naively, for
I didnt realize that I now had no identity, I protested that my initial was A.
Stupid girl, do not you know that N stands for Nurse? (Radloff: 1)

The Sisters reply to Brionys making the same mistake is politer, but no
less alarming:
This was how it was going to be. She had gone up to the Sister to point out
courteously that a mistake had been made with her name badge. She was
B. Tallis, not, as it said, on the little rectangular brooch, N. Tallis.
The reply was calm, You are, and will remain, as you have been designated. Your Christian name is of no interest to me. Now kindly sit down,
Nurse Tallis. (McEwan 2001: 275)

Sometimes McEwan deviates for specific reasons. The senior nurses

frighten Briony, Andrews and Radloff, but whereas the real-life nurses
work with a variety of other staff, Briony often [thinks] that her only
relationship was with Sister Drummond, and that her life on the wards
is largely dependent on how she stood in the Ward Sisters opinion
(McEwan 2001: 274, 275). Sister Drummond appears to be the only senior
nurse on Brionys ward; McEwan uses her to personalize the discipline
depicted by Andrews and Radloff, and concentrates Brionys life down
to a very small, very intense set of contacts.
Brionys daily routine is similarly curtailed, drawn from selected parts
of Andrewss and Radloffs memoirs. After listing Brionys menial tasks,
McEwan adds a short list of her medical experiences [she had] dabbed
gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted
lead lotion on a bruise (McEwan 2001: 277). This list is derived from
Andrews, and differs only in the tense used and in omitting the next
item on Andrewss list, namely, taking patients temperatures. Andrewss
list continues: very occasionally doing a minor surgical dressing or
removing a few stitches, sticking on and removing strapping plaster, and

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handing out doses of Gees Linctus by the gallon, M. and B. tablets by the
dozen, and the troops beloved A.P.C. tablets by the gross (Andrews 1977:
67). While McEwan cannot assume, as Andrews does, that his readers
will know what these abbreviations mean, truncating this list also gives a
stronger impression of how menial and boring Brionys work is.
McEwan picks up on details of the privations of the nurses routine
scattered throughout Andrewss and Radloffs accounts, and concentrates them together in three major sections that establish atmosphere.
McEwan describes how the nurses lives are regulated by the chimes
of nearby Big Ben, a detail borrowed from Radloff: Big Ben dictated
our routine, we dreaded his frequent reminders that we were late
(Radloff: 2). In Atonement, McEwan uses this idea to exacerbate the feeling of tension: The chimes of Big Ben marked every change of the day
and there were times when the solemn single note of the quarter hour
prompted moans of suppressed panic as the girls realised they were
supposed to be elsewhere (McEwan 2001: 283). Bedpans feature heavily
in Brionys nursing, and McEwan borrows details from Andrews and
Radloff that not only emphasize how disgusting emptying them is, but
also stress the bizarre attitude the nurses, who are adapting to hospital
discipline, are expected to have towards this task. In Radloffs memoirs,
the nurses are told the following: [Nurse], dont carry your bedpans
like tennis rackets carry them to the glory of God! (Radloff: 2, 3) In
Brionys account this appears as:
The day therefore began with bedpans. Sister did not approve of them being
carried down the ward like tennis rackets. They were to be carried to the
glory of God, and emptied, sluiced, cleaned and stowed by half past seven,
when it was time to start the morning drinks. (McEwan 2001: 283)

Briony is told off for running in the corridor with the phrase: Only haemorrhages and fires were permissible reasons for a nurse to run (McEwan
2001: 283). This is derived directly from Andrews, who is told: Please
remember a nurse may only run for haemorrhage or fire (Andrews
1977: 161). Brionys technique for dealing with the bedpans is based on
Andrewss, who describes herself addressing the bottles: Either I have
to empty you with my eyes shut and holding my breath or I cant empty
you at all (Andrews 1977: 155). Briony discovers [t]he trick of emptying
them, in fact the only way it was possible for her, was to close her eyes,
hold her breath and avert her head (McEwan 2001: 283). The humour
present in Andrewss memoir is missing in McEwans version: his desire
to portray this world as unrelentingly harsh and disciplined means that
he adapts, or edits, his sources to fit the desired picture.
Beside such details from the nurses routine, McEwan picks up particularly odd pieces of information from his sources and uses them
to sustain the underlying tone of strangeness. We have the sense that
Brionys reality is undercut by a Surrealist experience, as earlier explored

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in detail by Jeannette Baxter in Chapter One (see pp. 1325). McEwan

adapts Andrewss description of the models used to teach bed-bathing
techniques so as to emphasize a curious sexuality, which is hinted at
but never made explicit. Andrews describes models who are called
Mrs Mackintosh, Lady Chase, and George, a baby boy of convenient
physique to allow him to double as a baby girl (Andrews 1977: 151). In
Atonement, they reappear as: Mrs Mackintosh, Lady Chase, and baby
George, whose blandly impaired physique allowed him to double as a
baby girl (McEwan 2001: 275). The change from convenient to blandly
impaired introduces a note of damaged, or sublimated, sexuality not
present in the original, adding to the atmosphere of muffled hysteria in
the novel.
Brionys experience of nursing the dying from Dunkirk prompts a
change in her that is as important as her development of a concept of
realism while watching Robbies and Cecilias scene by the fountain in
Part One. As McEwan wants to show how Brionys personality swiftly
undergoes this vital change, he does not have space to show her off-duty.
This happens because the narrative pace has to be maintained, and he
therefore omits the details of life outside the hospital that Radloff and
Andrews incorporate. For Brionys transformation to be dramatically
plausible, McEwan has to keep constant and mounting pressure on her,
which peaks with the death of the young French soldier Luc Cornet.
This is not to say that Radloff and Andrews would not recognize The
Nightingale School of Nursing that McEwan recreates, but he does not
introduce the stoicism and sense of comradeship, present in their stories,
to Brionys until after the death of Luc Cornet. Up till this point, McEwan
heaps on borrowed details of the lonelier, harder parts of the nurses
lives, because the readers focus is meant to be entirely on Briony and her
inner life. This is why, unlike Andrews and Radloff, Briony has only one
friend, and why McEwan concentrates all the details of the many senior
nurses into the single figure of Sister Drummond his aim is to create a
spotlight on Brionys claustrophobically circumscribed world.
Once the atmosphere has been worked to a sufficient pitch, McEwan
introduces the first seriously wounded men whom Briony encounters.
McEwan is still following the chronology of Andrewss account at this
point, but makes occasional changes to serve his narrative ends. He also
rewrites Radloffs and Andrewss descriptions of the soldiers wounds
and behaviour adopting the personal details of soldiers and nurses
but making them behave in ways diametrically opposed to their originals. These changes always emphasize the brutality and futility of the
fighting. McEwans soldiers are less stoical and more bitter, and they
come across as being more contemporary than Radloff or Andrewss
patients. Brionys patients do not have stiff upper lips.
During this episode, McEwan increases the horror Briony faces
by having her treat five patients, two of whom are based on patients
from Andrewss book, and two from Radloffs. The surreal, nauseating

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undercurrent of this part peaks in Brionys one love scene in the novel,
after which she is never the same again much in the melodramatic
spirit of her early heroines. Brionys first patient was injured building
runways in northern France. His story deviates from the original one in
Andrewss book to emphasize his helplessness; he is less cheerful and
more passive than Andrewss patient. McEwan abridges the soldiers
description that Jerry kept bombing them every time they had the runway half built (Andrews 1977: 79), but adds phrases such as all over,
which emphasize his exhaustion and powerlessness (McEwan 2001:
298). In Andrewss account, the original soldier concludes by saying that
[w]e got shoved so far back we run out of fields, and seeing as you can
not build runways on the sea, here we are. What you got to say to that,
eh nurse? (Andrews 1977: 79). McEwans soldier is less forthcoming, but
the grammatical error in Andrewss patients speech is carried over: We
drops back [. . .] then its Jerry again and were falling back again. Till we
fell in the sea (McEwan 2001: 298).
The next patient is a composite of two patients treated by Andrews
and of McEwans father, who suffered shrapnel wounds on the retreat to
Dunkirk. Here McEwan takes medical details from Andrews and adds
his fathers experience of being reprimanded by a nurse for swearing in
pain while the shrapnel fragments were taken out. Brionys patient also
swears when she rips out the first fragment. Sister Drummonds reaction is contemptuous:
How dare you speak that way in front of one of my nurses?
I beg your pardon, sister. It just came out.
Sister Drummond looked with disdain into the bowl. Compared to what
weve admitted these past few hours, Airman Young, your injuries are
superficial. So youll consider yourself lucky. And youll show some courage
worthy of your uniform. Carry on, Nurse Tallis. (McEwan 2001: 300)

As Briony continues, the soldiers body shakes in pain while he silently

holds on to the bedhead. This part of the description is directly taken
from Andrews, where the soldier does not swear and behaves as stoically as Sister Drummond expects. Nowhere in any of the sources do
the nurses speak with such harshness to a patient, and nowhere do
the soldiers behave in the way that McEwans do. Andrewss patient
stays silent until the end of the procedure when the biggest fragment
is removed, and then he said, I am thanking you very much, nurse.
(Andrews 1977: 82). In Atonement, Brionys patient, staring at a similar
fragment, says, Run him under the tap, Nurse. Ill take him home.
Then he turned into the pillow. It may have been the word home, as well
as the pain (McEwan 2001: 300). This does not alienate the reader it
is hard to imagine reacting differently but a more significant alteration is McEwans decision to leave out the exchange between the nurse
and patient at the end of Andrewss account, when he is brought a

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measure of brandy. McEwan is faithful to Andrewss description: the

nurse goes to fetch the brandy, but is so shaken that she has to stop to
be sick. However, while in Andrewss account the soldier tries to get the
nurse, who is visibly upset, to drink the brandy, McEwan rushes the
reader straight on to Brionys next patient, omitting the conversation.
The editing here has the same function as Brionys invented lie about
the shrapnel travelling to the airmans brain if it is left in place; it lessens our sense of there being a personal connection between nurse and
patient. This puts McEwans novel at serious variance with Andrews:
where Andrews dwells on the mutual respect and concern between
patients and nursing staff, McEwan invites his reader to condemn the
rigid hospital rules, which prevent any real personal connection developing. In other words Briony, who is still immature and inexperienced,
sees her patient as a problem to be solved as quickly as possible. Sister
Drummonds furious response to the soldier swearing in pain is similarly lacking in empathy. Here, McEwan is modifying the source material in order to foreground his criticism of the crippling, dehumanizing
rigidity of social and professional protocols that regulate the behaviour
and lives of both soldiers and nurses.
Brionys next patient, Luc Cornet, is taken from Andrewss book.
Dramatically speaking, he is the most significant patient whom Briony
treats. Their interaction reveals the purpose of McEwans emphasis on
the misery of hospital life, bringing Briony and the reader back into a
domestic, intimate sphere with sudden and unexpected power. McEwan
begins this episode by firmly emphasizing its place within the tiny world
encompassed by Brionys relationship with Sister Drummond; Andrews
was told to sit with the dying soldier by a very senior QA (Andrews
1977: 98) whom she does not know personally, whereas in Atonement,
it is Drummond again (McEwan 2001: 305). Both Briony and Andrews
are told that the soldier is acute surgical, but theres no need to wear a
mask (McEwan 2001: 305; Andrews 1977: 98). McEwans narrative shifts
the emphasis here: unlike Briony, Andrews understands that this means
her patient is dying. McEwan also leaves out Andrewss explanation that
masks frighten patients, perhaps because this would prevent him from
getting straight into his description of Briony and Lucs meeting, and
also because McEwan does not want to show just yet Sister Drummonds
compassion, which becomes obvious after Lucs death.
The description of Luc Cornet in Atonement is much more romanticized than it is in Andrewss memoir. In an interview with John
Sutherland, McEwan explained that he altered this scene because he
wanted the reader to see some eruption of feeling from Briony: I saw
it as a love scene, even though its a dying scene [without this glimpse
of her emotional life] there would be something too unreliable about
her account of love (Sutherland 2002). Even so, McEwan does follow
Andrewss account: Briony makes the same mistake as Andrews and
takes the soldiers gauze dressing off. Both Briony and Andrews are

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so horrified by his injuries that they recoil, and the dressing begins to
fall. The details of what happens next are taken from Andrews, though
McEwan changes Lucs injuries slightly, as he wants him still to have
both eyes, while in Andrewss account the soldier has lost one. McEwan
also adds the detail of Briony catching the bloody sterile towel before it
hits the floor, furthering our sense of horror.
The most immediately apparent difference between the two passages
is that in Andrewss version the soldier is English, whereas in McEwans
he is French. McEwan has used French in intriguing ways before (see
Baxter in this volume, p. 24, and Broughton 1991). Here, it has one functional advantage; Brionys schoolgirl grasp of French forces her to translate nurse as sister, which leads to a discussion of Cecilia, and then to
their discussion of love. John, Andrewss patient, seems a polite public
schoolboy. His language is more dated than Lucs; at one point he says
I say jolly decent of her (Andrews 1977: 99). McEwan does follow
the events as Andrews describes them but John talks about school and
the army, which Luc does not, and when Andrews asks him his name,
he gives his surname and army number. Luc, by contrast, seems a boy
rather than a soldier. He is already more delirious than John is when
Briony first meets him; this forces Briony into a more intimate conversation, which gestures more obviously towards the domestic, family life
that Briony has lost and that Luc is about to lose absolutely. The details
of Lucs ramblings are different from Johns, concentrating more on his
sister, and then on Briony. Although Briony weakly protests that she
does not know him and that he is in hospital in London, Luc thinks they
have met before, and draws her into a conversation about his bakery and
his family. While this is all McEwans invention, the detail of the grating sound at the back of his throat (which signals that more is wrong
than Briony has noticed) and the description of his tight grip on her
hand are both from Andrews (Andrews 1977: 99, 100). Luc deteriorates
and starts thinking they are a couple, which gives the scene a very personal intimacy that Andrewss account does not have. Briony realizes
that Luc is dying and behaves accordingly. Like John, Luc asks her to
loosen his bandages, and like Andrews, Briony does not expect to see
half of his head and face shot away. This is the moment when Briony is
shocked into adulthood. Shortly afterwards, Luc and John die, suddenly
sitting bolt upright, making Briony and Andrews both catch them in
their arms. Both are unaware for a moment that the soldier has died.
The ending of this episode is significant for its dramatic inversion,
which underscores Brionys new-found adulthood. While McEwan
follows Andrewss narrative and even takes the basis of the dialogue
from her account, he reverses his previous tactic of portraying Sister
Drummond as a cold and distant character by making her more sympathetic and humane than the original. In other words, Brionys quick
mental change and empathy allow her to reinterpret the cold, harsh
environment. We can see further evidence of this in McEwans brief

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comment about Briony emptying bedpans. Both Radloff and Andrews

never minded changing bedpans: the patients were so humiliated by
them that the nurses would have felt self-indulgent complaining themselves (Andrews 2005: 2). For Briony, it is now a task which she had
never minded [. . .] less (McEwan 2001: 297). Thus, McEwan uses details
from Radloff and Andrews to create a dramatically coherent atmosphere and narrative trajectory that are satisfying from a literary point
of view, and which, while adapting the source material, are not wholly
historically inaccurate.

Conclusion: Between History and Fiction

Can we draw any general principles about McEwans use of historical
source material in Atonement? Or is it perhaps the case that the rules are
made, and unmade, by authors themselves? Rules about the mechanics
of using source material in fiction are, and may perhaps remain, notoriously hazy: unlike other forms of writing, there are no agreed rules as
to what kind of details can be used, or how; no rules governing the use
of phrasing, or scenario, or background detail. Does it make a difference if an author uses a single source extensively, or builds a narrative
out of a number of stories, or facts, from different sources? Is the extent
to which an author relies on a single source significant, and, if so, how
might an author properly acknowledge this? Fiction, after all, is not held
to the same standards of objective truth as history, but will we find footnotes spreading into novels in the future?
If we read Atonement as an answer to such questions, the novel offers
a passionate ethical argument against postmodern fabulism, reasserting the difference between historical and fictional forms of narrative,
and creating a new form of historiographical metafiction. By rejecting
postmodernisms erasure of the difference between history and fiction,
McEwan extends the debate about truth in narrative from the level of
the plot to the form of the novel itself, and historical fiction in particular.
This form, because of its difference from that of historical narrative, can
take us towards an understanding of the past that the source material
alone might not achieve. Atonement partakes of both the empiricist and
postmodern traditions, creating a dynamic tension that is both explored
and challenged in the next chapter, which investigates the form of
Atonement in great detail.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Postmodernism and the Ethics of

Fiction in Atonement
ALISTAIR CORMACK

Chapter Summary: In Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan performs a complex examination of novelistic discourse. The narrative involves a collision between different styles and modes of representation; in particular,
the Englishness of the novels setting and its self-conscious references
to a pantheon of canonical English writers seem at odds with its jarringly
postmodern conclusion. This chapter investigates this dissonance. It
begins by looking at the tradition of English fiction through a consideration of F. R. Leavis, after which postmodernism is discussed. Finally, a
reading of Atonement will be presented that looks at how the novel overlays these complex and contradictory discourses. It seems that McEwan
has written a novel that passes through modernism and postmodernism
to arrive back at a more traditionally realist form. The chapter concludes
by arguing that McEwan rejects the moral indeterminacy of postmodern
poetics, and pits against it a tradition of English empiricism.

The Great Tradition: McEwan and Leavis

Atonement is haunted by a host of English novelists. We encounter Jane
Austen, L. P. Hartley, E. M. Forster, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia
Woolf among others. McEwan engages with and updates Forster and
Austen, and the effect is to render newly significant their concerns.
Implicit in this account is the conviction that to name Forster and Austen
is adequate shorthand for the historical layers of English fiction (Lee,
2001: 16). One might argue that this is a rather narrow definition: English
fiction also contains Tristram Shandy (176067), Frankenstein (1817), and
Wuthering Heights (1847), novels that suggest very different traditions,
and modes of writing that are absent from Atonement. When critics talk
of McEwans debt to English fiction they are invoking a certain set of
novels, a certain set of values.

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One way to approach the values implicit in the works referred to in

Atonement is to look at F. R. Leaviss influential work on English fiction,
The Great Tradition (1948). Though Leaviss list of great writers Austen,
George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad is not identical to those
referred to above, those he specifically excludes Laurence Sterne, Emily
Bront and James Joyce match those excluded by McEwan. Leavis, as
we shall see, even makes an appearance in Atonement, and clearly represents more than mere period colour. In talking of the central figure in
his pantheon, Austen, Leavis outlines what he considers to be central to
the greatness of a novelist:
[W]hen we examine the formal perfection of Emma, we find that it can only
be appreciated in terms of the moral preoccupations that characterize the
novelists peculiar interest in life. Those who suppose it to be an aesthetic
matter, a beauty of composition that is combined, miraculously, with truth
to life, can give no adequate reason for the view that Emma is a great novel,
and no intelligent account of its perfection of form. It is in the same way true
of the other great English novelists that their interest in their art gives them
the opposite of an affinity with Pater and George Moore; it is, brought to an
intense focus, an unusually developed interest in life. For, far from having
any of Flauberts disgust or disdain or boredom, they are all distinguished
by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life,
and a marked moral intensity. (Leavis 1982: 1718)

George Moore, Walter Pater and Gustave Flaubert are guilty of aestheticism, by which Leavis means an overdeveloped interest in style at the
expense of morality in the sense of a reverent openness before life and
a concern for what Plato calls the good life. The great English writer,
instead, has a particular interest in the representation of reality: their
interest in their art is in fact an interest in life itself. This interest is
indicated by a personal investment in the investigation of right conduct,
or practical morality. The novel, considered in this way, is a vehicle for
the convincing portrayal of individual ethical choice in a social setting
created with unobtrusive verisimilitude. The sort of writers who are not
Great are non-mimetic, and are thus either amorally interested in form
or didactically interested in allegory.
There are two philosophical positions that go together to create
the foundation for the art that Leavis endorses. On the one hand we
find humanism, the belief that humanity has an unchanging essence
and therefore that the central concerns of life the search for love and
meaning perhaps are the same for all people at all times. On the other
hand we find empiricism, the notion that only what is made evident to
the senses, or is directly experienced, can be trusted. What these ideas
have in common is a distrust of anything that betokens abstraction,
which explains Leaviss distaste for the aesthetic, even within criticism
itself. His Englishness is one in which common sense dominates the

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mode of representation and orders moral perceptions; Leavis himself

represents Englishness in his own refusal to adopt an intellectual or
critical vocabulary. In the passage quoted above, the terms life and
moral are not examined or challenged; the reader should know what is
meant. It is no coincidence that they are a sort of non-intellectual way of
announcing empiricism (life) and humanism (moral), and although
it could be noted that Leavis is self-conscious about their unhelpfulness, it is this tradition to which Atonement refers by its many implicit
quotations.

As the Pompidou Does its Escalators: Postmodernism

Along with the attention paid to the Englishness of Atonement, critical
responses have also sought to explore the novels postmodernism. The
striking metafictional twist that ends the novel, in James Woods words,
makes the book a proper postmodern artifact, wearing its doubts on its
sleeve, on the outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators (Wood 2002).
Looked at in one way, postmodernism indicates a periodization and a
style of art; most obviously we can describe it as that which came after
modernism. This simple approach is important when reading Atonement
because the poetics of modernism are a subject for speculation throughout the novel. However, in a broader sense modernity is not a limited
moment of experimentalism in the arts, but a project in science, politics
and culture that issues from the Enlightenment, which stands for the
belief that the natural world can be finally understood through experiment, and that human life can be organized along rational and equitable
lines. Postmodernism represents the rejection of this belief, or at least
the sense that it has failed or is limited.
Whereas the Leavisite tradition of English fiction presents us with a
set of convictions about reality and morality, postmodernism brings a
rejection of certainties. Since there is no unmediated reality there can
be no certain truth; since there is no truth, there is no ground on which
to base universal moral principles. We are moving towards the second
approach to postmodernism. The doubts that arise in postmodernism
about absolute claims to truth reflect a sense that the accounts of human
activity that have offered complete explanations are fatally tainted by
a desire for order and power. Thus, widely different systems of knowledge Christianity, Marxism and the scientific notion of progress are
all attacked as generalizations that serve to occlude difference and suppress dissent. Postmodernism becomes a rejection of the Enlightenment
and counters with the sense that the end of scientific exploration is
nuclear weaponry, and that any attempt to control social life is inevitably fascistic. Art that derives from this position is often understood
to foreground the constructedness of narratives that claim the status
of clear and self-evident truth. Once again fiction can claim a renewed

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significance; by exposing its own processes of storytelling, novels reflect

how knowledge of all types is formed. As we will see, there are aspects
of Atonements representation of war and its questioning of the truth of
Brionys accounts that seem to fit into the paradigm of postmodernism
just outlined. However, the exact way in which this tessellates with the
novels Englishness still requires explanation.

From Modernism to Postmodernism: Fictional Fictions

Modernist novels are characterized by the absence of omniscience in
their narration and its replacement with a variety of fragmentary subjective perspectives. The first section of Atonement, set in 1935, seems
to embody just such a modernist poetics. Although delivered by a
third-person narrator, each chapter is closely focalized through the
consciousness of one character, except Chapter Five, which is shared
by the villainous duo of Marshall and Lola. For example, Chapter Six
follows the thoughts of Emily Tallis, the mother of Briony, Cecilia and
Leon. Suspecting she will suffer a migraine, she has withdrawn to her
darkened bedroom; like Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway, she is weighed
down with concerns about the social event taking shape around her.
She hears feet on the stairs and reflects that by the muffled sound of
them [. . .] they must be barefoot and therefore Brionys (McEwan 2001:
66). Her ability to deduce this fact, we learn, comes from practice:
Habitual fretting about her children, her husband, her sister, the help, had
rubbed her senses raw; migraine, mother-love and, over the years, many
hours of lying still on her bed, had distilled from this sensitivity a sixth
sense, a tentacular awareness that reached out from the dimness and moved
through the house [. . .] a conversation that penetrated a wall, or, better, two
walls, came stripped of all but its essential twists and nuances. (McEwan
2001: 66)

Emily surmises that she can hear Briony stomping off in a mood and
Cecilia belatedly taking flowers to Marshalls room; she can also smell
her older daughters illicit cigarette, imagining that she would be wanting to impress Leons friend, and that in itself might not be a bad thing
(McEwan 2001: 67). The staging of the scene seems designed to flaunt
a novelistic discourse settled on the cornerstones of modernism: the
hypersensitive consciousness, in darkened solitude, attentive to each
creak of the house; the maternal solicitousness, offering a persuasive
but finally partial interpretation of the sounds and smells she encounters. The way in which the narrative attends to individual perception
seems almost too impeccable. Indeed, as we will see, there are further
clues that the exemplary modernist text we encounter is being subtly
subverted.

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Most of the chapters in the first section are given to 13-year-old

Briony Tallis. To begin with, it appears strange that her perception of
events should be the most significant. However, as the story progresses
we realize that she has a role, in both the plot and its telling, that brings
to mind L. P. Hartleys The Go-Between (1953), a novel also narrated by
a figure who as a child had been involved as intermediary in a tragic
class-traversing love affair in a country house. An event which proves
central to the novel occurs when Briony glimpses from an upstairs window the sexually charged encounter between Robbie and Cecilia by the
fountain. Briony is already a creator of fictions, and she muses on what
she has witnessed as an aesthetic problem:
[S]he sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she
could include a hidden observer like herself. [. . .] She could write the scene
three times over, from three points of view [. . .] None of these three was bad,
nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to
be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. (McEwan 2001: 40)

We may find ourselves reflecting that we are reading just such a series of scenes. For instance, the presentation of Emily Talliss thoughts,
a backwater of the plot, is primarily to show her independent existence
in just the way Briony describes. The proto-modernist insight offered
above prompts a jarring break from the primary diegesis; the narration
strangely, and suddenly, leaps forward from 1935: Six decades later she
would describe how, at the age of thirteen, she had written her way
through a whole history of literature (McEwan 2001: 41). Despite this
fissure in the surface of the text, on a first reading of the first section it is
easy to be self-deluding and to take the virtuoso display of modernism
at face value. Wrapped up in the drama of what Briony refers to later
as the crime and the frequent psychological insights with which we
are presented, the reader does not attend too much to the role as writer
which the text has assigned to the youngest Tallis.
However, in the third section of the book we are forced to reconsider
what we have read. It is 1940 and Briony is now a nurse. In the period
immediately before her training she has written a novella entitled we
find out later Two Figures by a Fountain. Reflecting on her literary practice, Briony argues:
The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots.
Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters.
They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very
concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had
exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no
longer turn. . . . It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the
conscious mind as a river through time [. . .] She had read Virginia Woolfs

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The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being
worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction,
could capture the essence of the change. (McEwan 2001: 2812)

It is decidedly unsettling for a reader engrossed in a novel that scrupulously recreates the conscious mind as a river through time to find
a character musing on precisely this topic. The full force of this selfreferentiality is not felt for another 50 pages. Briony has sent her story to
a magazine called Horizon, whose editor (who signs off Yours sincerely,
CC, referring to the magazines editor Cyril Connolly) writes an appreciative rejection letter. The letter corrects a variety of infelicities of style
and implausibilities of action. As Frank Kermode points out, changes
from novella to novel can be tracked; for example, in the original Cecilia
goes fully dressed into the fountain, the vase is Ming not Meissen,
and the Tallises fountain has been described as a copy of one in the
Piazza Navona (Kermode 2001: 8). More importantly, in the novel the
real impetus of the event has been restored to it. Brionys first attempt,
Connolly thinks, was rather dry:
Your most sophisticated readers might well be up on the latest Bergsonian
theories of consciousness, but Im sure they retain a childlike desire to be told
a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens. (McEwan 2001: 314)

Connollys reference is to Henri Bergsons theory, so influential on modernist aesthetics, that the consciousness is never static, and that instead
it is constantly changing due to present impressions integrating with
past memories. The letter makes us aware of our own collusion in the
postmodernism that takes us beyond the focus on the representation of
consciousness to the exclusion of action. It is not enough for us to witness passively the flow of a mind at work; we desperately want to know
what has happened. Briony, it turns out, was wrong when she argued
that there need not be a moral.
There are several aspects of this narrative trick that can be described
as postmodern. First we have historical personages (Connolly and
Elizabeth Bowen) who write for a real magazine commenting on a fictional fiction, indeed on specific phrases we have already read. More
importantly, we now realize that we have been duped. We are forced
to return to the scene at the fountain indeed to the whole first section
and regard it as pastiche: what we read in good faith in the first section as a Woolf-like modernism a piecing together of what actually
happened from a variety of perspectives we must now regard as
an imitation by an absent author-demiurge (McEwan) of one characters own modernist reconstruction of the event, which occurs entirely
within the fictional boundary of Atonement. That this is the story of
a novelist, not a teller of any other type, and a modernist novelist at
that, seems sufficient grounds to argue for the formal postmodernism

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of Atonement. However, in the epilogue, dated 1999, we have further

evidence. Briony addresses us in the first person for the first time and
makes an argument that seems, in postmodernist style, to challenge the
notion of an independent reality: When I am dead, and the Marshalls
are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my
inventions (McEwan 2001: 371). What right, she asks, does reality have
to arrogate to itself the primary ontological position? However, if this
is postmodernism, it is not the postmodernism of the type that revels
in fragmentation and celebrates moral relativism. Although there is
plenty of evidence of self-reflexiveness and pastiche in Atonement, the
sort of airy exhilaration that often characterizes works in this mode is
absent from McEwans novel. If it is postmodern, it is not postmodernism of the playful celebratory type. At the end of the novel both Briony
Tallis, our narrator, and we, her readers, are profoundly troubled by
the uncertainties we face.

Postmodernist and Leavisite Readings of Atonement

It is plain that Atonement is postmodern in the sense that it comes after,
and explicitly criticizes, modernism. Many critics have extended this
reading to suggest that it participates in the broader postmodern critique of the Enlightenment and representation. Brian Finney has argued
that Atonements two time frames are on either side of a huge cultural
divide:
In 1935 the West was suffering from a collective myopia in the face of the rise
of fascism, which only a minority on the left seemed prepared to confront.
Robbie is typical of the collective delusion at that time with his fantasies of
a future life spent as a family doctor and casual reader. The West is about to
be hurled into a war that will usher in a radically different, postmodern era
to which this narrative, completed in 1999, belongs. (Finney 2002: 778)

This view might seem surprising given the comfortable familiarity of

the country house setting. Attentive readers will have noticed, however,
that McEwan has undermined conventional expectations: the ambience of solidity and family tradition (McEwan 2001: 145) is misleading
in a house only a few years old; the folly overlooking the lake, though
picturesque at a distance, at close inspection has a mottled, diseased
appearance and exposed laths, themselves rotting away, which resemble the ribs of a starving animal (McEwan 2001: 72). This is an England
whose tradition is a visibly decomposing fake.
Finney poses his argument against those reviewers who, perhaps
ignoring its unsettling undertones, enjoyed the first section of the novel,
but were disappointed by what they considered the gimmicky nature of
the novels metafictional conclusion. He points out that the metafictional

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element is present throughout both through the self-conscious narration of Briony and through the novels obtrusive intertextuality and
argues that literary self-consciousness is at the heart of what the novel
is trying to achieve. The reader is being refused the comforts of classic
realist narrative:
To draw attention to the narrative process is not an act of self-indulgence on
the part of the metafictional novelist [. . .] It is central to the books concerns
[. . .] [W]hen novelists force us to understand the constructed nature of their
characters, they invite us simultaneously to reflect on the way subjectivity
is similarly constructed in the non-fictional world we inhabit [. . .] [T]he use
of metafiction in the book serves to undermine the naturalization of social
and economic inequalities that especially characterized British society in
the 1930s. (Finney 2002: 76)

Finney argues that the novel forces us to see how we ourselves make
sense of the world through the very processes of narrative that Briony
has revealed to be so misleading. Furthermore, he implies that the way
in which tradition is shown to be a barely convincing artifice exposes it
as a means through which people are oppressed.
Though there is much to recommend the reading offered by Finney,
there are two main problems with his argument. In the first place,
Finney adopts Catherine Belseys criticism of the naturalizing function
of histoire in the classic realist text (see Finney 2002: 7071 and Belsey
1980: 72). However, Atonement could never really be read in this way:
the first section is not an undermined classic realism, but an undermined modernism. This is key: classic realism is characterized by a
mediating discourse what Colin MacCabe influentially named metalanguage whereas modernism presents its consciousnesses without
an overarching and containing discourse (MacCabe 1979: 1338). This
sort of point of view modernism is what we encounter in the first section and is commented on by Brionys novella Two Figures by a Fountain.
McEwan is thus not using his novel to challenge the ideological functions of a novelistic discourse assaying verisimilitude, but rather to
attack static, morally disengaged, plotless modernism. McEwan criticizes the two poles of writing: the moralistic simplicity of melodrama
in Brionys naive Trials of Arabella and the amoralistic disengagement of
modernism in her later work. It is worth noting here that in its distaste
for the didactic and the aesthetic, Atonement is very much in accord with
Leaviss view of art. It is important that we grasp Atonements rejection
of modernism, as it is modernism that critics like Belsey and MacCabe
present as a felicitous alternative to classic realism. They argue that
modernisms refusal to produce a hierarchy of discourses meant the
reader could not situate herself in the text in a stable subject position.
If Atonement is an attack on modernism it cannot be so easily co-opted
to a Belsey-like critical position: that is to say, the novel cannot be a

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criticism of our reification of a shared ideological construction of the

real, but is rather a criticism of a certain novelistic form. In a sense,
there is a narrow literary dimension to Atonement, which critics have
been rather reluctant to note.
A far more important problem with Finneys argument concerns
how the ending of Atonement works. He argues that the force of the
criticism implicit in the novel is against the naivety of the bad reviewers who want the simplified wish fulfillments of classic realist fiction
(Finney 2002: 81), and in favour of the postmodern notion that we are
all narrated. In the following passage there is a break in the logic of the
argument:
From the start, [Brionys] powerful imagination works to confuse the real
with the fictive [. . .] The young Briony suffers from the inability to disentangle life from the literature that has shaped her life. She imposes the patterns
of fiction on the facts of life. To complain about the metafictional element in
the book is to fail to understand that we are all narrated, entering at birth
into a pre-existing narrative which provides the palimpsest on which we
inscribe our own narratives/lives. (Finney 2002: 789)

It is true that Briony is guilty of imposing fiction on reality and that her
confusion of literature and life causes her crime. It is less clear that the
implication of this insight is that we are all narrated. McEwan suggests
that there is an overarching thing called the real beyond the narratives
we construct about our lives, and that we are morally obliged to know
that real so that we can distinguish it from our fantasies. If we are all
narrated, there is no exterior reality which can be used to judge the
inaccuracy of Brionys literary imagination. McEwans insistence on the
real over our illusions is the opposite of a postmodern insight. The crime
in Atonement, as McEwan points out, is generated by the danger of an
imagination that cant quite see the boundaries of what is real and what
is unreal (Reynolds and Noakes 2002: 19). In answer to some of the questions raised by Natasha Alden in the previous chapter (see pp. 5769), it
could thus be argued that the effect of the metafiction is not to undermine certainty about the real, but to present a critique of the processes
by which the imagination works. Rather than belonging to the uncertain
postmodern era, Atonement belongs to a world in which Enlightenment
thinking, far from being in crisis, is confident enough to chastise fiction
and its fripperies: an identifiable real world lies beneath, and casts a critical eye on, the fictional surface created by the novels narrator.
This takes us back to the tradition of English empiricism outlined
earlier, which, McEwan suggests, finds its most important source in the
work of Jane Austen:
What are the distances between what is real and what is imagined? Catherine
Morland, the heroine of Jane Austens Northanger Abbey, was a girl so full of

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the delights of gothic fiction that she causes havoc around her when she
imagines a perfectly innocent man to be capable of the most terrible things.
(Reynolds and Noakes 2002: 20)

However, Sense and Sensibility (1811) offers an even more fruitful comparison to Atonement than Northanger Abbey (1803), from which Atonement
derives its epigraph. Sense and Sensibility takes its title from contemporary debates about knowledge and right action; the notion of sense as
it relates to sense impressions (and thus empiricism) is linked to the
idea that good sense recommends adhering to orthodox social codes,
propriety and manners. Briony is an inheritor of Marianne Dashwood,
someone guilty of sensibility understood as the selfish indulgence of
internalized emotions and imagination. The question of Englishness
turns out to be relevant after all: McEwan has written a story that passes
through modernism and postmodernism to return to the heart of the
Great Tradition of English novelists.
McEwan has asserted that not only Briony but Robbie too has a relationship, a deep relationship with writing and storytelling (Reynolds
and Noakes 2002: 19). Indeed, in two significant passages involving him,
this relationship is coupled with the opposition of sense to sensibility.
In the first, Robbie is reflecting on his decision to become a doctor:
There was a story he was plotting with himself as the hero, and already its
opening had caused a little shock among his friends. [. . .] Despite his first,
the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlour
game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable
adjunct to a civilised existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr Leavis
said in his lectures. It was not the necessary priesthood, nor the most vital
pursuit of an enquiring mind, nor the first and last defence against a barbarian horde [. . .] [H]is practical nature and his frustrated scientific aspirations
would find an outlet, he would have skill far more elaborate than the ones
he had acquired in practical criticism, and above all he would have made his
own decision. (McEwan 2001: 91)

We must carefully trace the levels at work here. McEwan is writing as

Briony, who in turn is ventriloquizing Robbies thoughts as part of her
act of atonement, while these thoughts are themselves a story he was
plotting. At first glance this would seem the epitome of a critical postmodernism, investigating the ways in which narrative functions in literature and life. Nevertheless, there is no sense in which the truth or
life disappears. Beneath the accreted layers of narrative the manifest
content of the passage is, rather, simply an attack on the imagination.
Robbie suggests that literature has merely a peripheral role as part of a
civilized existence; claims for its centrality are absurd. Dominic Head
has argued that, in light of these comments, the implication of Robbies
fate is the need for a more urgent re-evaluation of cultural work than

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Leavis can offer (Head 2007: 173). However, Robbies story is one leading him away from literature and into life. Heads criticism of Leavis is
thus rather unfair, for the implicit empiricism (Robbies practical nature)
that informs the decision is entirely consistent with Leaviss own position that literature is only valuable when in service to morality and
reality. That is to say, while in the diegetic world of Atonement Robbie
may be opposed to Leavis, as a character in a novel he is a device a
means by which Leavisite aesthetics may be promoted. Robbie, in the
English tradition, rejects the sensibility of literature for the sense of a
career in medicine.
Part Two forms the key to Atonement. It extends the critique of storytelling into the public arena. The act of mediation is complex in the first
example, but it becomes even more complicated, and of even greater
urgency, in the next. Here, Robbie is drifting off to sleep at the end of
the Dunkirk episode:
They would be forming up in the road outside and marching to the beach.
Squaring off to the right. Order would prevail. No one at Cambridge taught
the benefits of good marching order. They revered the free, unruly spirits.
The poets. But what did the poets know about survival? About surviving
as a body of men. No breaking of ranks, no rushing the boats, no first come
first served, no devil take the hindmost. (McEwan 2001: 264)

If Briony must learn to rid herself of her literary imagination then

British culture must, too, divest itself of its controlling myths. In this
case, the notion of the Dunkirk Spirit is savagely demythologized; the
retreat is replayed in all its contingent horror. The idea of a cohesive
Spirit is replaced by an event marked by division between the services (an airman is attacked [25053]) and between classes. The passage quoted above suggests a degree of self-accusation on both Brionys
and McEwans part: What did the poets know of survival? (264) Robbie
asks and the two authors hover above him anxious and indicted. They
may do their best to imagine, but the success of their version depends
on a trickery involving the apparently random deployment of convincing detail what Briony terms, in the last section, the pointillist
approach to verisimilitude (McEwan 2001: 359). Once again empiricism
implicitly demolishes the value of literature, for even the most random
and demythologizing account of war can never offer an experience that
approaches its reality. The reader, too, is indicted as party to the vampirism of war literature.
However, the passage goes beyond these implications. In Marilyn
Butlers influential Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) she characterized her subject as anti-jacobin: Austens writing displays affinities
with much late-eighteenth century British writing which reacted to,
and rejected, liberal ideas and threats that emerged from the French
Revolution. Such fiction provided an opposition to sentimental writing,

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which assumed that human instinct is essentially good and preferred

the individual over established institutions and conventions. Butlers
account of Sense and Sensibility offers a way into this debate:
Jane Austens version of sensibility that is, individualism, or the worship of the self, in various familiar guises is as harshly dealt with here
as anywhere in the anti-jacobin tradition. [. . .] Mrs. Ferrarss London is
recognizably a sketch of the anarchy that follows the loss of all values but
self-indulgence. In the opening chapters especially, where Marianne is the
target of criticism, sensibility means sentimental (or revolutionary) idealism, which Elinor counters with her sceptical or pessimistic view of mans
nature. (Butler 1997: 194)

In Robbies association of poets with unruly freedom, he aligns the

imagination with selfishness. The alternative is the good order that
guarantees survival. Throughout McEwans novel the imagination is
portrayed as dangerous, untrustworthy and originating in self-interest.
Atonement has thus inherited an updated form of anti-jacobinism.
McEwan returns to Austens conservative notion that knowledge of the
self and the principles on which moral action is based must be mediated
through conventional social obligation.
The final place in which we must test this anti-postmodern reading is
at Atonements close, when the texts self-consciousness is most obvious.
We are told that the section in Balham is a fabrication that Robbie and
Cecilia are dead and are forced to recognize the constructedness of
the world in which we have been immersed. As McEwan has stated, the
novel is less about the crime than the process of atonement through
writing (Reynolds and Noakes 2002: 20). However, this does not clarify
the implications of Brionys confession. Although Atonement certainly
wants us to feel the force of its ambiguity, as readers we feel sympathy
for Briony and admire her candid self-analysis while feeling desolated
by Robbie and Cecilias death. However, in the end there seems little
uncertainty. For the novel to belong to the world of the postmodern
for it to argue, as Finney suggests, that constructing false fictions is
unavoidable there has to be doubt about what really happened. Here,
there is none. The real, against which Briony struggles, as she did in the
case of the rape, is the unavoidable truth of the lovers death; depicting
them has not brought them back to life or enabled her to assuage her
guilt. Fiction is presented as a lie a lie that, if believed, comforts, distorts and finally produces unethical action. There is no atonement and
fiction is necessarily a failure because Briony knows what is true.
The status of fiction in Atonement is clearest in the passage in which
Briony is explaining why she has to wait for her death before publishing:
The Marshalls have been active about the courts since the late forties,
defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity. They could ruin

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a publishing house with ease from their current accounts. One might almost
think they had something to hide. Think, yes, but not write. The obvious
suggestions have been made displace, transmute, dissemble. Bring down
the fogs of the imagination! What are novelists for? (McEwan 2001: 370)

The last two-and-a-half sentences are Brionys quotation from an imaginary friend, publisher or editor advising her on how she might publish
without becoming open to litigation in itself ironized, given the plagiarism row traced in Chapter Four of this book. However, the view of
literary production put forward here is consistent with the implicit view
held throughout Atonement. The imagination is a fog, something that
obscures facts and misleads the unwary. The answer to her own question What are novelists for? is surprisingly damning. Whether they are
fairytale fabulists, scrupulous modernists, or self-conscious postmodernists, they are here to lie.
Atonements metafiction is not there to present the reader with the
inevitable penetration of the real with the fictive. Instead the novel
serves to show that the two worlds are entirely distinct: there is the
world of the real and the world of literature, and woe betide those who
confuse the two. For the novel to be postmodern there would have to be
ontological uncertainty rather than the overwhelming confidence about
what is true with which we are confronted.
McEwan has a profound interest in the ethical dimension of the
processes of reading and writing fiction, but this does not mean that
he is tempted to believe that we are all narrated. This latter position is
tainted with a moral indeterminacy that his work consciously rejects.
The brunt of the criticism of the imagination implicit in Atonement falls
not on Briony alone, however. By referring to Austen, the novel implicitly attacks postmodern novelists and their celebration of the fictive.
These latter-day Jacobins one thinks perhaps of Angela Carter and
Salman Rushdie, and, ironically, McEwans earlier self, who wrote The
Child in Time are guilty of making over-elaborate claims for the novel,
and the literary imagination in general. Against the dangers of relativism and self-delusion implicit in postmodern poetics Atonement pits a
tradition of English empiricism.

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CHAPTER SIX

Ian McEwans Modernist Time:

Atonement and Saturday
LAURA MARCUS

Chapter Summary: At the heart of all Ian McEwans fiction is a concern with time and the experience of temporality. This chapter examines McEwans interest in modernist time the explosion of interest
in dynamic temporalities and variable time caused by scientific progress in Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005). It analyses modernist
time by examining The Child in Time (1987) and moves on to explore
McEwans narration of time via his engagement with Virginia Woolf.
McEwan brings her work back into the fold because she plays out a
movement between the dissolution and recreation of character in the
novel, and she explores the interrelationship of individual consciousnesses. McEwans fictions ultimately confound absolute distinctions
between realist, modernist and postmodernist writing, while at the
same time revealing the most acute awareness of the particularities of
times and of histories.

At the heart of all Ian McEwans fiction is a concern with time and
the experience of temporality, from the time of the fiction narrative
duration, the looping backwards and forwards in the temporalities of
memory and anticipation to the ways in which characters and readers themselves experience time. McEwans signal narrative technique is
his representation of the extended temporalities entailed in a singular
occurrence: a car-crash; the collapse of a hot-air balloon; the approach of
menacing dogs in an isolated landscape; a struggle by a fountain over a
vase; the flight-path of a burning aeroplane. In The Child in Time (1987),
the central protagonist, Stephen Lewis, successfully steers his car to
safety after a collision and, as he becomes aware of the ways in which
time has contracted and expanded, marvels at how duration shaped
itself round the intensity of the event (McEwan 1987: 95). From novel
to novel, McEwans characters come up against this experience of time

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and its shaping and warping: it also becomes the essential matter of the
readers experience.
McEwans fiction is further preoccupied by the relationship between
public and private histories, and with the ways in which our individual
experiences occur in tandem, or at odds, with historical events. Testing
the concept of collective experience and the extent to which the timesense of the individual is aligned with that of the group or mass, a number of his novels represent public and historically-charged events which
take place within the public sphere of the modern city: demonstrations,
celebrations, protests. In Black Dogs (1992), the narrator, Jeremy, and
his father-in-law, Bernard, a former member of the Communist Party,
travel to see Berlin for themselves as the wall surrounding West Berlin
comes down in 1989, and division cedes to the promise of unity. It was
Bernard who had first alerted Jeremy to the events taking place, in a
phone call which interrupts Jeremy and his wife Jennys love-making.
They resume, for it was important that we maintain the primacy of the
private life [. . .] But the spell had been broken. Cheering crowds were
surging through the early morning gloom of our bedroom. We were
both elsewhere (McEwan 1998: 69). They turn on the television and
watch as [t]he camera bobbed and weaved intrusively into wide-armed
embraces (McEwan 1998: 69). The relationship and, at times, tension
between the private life and the public event are intertwined with the
question of story-telling, the piecing together of lives in the biographical
form, the complexities created by competing accounts of events, and the
need to shore up the past through narrative and in the face of memorys
losses.
In Atonement (2001) McEwans preoccupation with the experience
and representation of time is intertwined with his explorations of the
nature of fiction and the fictive. This entails complex negotiations with
the work of modernist writers and with modernist time the exploration of dynamic temporalities and variable time caused by scientific
progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel
both inhabits this time and articulates its cultural and temporal distance from it. This temporal double consciousness has its parallel in the
double nature of Atonements engagement with the relationship between
experience and representation, and with the imbrications of reality and
fiction. Its fictive self-reflexivity is achieved within an apparently realist
framework in which the reader becomes fully engaged in the immediacies of the depicted events which are retrospectively revealed to be
fictional. I think that Im always drawn, McEwan has stated, to some
kind of balance between a fiction that is self-reflective on its processes,
and one that has a forward impetus too, that will completely accept the
given terms of the illusion of fiction (Noakes and Reynolds 2002: 20).
The achievement of Atonement is to bring these two dimensions together
so seamlessly, and to integrate the forward impetus with the posthumous ironies (McEwan 2002: 48) of retrospective narration.

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Saturday (2005), in its representation of a day in the life of a man and

a city, is indebted to the great modernist city texts of James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf Ulysses (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). The nature
of this debt or legacy is, however, by no means straightforward. Like
other contemporary novels which rewrite earlier fictions Michael
Cunninghams re-imaginings of Virginia Woolfs life and fiction in
The Hours (1998) is a central example Saturday enacts a split between
the texts knowledge that it is a repetition of a fictional predecessor
and the novels characters unawareness of this fact. Living their lives
as if for the first time, they are nonetheless caught in the literary webs
of echo, allusion, reference. McEwan has on occasion adopted a critical
attitude towards what he has perceived as Woolfs refusal of character
in her novels, but his recent fiction, in particular, is profoundly engaged
with the forms of time, narrative and consciousness which lay at the
heart of her fictional experiments: the one-day novel; the irruptions of
the past into present time; the distinction between external and internal
time time on the clock and time in the mind (Woolf 1992a: 95), in
Woolfs phrase and the variable temporalities that result from this disjunction; the construction of a passage or tunnel through which time
travels. McEwan explores and deploys these temporal and narrative
structures, but he does not attempt merely to reproduce the modernist
text, nor to create a parody or pastiche of it. His later novels are, rather, in
dialogue with the structures of modernist fiction, which revolutionized
the ways in which stories could be told. He acknowledges the debt even
as he calls attention to the necessary and inevitable distance between
his own time and that of the modernist novelist.

The Temporalities of The Child in Time

How do we live in time, and what is the relationship of the individuals time to that of the public and historical event? These questions preoccupied nineteenth-century writers and we could certainly position
McEwan as an historical novelist and writer of historical fiction, as
Natasha Alden asserts in Chapter Four. His period is to a significant
extent World War Two and its aftermath: his parents time. This suggests that we live in, and through, the values of the generation, or generations, preceding our own. To this extent, we are never fully present at
and in our own times. This suggestion of an ideological time-lapse or
time-lag is realized, in an unfamiliar dimension of experience, in The
Child in Time, when Stephen travels to visit his wife Julie, from whom he
has separated after the devastating experience of their young daughters
abduction. Walking to the cottage in which Julie is living, he passes a
country pub through whose window he sees a young man and woman,
dressed in the clothing of the mid-twentieth century, engrossed in discussion. Through the window he meets the eyes of the young woman

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who he knew, beyond question, was his mother (McEwan 1987: 59), but
though she seems to look at him she simply returned Stephens gaze
she does not appear to see him. This quasi-encounter, and the failure of
reciprocity, removes all the security of his being, sending him spinning
through a time before, or outside the known structures of, identity and
temporality. Stephen later questions his now elderly mother about his
experience, and she tells him of the time, early in her marriage, where
the recently discovered fact of her pregnancy had seemed an inconvenience to his father, and where the continued existence of the foetus had
hung in the balance. She had decided to have the baby when she had
seen, as she sat in the pub, a face at the window, the face of a child, sort
of floating there [. . .] [A]s far as I was concerned then, I was convinced,
I just knew that I was looking at my own child. If you like, I was looking
at you (McEwan 1987: 175). As Dominic Head argues, McEwan here
employs the post-Einsteinian conception of the plasticity of time and
space to allow his protagonist to intervene in the past and secure his
own future (Head 2002: 235).
In The Child in Time, McEwan creates a character, Thelma, an academic physicist whose subject is the nature of time. She serves as the
theorist of time in the novel, explaining to Stephen (and us) the ways
in which time in the universe is conceived by scientists. The commonplace understanding of time as linear, marching from left to right, from
the past through the present to the future, is either nonsense or a tiny
fraction of the truth. We know this from our own experience. An hour
can seem like five minutes or a week. Time is variable (McEwan 1987:
11718). It is also possible that time can grind to a halt altogether (as
in black holes), or move backwards. The engagement of McEwans
novel with, in Peter Middletons and Tim Woods phrase, the temporal
discourse of the new physics (Middleton and Woods 2000: 117), connects it to other late-twentieth-century novels Middleton and Woods
instance Margaret Atwoods Cats Eye (1988) and Ursula Le Guins The
Dispossessed (1974) in which physicists of time play significant parts.
The highly complex and speculative concepts of time in contemporary
physics which differ radically between theories of relativity (in which
time is relative to the observer) and quantum mechanics (in which time
is external to the system) are not, however, easily incorporated into
narrative fiction, though they have shaped the directions of science fiction as a twentieth-century genre. In The Child in Time Thelma can offer
Stephen no explanation for his experience, though its confounding of
the ordinary conceptions of the ordering of time bears some relation
to the hypotheses at work in the scientist Stephen Hawkings A Brief
History of Time (1988), which include the possibilities of time lived backwards and travel into the past. She does suggest, however, that:
It was not entirely fanciful to imagine that there would one day be mathematical and physical descriptions of the type of experience Stephen had

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recounted [. . .] Think how humanised and approachable scientists would

be if they could join in the really important conversations about time, and
without thinking they had the final word the mystics experience of timelessness, the chaotic unfolding of time in dreams, the Christian moment of
fulfilment and redemption, the annihilated time of deep sleep, the elaborate
time schemes of novelists, poets, daydreamers, the infinite unchanging time
of childhood. (McEwan 1987: 120)

The utopian conceptions of bringing together scientific time and

social time (Middleton and Woods 2000: 117) and the languages of science and literature are central to A Child in Time as a novel of ideas.
They also resonate, however, albeit in different guises, in Atonement
and, most markedly, in Saturday. These novels of character and consciousness are preoccupied not only with time, temporality and duration, but with the competing claims of science/medicine and literature
to truth. They also possess an extreme self-consciousness about the
stakes and status of fiction and storytelling, and an intense, if often
implicit, relationship to other fictional works, in particular those of
early- and mid-twentieth-century writers. The remainder of this chapter explores McEwans preoccupation with the nature of the fictive, as
it relates to his negotiations with the work of modernist writers and
modernist time.

Time and Knowledge in Atonement

The ironies of Atonements retrospective composition are unlikely to be
fully comprehended at a first reading. The intense jolt to the first-time
reader occurs at a late stage in the novel when it is made clear that we
have been reading the final draft of a novel, written by the central character, Bryony Tallis, who makes her initial appearance, as an aspiring
13-year-old writer, on the novels first page. The two characters Cecilia
and Robbie whose destinies have become a matter of such moment,
have not survived within historical time. Their lives have been extended
only in Bryonys narrative, the consolatory nature of which is presented
in coded form in the third section of the novel when Bryony, nursing a
dying Frenchman, Luc Cornet, tells him of her sister and the man she is
to marry. In readings beyond the first, the insistent use of prospect and
retrospect, and the invocation of posthumous ironies, will point to a
knowledge initially concealed by the power of the narrative drive. Time
becomes the medium and instrument of irony and pathos, as the lineaments of the present are imagined from the perspectives of a future
which neither Cecilia nor Robbie, the characters who are represented
most fully in this mode of anticipated retrospect, will in fact live out
the unavailable future, in a phrase used later in the novel in connection with the dead Luc (McEwan 2002: 311). Cecilia envisages a future

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vantage point from which she will look back at a present which has
become the past: Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met
a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and
whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest
of her life with gratitude, or profound and particular regret (McEwan,
2002: 47). Robbie projects himself forward into the man he will never in
fact become, imagining his future as he walks to the Talliss house for
an evening whose outcome will be the destruction of every plan he has
made: The hard soles of his shoes rapped loudly on the metalled road
like a giant clock, and he made himself think about time, about his great
hoard, the luxury of an unspent fortune. He had never before felt so
self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience
for the story to begin (McEwan 2002: 92). Our stories, though, are not
always ours for the making.
In the long first section of the novel, which recounts the events of
a single day, the third-person narration enters, in turn, the consciousnesses of four of the characters depicted: Bryony, her sister Cecilia, their
mother Emily, and Robbie, son of their cleaning woman Grace Turner.
If Cecilia and Robbie, who first become lovers during the evening of
this day, are caught in the imaginings of time and subjected to its failed
possibilities and ironies, Bryony and Emily inhabit, and are inhabited
by, another set of terms, in particular those of knowledge and vision,
knowing and seeing. Bryony is explicitly represented as the fabulist, the
maker-up, and the writer, of stories. Writing is her way of ordering the
world, and its initial pleasures are those of miniaturization to be compared with the satisfaction of her neatly arranged model farm and the
satisfactions of completion. Yet as the day progresses, Bryony begins to
understand something of complexity of the role of fiction in representing multiple and conflicting points of view.
An author often cited by McEwan as an influence on his work,
Henry James, proclaims: The house of fiction has in short not one
window, but a million a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather (James 2003: 45). Throughout Atonement Bryony, like
Henry Perowne in Saturday, is represented as a watcher from windows. James, writing at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, represented such ways of seeing as central to the architecture
of the modern novel. The intense focus, in the work of James and
his contemporaries, including Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford,
on the relationship between consciousness and vision and its multiple perspectives, challenged the idea that there is a single, objective
way of viewing and describing events, objects and people. Bryonys
witnessing of the scene by the fountain the encounter between
Cecilia and Robbie which lies at the novels heart already witnessed
by the reader through the eyes of a seemingly omniscient narrator,
and her failure to comprehend what she sees, leads to a new understanding of writing: she sensed she could write a scene like the one

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by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself
(McEwan 2002: 40):
She [Bryony] could write the scene three times over, from three points of
view [. . .] She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive [. . .] And only in a
story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal
value. That was the only moral a story need have. (McEwan 2002: 40)

Yet this is not a fully or finally achieved vision: Bryony subsequently finds
herself unable to deal with contradiction and imposes an interpretative
order on events, which has fatal consequences for those around her.
Emily writes nothing and sees nothing from the bed to which illness
confines her, yet possesses a form of sixth sense, which she describes as
a tentacular awareness that reached out from the dimness and moved
through the house, unseen and all-knowing [. . .] What to others would have
been a muffling was to her alert senses, which were fine-tuned like the cats
whiskers of an old wireless, an almost unbearable amplification. She lay in
the dark and knew everything. The less she was able to do, the more she was
aware. (McEwan 2002: 66)

Lying in bed, she hears the sound of a mans voice in the room in which
her niece Lola is staying. She beamed her raw attention into every recess
of the house. There was nothing, and then, like a lamp turned on and off
in total darkness, there was a little squeal of laughter abruptly smothered. Lola, then, in the nursery with Marshall (McEwan 2002: 69). She is
reassured by her identification of the sounds of the house: wrongly so,
for it is Marshall who will be responsible for the damage that follows.
The novel thus puts into question the very concept of narrative omniscience, of the unseen and all-knowing narrator. Emily is indeed aware
that she could send her tendrils into every room of the house, but she
could not send them into the future (McEwan 2002: 71).
The terms of knowing and seeing/unseeing are brought together
with those of Bryonys crime at the close of the day, the false identification of Robbie as Lolas rapist: the understanding that what she knew
was not literally, or not only, based on the visible (McEwan 2002: 169).
Bryonys dangerous knowledge results from her need for a story that
makes sense of the events she witnessed earlier in the day but whose
meaning she has not understood: Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain,
the obscene word in the letter she carried from Robbie to Cecilia, their
love-making in the library which Bryony interprets as Robbies assault
upon her sister. Throughout the first section of the novel, she understands sexual passion as coercion and violence.
Issues of knowledge and vision function at two levels in the narrative:
they relate to the question of what characters know and see, or imagine

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they know and have seen, and to the question of narration itself and
the workings of narrative omniscience. This is brought into relationship
with telepathy and clairvoyance, the shillings glimpse of the future
(with all the irony that this phrase imparts, in a novel of unavailable
futures) provided by Robbies mother Grace (McEwan 2002: 88). A story
was a form of telepathy, Bryony thinks, as she contemplates the question of intention and of minds other than her own: By means of inking
symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from
her mind to her readers. It was a magical process, so commonplace that
no one stopped to wonder at it (McEwan 2002: 37). The thought chimes
with Nicholas Royles argument that narrative omniscience is a misnomer, bringing with it an inappropriate religious baggage, for the ways
in which communication occurs between author and character, author
and reader the reading of minds, the entry into the minds of others,
and the communication of the contents of these minds to readers is not
omniscient, Royle argues, but telepathic. The category of the omniscient narrator, so familiar that its presuppositions go unquestioned,
conceals the magical process, the magical thinking that lies at the heart
of literary writing and reading (Royle 2003: 261).

Atonement and Woolf

A further form of communication is the one that occurs between works
of literature themselves. Woolf is directly named twice in the novel and
her words haunt not only Bryony but the novel itself or, more accurately, the echoes of Woolf become Bryonys style and signature, covertly
alluding to her authorship of the entire work. In the passage quoted
above, in which the mother beamed her raw attention into every corner
of the house, we hear echoes of Woolfs Mrs Ramsay, of the identification between the mother and the house and her becoming the light
of the lighthouse: She looked up over her knitting and met the third
stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes,
searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie (Woolf 1992b: 70).
The first draft of the novel which Bryonys atonement will require
her to write again and again is explicitly linked to Woolfs fiction, as the
following quotation underscores:
Despite her journal sketches, [Bryony] no longer believed in characters. They
were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century [. . .] Plots too
were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn [. . .] It was
thought, perceptions, sensations that interested her [. . .] If only she could
reproduce the clear light of a summers morning, the sensations of a child
standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallows flight over a pool of
water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. She had

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read Virginia Woolfs The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a
new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change. (McEwan 2002:
2812)

The terms change and transformation are central here, echoing their
repetition in the novels first section. Robbie, finally acknowledging
his desire for Cecilia, is in no doubt that a great change was coming
over him (McEwan 2002: 80); entering a room, and seeing light falling through a glass door in fiery honeycomb patterns, he is surprised by the transformation (McEwan 2002: 87). Literature is central to
Robbies imaginings, and the versions of the letter he writes to Cecilia
are referred to throughout as drafts which, like Bryony, he works over
again and again. The obscene draft which he sends unintentionally is
said to have been charged by his reading of Lawrences Lady Chatterleys
Lover (1928), a novel whose plot is another ghost in McEwans narrative
of cross-class love and eroticism, above all in Robbies deliberate and
precise usage of the word cunt. Entering Cecilias consciousness, we
are told of the ways in which she also feels herself to be changed and
transformed by her years at Cambridge (McEwan 2002: 103). Robbie and
Cecilias subsequent love-making marked a transformation, changed
their childhood relationships to each other (McEwan 2002: 135). Love is
rendered as the momentous change they had achieved, as the transformation of the self (McEwan 2002: 137), a topos explored in Saturday,
and assessed by Sebastian Groes in the next chapter (see pp. 1036).
The impact of the days events on Bryony is a bewildering one, but it is
underlain by the sense that it has brought about changes that had made
her into a real writer at last and transformed what had gone before
(McEwan 2002: 121). The repetition of the two terms in these varying contexts, and their later return in Bryonys adult reflections on the change
and transformation that has occurred in modernist writing with its
clear echoes of Woolfs playful assertion that On or about December
1910 human character changed (Woolf 2008: 38) creates a complex
nexus of literary values. Change and transformation are to be perceived as dimensions of perception and sensation, and of the alteration
in the ways in which the modernist work represents the world, but they
are also processes acting upon characters who are, or feel themselves to
be, changed and transformed by events and passions. The transformation that is being worked in human nature, McEwan appears to be suggesting, is to be represented through character and not in opposition
to it, and this would seem to be the position Bryony comes to adopt as
she drafts and redrafts her novel, the final draft of which is given to us
whole and entire.
The first draft, by contrast, would appear to have eschewed character
and plot. Bryony receives a letter from the editor of Horizon magazine
(initialled CC, for Cyril Connolly) rejecting the novella, entitled Two

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Figures by a Fountain: Something unique and unexplained is caught.

However, we wondered whether it owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs Woolf (McEwan 2002: 313). It is suggested that the novella
requires development, the backbone of a story: If this girl has so fully
misunderstood or been so wholly baffled by the strange little scene that
has unfolded before her, how might it affect the lives of the two adults?
Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion? (McEwan
2002: 313) This is, of course, the way in which the novel unfolds. The
letter also provides clues that the narrative we have already read that
of the scene by the fountain in the first section has undergone revisions following the letters suggestions: the Ming vase has, for example,
become a Meissen vase. We are being prepared as readers and yet
when it comes we are not prepared to be told that the narrative is
Bryonys and not the impartial truth of historic narration or histoire.
The shock of this knowledge, when it comes, exposes the extent of our
investment as readers in the illusion of fiction.
The fictionalism of Atonement is closely connected to Woolfs writing, and the novel of Woolfs most strongly echoed is To the Lighthouse
(1927). Atonement deploys a version of its tripartite structure: a single
day in the house in the country, the middle section time passes and the
war and, finally, the return to the house, when everything that happens is an attempt to complete what was left unfinished. The trip to the
lighthouse, Lilys painting of Mrs Ramsay and, in Atonement, the enacting of the young Bryonys play, whose performance was abandoned
some six decades previously these are all gestures of completion which
come too late. The questions raised here are those of the relationships
between belatedness and atonement, narration and reparation, and of
McEwans novel as late Woolf. McEwan is drawn to the redemptive
nature of modernist time, in which the work of art offers compensation
for the losses wrought by time and history, but he deploys it with the
full knowledge of its identity as a consolatory fiction.
In its central section, Atonement gives us the experience of war the
Second World War and the retreat of the British and French at Dunkirk.
This section transmutes the empty house and the passage of time in To
the Lighthouse into an intensely realized representation of war and its
impact upon bodies. One might be tempted to say that this is the male
novelist, supplementing, or filling in, or giving flesh albeit of a torn and
wounded kind to the sort of events and experiences at which Woolf
would not look directly, in her refusal to heroize the protagonists of a
war (in her case World War One) to which she was profoundly opposed.
Yet Atonement narrates the war (we later learn) through Bryonys imaginings. The women nurses experiences of war, and their sensations of seeing and touching broken and maimed bodies, occupy the third part of
the novel. The distorted, fragmented and surreal perceptions of body
parts and faces that characterize the novels opening section, which are
linked to the strange sensations brought about by the heat of the day

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and the tensions within the household, return in its second and third
parts as the realities of warfare.
The connective images of fragmentation also serve to link the private pre-war world of the country house with the depredations of war.
Change and transformation operate not only at the level of the individual character and the private life: the sense of something momentous, but unnamed and unnameable, on the point of occurrence is also
part of the public history of the mid-1930s, at a time when, as Brian
Finney writes in his account of Atonement, the West was suffering from
a collective myopia in the face of the rise of fascism which only a minority on the political left seemed prepared to confront (Finney 2002: 77).
The vase, the central prop in the mise-en-scne of the Two Figures by
a Fountain broken, repaired and broken again along its fault-lines
creates a direct link to the preceding war. The post-war years transmute
into the inter-war years. The family situation which has led to the presence in the household of the Talliss cousins Lola and her two young
brothers is described as a bitter domestic civil war: fathers in the novel
are for the most part absent, literally or emotionally. The private, in
Finneys words, is linked to the public by the figurative use of the word
war, which calls attention to its polysemantic usage (Finney 2002: 77)
in that both realms are linguistically linked by the same word.
The thematic and perceptual continuities between the first and the
central parts of Atonement are further hints of the overarching nature
of Bryonys narration, continuities otherwise masked by the different
styles deployed in the novels different sections. There are moments, for
instance, at which a Woolfian perception seems to enter the war-zone:
Each successive ridge was paler than the one before. He saw a receding
wash of grey and blue fading in a haze towards the setting sun, like
something oriental on a dinner plate (McEwan 2002: 194). This is the
language of The Waves (1931), anticipated in the first section of the novel,
as a prelude to Robbies reveries: In the early evening, high-altitude
clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became
richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow
hung above the giant crests of parkland trees (McEwan 2002: 78).
Some of the comments contained in the letter are, Horizons editor
writes to Bryony, those of Mrs Elizabeth Bowen: like Woolfs, Bowens
words, as McEwan suggests, haunt the novel. The imbrications of time
and war, in particular, connect Atonement to Bowens World War Two
novel The Heat of the Day (1949), in which characters seek to preserve the
fragments of their shattered worlds. The dead were not yet present, the
absent were presumed alive, we are told in Part Three of Atonement, of
the hours before the wounded men arrive at the hospital from France
(McEwan 2002: 287). The terms of presence and absence, and their connections to posthumous existence, were at the heart of Bowens haunted
and haunting representations of the city during war-time: Most of all
the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their

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anonymous presence not as todays dead but as yesterdays living felt

through London (Bowen 1950: 86).
The presence in McEwans text of these echoes and influences raises
two significant, and at points interrelated, issues: the relationship of the
contemporary writer to his or her modernist predecessors, and the male
writers negotiations with womens voices and with women writers.
McEwans specific engagement with Virginia Woolf remains ambiguous. As we have seen, Bryonys novella, Two Figures by a Fountain, so
influenced, we are told, by The Waves and by Woolfs ideas about fiction,
is represented as an evasive text, whose refusal of plot, of development,
is a denial of human acts and their implications. And yet in Atonement,
McEwan also turns back to Woolf, and, in particular, to the ways in
which she continued to play out the dissolution and the recreation of
character in the novel, and the separation between, and interrelationship of, individual consciousnesses.
The novels epilogue or coda moves into a different form of voicing,
as we are presented with Bryonys first-person narration. She describes
the ways in which her atonement has taken the form of her writing her
novel over and over again. Nothing is disguised, Bryony asserts in the
closing section, London, 1999, but the final version of the novel the
novel we have just read takes a stand against oblivion and despair:
The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist
achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes,
she is also God? (McEwan 2002: 371).
For some critics, the epilogue to Atonement was an unwelcome addition, and the blunt, postmodern ending a betrayal of the novels earlier
subtleties. It could, however, be argued that the epilogue becomes all the
more necessary to preserve the balance McEwan seeks between the selfreflective fiction and the illusion of reality. It produces, moreover, a highly
ambiguous closure, giving us something of the shifts and alterations in
Bryonys understandings of the work of fiction explored at earlier stages
in the novel. The atonement achieved or not achieved by Bryonys
fiction-making remains an uncertain, ill-defined concept. As Dominic
Head argues, McEwan seems to be taking some distance from the position, adopted by a number of his literary contemporaries and indeed suggested by a number of his own comments in interview, that narrative
empathy is necessarily an ethics of fiction (Head 2007: 174). The novelists imaginative entry into other minds can never obviate the fact that
these minds are, ultimately, his or her own creation. Bryonys conundrum,
moreover, uses terms that the novel had earlier seemed to repudiate
omniscience, the impersonal God-figure of the author/narrator pitting
these against a word and concept atonement whose religious register
they would, on the surface, seem to share. The belatedness, which reinscribes the structure and closure of To the Lighthouse, defines the return to
the house and the performance of Bryonys play: the breach in time can in
part, but only in part, be bridged by the work and workings of art.

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The epilogue is in fact driven not only by the question of the fictive
but by the implications of the now elderly Bryonys vascular dementia, which will slowly eradicate first memory and then identity. This
context has a very personal resonance for McEwan, who has written of
the destruction of his mothers memory through the same neurological
disease, the effects of which he also explores in Saturday, in his representation of his central protagonists mother and her loss of the structures
of time and temporality: Everything belongs in the present (McEwan
2005: 164). Increased longevity has, in the contemporary Western world,
brought with it both more memory and more memory to be lost: McEwan
is among a number of contemporary memoirists and novelists writing,
shoring up memory, in the face of parental usually maternal mental
dissolution. This has in turn led to an increased fascination with mental
processes, a concern with the nature of empathy, and a redefinition of
the modernist preoccupation with consciousness in neurological terms.
All of these lie at the heart of Saturday. The source of the violence which
will be directed against Perowne and, later in the day, against his family, is the damaged, defective brain of the character Baxter: Here is the
signature of so many neurodegenerative diseases the swift transition
from one mood to another, without awareness or memory, or understanding of how it seems to others (McEwan 2005: 96).

Saturday and the Modernist Novel

Woolfs writing, and specifically Mrs Dalloway, also reverberates throughout Saturday. Events in Clarissa Dalloways day are closely matched by
those in Henry Perownes: they include the viewing of a spectacle in
the sky; the preparations for an evening party; blockades in the city,
on the Saturday of the anti-war protest; the embedding of memories
which back the present with the past; the world seen by the sane and the
insane, side by side. Time and the city, time in the city, are at the heart of
both novels. The structure of the day, the chiming of the hours, and the
march of the city appear to propel the protagonists of both Mrs Dalloway
and Saturday ever forward, but spaces of memory and subjectivity the
spheres of private time are hollowed out from within linear time to
produce, in Ann Banfields phrase, arrested moments (Banfield 2007:
56). Yet there are important differences as well as similarities in the
ways in which private and public time, and the relationship between
the two, are represented in Woolfs and McEwans novels.
These differences and similarities have been picked up and developed by Mark Currie, who, in About Time (2007), frames his discussion
of time in Saturday through the philosopher and narrative theorist Paul
Ricoeurs account of time and narrative in Mrs Dalloway. In Woolfs
novel, the passing of the day as it progresses is punctuated by the tolling of Big Ben, whose strokes are, Ricoeur argues, part of the characters

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experience of time and of its fictive refiguration in the novel. As the

numerous events of the day accumulate, pulling the narrative ahead,
it is simultaneously pulled backwards by excursions into the past. The
striking of Big Ben represents chronological time; what is significant,
Ricoeur notes, is the relation that the various protagonists establish
with these marks of time (Ricoeur 1985: 105). In Ricoeurs analysis,
monumental history secretes a monumental time which has its audible expression in chronological time. Hence the complicity of clock
time with the figures and institutions of authority and power in the
novel, located at the heart of the imperial city. Septimus Smith, the shellshocked victim of World War One, is both the hero and the victim of
the radical discordance beween personal time and monumental time.
The horror of time rises up from the depths of monumental history
the Great War bringing back from the dead the ghost of Septimuss
war comrade Evans. Clarissa, while sharing Septimuss experience of
the terror of time, is saved (Woolf 2000: 31) by her ability to plunge into
the very heart of the moment (Woolf 2000: 4) and by a relationship
with time which is both collusive and subversive: her time is sounded
by the church bells of St Margarets which come in the wake of the great
booming voice of Big Ben.
In Curries reading of the novel, the incident which begins Perownes
day, the burning plane in the sky, is significant for the role it performs
in transforming clock time into monumental time, since it is through
the rolling reports of TV news that this incident passes from the realm
of private occurrence into the public domain (Currie 2007: 130). Currie
argues that the rolling events of TV and radio news, which function as a
form of clock for Perowne, define a distinctly modern relation between
the present and its representation as retrospect, a relation which seems
to define the reality of an event in terms of its representation, and that
this mastery which is lacking in the experiential present is valued
by Perowne over the reinventions of literature (Currie 2007: 130). He
possesses a mastery over the present which produces an alignment
between his inner life and the public world (Currie 2007: 131). Whereas
Mrs Dalloway offers a variant of the relation of internal to monumental
time in which the anachronicity of the former confronts the relentless
forward motion of the latter, Saturday corroborates the scientific mind
style with its monumental history (Currie 2007: 131).
This reading to some extent disregards the ways in which remembered events in Saturday a retrospection primarily linked to Perownes
familial relationships rather than to the public domain pull the present
back into the past and create hollowed-out moments or intervals equivalent to those of the modernist novel, in which subjectivity, desire and
memory are allowed space and time to burgeon. Curries arguments do
open up, however, the complex terms of McEwans relationship to his
modernist predecessors and the implications of the ways in which he
reframes their words. Leaving his house for his days activities, Henry

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Perownes sensations directly echo those of Clarissa Dalloway at the

opening of Woolfs novel. Clarissa, stepping out into the June day, recalls
the moments in her youth when she had burst open the French windows
and plunged at Burton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller
than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a
wave; the kiss of a wave (Woolf 2000: 3). The plunge is simultaneously
into the present of the novel and the past of its central character through
the threshold of the window, at which Clarissa is at other junctures in
the novel also a watcher. In Saturday, McEwan writes:
As he steps outside and turns from closing the door, he hears the squeal of
seagulls come inland for the citys good pickings. The sun is low and only
one half of the square his half is in full sunlight. He walks away from
the square along blinding moist pavement, surprised by the freshness of
the day. The air tastes almost clean. He has an impression of striding along
a natural surface, along some coastal wilderness, on a smooth slab of basalt
causeway he vaguely recalls from a childhood holiday. It must be the cry of
the gulls bringing it back. He can remember the taste of spray off a turbulent
blue-green sea, and as he reaches Warren Street he reminds himself that he
mustnt forget the fishmongers. (McEwan 2005: 71)

Perowne thus tracks his own thought processes and their paths of association, and the ways in which present impressions bring back sensations from the past. He has no access, however, as Currie observes,
to the unknowable conditions in which his fiction life is embedded,
including what he doesnt know of his own intertextual relations to The
Odyssey, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway (Currie, 2007: 132). For Currie, this
unknowing extends beyond Perowne to the novel itself, its commitment
to a realistic frame rendering its self-knowledge incomplete, in that it
cannot show even the most basic awareness of its own fictionality, and
so of its own place in the debate between literature and science (Currie
2007: 132). Yet it could be argued that the novels intertexuality constitutes precisely its awareness of its own fictionality and that Saturday is
vigilant less in the preservation of its realistic frame than in its commitment to, in Heads phrase, the immediacy of human consciousness
which goes beyond mastery of the present in its attempt to understand
and represent the workings of the mind (Head 2007: 192). As in the passage quoted above, with its strong echoes of Mrs Dalloway, McEwan is
paying a form of homage to modernist representations of consciousness, while, as Head notes, moving in a new direction with his attempt
to produce a diagnostic slice-of-mind novel [. . .] rather than a modernist slice-of-mind novel (Head 2007: 192). McEwan brings to the fore
a new interest among writers in neuroscience and the relations between
mind and brain: the novel would appear to be committed to a new way
of aligning narrative and mental processes, and the forms of knowledge
and enquiry associated with both literature and science.

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The question of McEwans engagement with Woolf, and other modernist texts, is thus a highly complex one, and explored in detail by Groes
in the next chapter. McEwans early fictions might have situated him
securely as a postmodernist writer. Yet his more recent novels suggest a
closer relationship not only with modernism but with the texts that preceded that movement and moment. This is borne out by McEwans interest in the question of character in fiction. Woolf seems to represent for
McEwan a rejection of the centrality of plot and character: he returns
these to the novel, while extending Woolfs, and the modernists, focus
on consciousness and complex temporalities. His fictions ultimately
confound absolute distinctions between realist, modernist and postmodernist writings, while at the same time revealing the most acute
awareness of the particularities of time and of history.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Ian McEwan and the Modernist

Consciousness of the City in
Saturday
SEBASTIAN GROES

Chapter Summary: Ian McEwans early work presents an archetypal

Darkest London of poverty, oppression, squalor and reduced humanity,
but The Child in Time (1987) introduces a shift in this vision by refracting the
city through the lens of modernist texts, ideas and images. Saturday (2005)
intensifies McEwans modernist renegotiation of London by bringing the
city to life via a complex intertextuality. On the one hand we find canonic
modernist works and, on the other, the Victorian cultural critic and poet
Matthew Arnold (18221888). This chapter uses McEwans representation
of the contemporary city as a means of understanding his complex, uncertain meditation on the state of the world at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, the divorce of the private and public realms, the relationship
between science and the arts, democracy, and the war in Iraq.

Darkest London
Ian McEwan is one of the foremost explorers of our experience of the
modern city, and London in particular has played a central role in this
project. His early short stories portray an archetypal version of what
Raymond Williams called Darkest London, a city of darkness, of
oppression, of crime and squalor, or reduced humanity (Williams 1973:
221; 227). These tales align the city with a literary mythology of London
as a monstrous and unjust place where young innocents are corrupted,
and dragged into abject underworlds of slave labour and prostitution.
In Disguises (1975), children are abused by a network of paedophiles in
an Islington home. Set in and around Finsbury Park, Homemade (1975)
tells the story of a young man who rapes his sister to lose his much
resented virginity. Butterflies (1975) also presents a dark city: there are
no parks in this part of London, only car parks. And there is a canal, the

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brown canal which goes between factories and past a scrap heap, the
canal little Jane drowned in (McEwan 2006a: 72) she drowns after the
narrator sexually assaults her. He also notes that a glass of water from a
London tap has been drunk five times before, evoking the image of the
city as unclean (McEwan 2006a: 73). The irony of the imagery, itself recycled, suggests that McEwan acknowledges and challenges traditional
treatments of London as a stage for either innocence or experience.
The darkest London tradition tends to feature the illegitimate parts
of the city and the separated East End in particular (Williams 1973: 229).
McEwans stories feature Soho, famously associated with pornography,
prostitution, adult entertainment and the gay scene. In Pornography
(1978), a Soho porn peddler who cheats on two nurses gets his comeuppance in the form of castration. Likewise, the rehearsal of a pornographic Soho musical in Cocker at the Theatre (1975) ironizes the
commodification of the body within the urban economy by staging it
as adult entertainment. McEwans city is a spectacle of lust and excess,
and a theatre of manipulation and moral decline, crawling with lecherous and violent lowlife. In the dystopian Two Fragments: March 199
(1978), the capital is reduced to post-apocalyptic rubble. When the nameless protagonist walks along avenues of rusted, broken down cars, he
stops in Soho to warm himself by a fire, (McEwan 2006f: 53) and is
approached by a Chinaman, who takes him home to Chinatown, where
a few upper-storey windows gleamed dully [and] gave a sense of direction of the street but they shone no light on it (McEwan 2006f: 54). This
is a metropolis where culture, technology, civilization and law have
vanished, leaving an underworld where society and human thought
have been reduced to the basest level of consciousness. The Child in Time
(1987) is set in an overcrowded, hellish future London, a lost time and
a lost landscape (McEwan 1988: 12), in which the protagonists daughter is kidnapped from a South London supermarket. In the portrayal
of London as a desert where restrictions on water use had reduced the
front gardens of suburban West London to dust (McEwan 1988: 85),
McEwan rehearses a modernist clich: The little squares of lawn were
baked earth from which even the dried grass had flaked away. One wag
had planted a row of cacti. The spiritual, cultural and moral depletion
evoked by this image overtly echoes T. S. Eliots London in The Waste
Land (1922): What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of
this stony rubbish? (Eliot 1969: 61). McEwans answer is again ambivalent: on the one hand, the sinister publisher Charles Darke becomes a
powerful and manipulative politician as anarchy takes hold of a North
London suburb; on the other, the protagonist, Stephen Lewis, manages
to reclaim his adulthood and sense of social and moral responsibility
only after regressing into a childlike state.
The Child in Time complicates the darkest London stereotype by focusing on geographical areas different from the earlier work and, as the
echo of Eliot suggests, by offering different images. Paul Edwards has

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focussed on McEwans juxtaposition of trains and cars as a symbolic

clash between nineteenth- and late-twentieth-century culture and technology under Thatcher (Edwards 1995), but the description of a 1930s
housing development in West London intensifies McEwans play with
signs of modernity: They were squat, grubbily rendered houses dreaming under their roofs of open seas; there was a porthole by each front
door, and the upper windows, cased in metal, attempted to suggest
the bridge of an ocean liner (McEwan 1988: 85). Enduring Love (1997)
repeats this image in Joe Roses description of his apartment building:
In the twenties something resembling the Queen Mary ran aground
in Maida Vale, and all that remains now is the bridge, our apartment
building (McEwan 1998: 54). The dating and situating of the building,
and McEwans repeated use of the image, are striking. The ocean liner
is a stock symbol of modernity: the machinery of the twentieth century connotes international travel, a spirit of progress and optimism
about the fate of culture and civilization. This sign of modernity creates
the false impression that the stylized and harmonious architecture is
actually able to shut out the chaos, madness and violence of darkest
London embodied in Joes stalker, Jed. The shifting representation of
London marks an important adjustment to McEwans earlier portrayal
of the city by refracting the representation of the city through the lens
of modernity.

A Modernist Consciousness of the City:

Three Types of Intertextuality
Saturday (2005) takes Fitzrovia, and a building based upon McEwans
own home, as the setting for a further intensification of this modernist renegotiation of London. The novel narrates 24 hours in the life of
neurosurgeon Henry Perowne who, after having woken in an unusual
state of mind (McEwan 2005: 17), intends to enjoy his day of leisure,
which will also see his family reunited after a period of disharmony.
The days trajectory is thrown off its logical course when the protest
march against the impending war in Iraq (15 February 2003) blocks
off his intended journey through the city, after which his car collides
with that of the criminal, Baxter, who later invades his Regency home
(McEwan 2005: 81; 206). The novel openly engages with the post-9/11
state of the world, and the questions raised by the anti-war demonstration. Although Perowne excludes himself from this march, he experiences his own ambivalence as a form of vertigo, of dizzy indecision
(McEwan 2005: 141), the book is saturated with debates about the war.
At the close of the eventful day, the reader understands that the ambiguity of this uncultured and tedious medic (McEwan 2005: 195) is a
reflection of current uncertainties as well as a potent form of resistance
to both State dominance and to individual self-righteousness.

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At the heart of the novel lies the reinvigoration of a topos as old as

storytelling itself the transformation of the self, which has its forebears
in classic writers such as Homer and Ovid. The trajectory of Perownes
growing self-knowledge is tied to his engagement with, and changing
perception of, a wide variety of cultural and political debates at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. These discussions are shaped by
the many competing ideas, voices and literary references to, amongst
others, Sophocles (McEwan 2005: 221); Thomas Wyatt (McEwan 2005:
200); Shakespeare (McEwan 2005: 58; 124; 125; 134); John Milton (McEwan
2005: 134); William Blake (McEwan 2005: 27); Mary Shelley (McEwan
2005: 157); Jane Austen (McEwan 2005: 27; 133; 156); Charlotte Bront;
Dickens; Darwin (McEwan 2005: 6; 55; 58); George Eliot (McEwan 2005:
156); Robert Browning (McEwan 2005: 134); Matthew Arnold (McEwan
2005: 231; 269; 279); Tolstoy (McEwan 2005: 66); Flaubert (McEwan 2005:
66); Joseph Conrad (McEwan 2005: 6; 95); Kafka (McEwan 2005: 133);
Henry James (McEwan 2005: 58); Saul Bellow (McEwan 2005: epigraph;
12223); Philip Larkin (McEwan 2005: 56; 138); James Fenton (McEwan
2005: 130; 135); Ted Hughes (McEwan 2005: 130); Craig Raine (McEwan
2005: 130); and Andrew Motion (McEwan 2005: 130; 135). We also find
an abundance of references to music, from Wagner (McEwan 2005: 29),
Beethoven (McEwan 2005: 68), Schubert (McEwan 2005: 77) and Bach
(McEwan 2005: 22) to blues-rock and jazz musicians such as Eric
Clapton (McEwan 2005: 26; 132); Branford Marsalis (McEwan 2005: 33);
Ry Cooder (McEwan 2005: 33); John Coltrane (McEwan 2005: 68); and
John Lee Hooker (McEwan 2005: 131); to painters including Mondrian
(McEwan 2005: 78), Czanne (McEwan 2005: 68) and Howard Hodgkin
(McEwan 2005: 181); to artists including Cornelia Parker (McEwan 2005:
142); and to social science writers Fred Halliday (McEwan 2005: 32)
and Paul Ekman (McEwan 2005: 141). McEwan utilizes three distinct
types of intertextual engagement: first, direct citation and the borrowing of voice; second, the construction of parallels; and, third, echo and
allusion.
Alongside the overwhelming extent of intertextual reference, the
other distinctive characteristic of Saturday is to be found in its representation of the city itself. As a reference to James Joyces classic short story
The Dead (1914) suggests, the explicit site for McEwans meditations
is the city, grand achievement of all the living and all the dead whove
ever lived here, [which] is fine too, and robust (McEwan 2005: 77; Joyce
1996: 256). In a television interview with Melvyn Bragg, McEwan stated:
Inseparable from the idea of having a novel right in the present was to do
London again, or to do London properly. To get the taste and flavour of
it. (Bragg 2005). This remark indicates the significance of London within
the novel, and hints at McEwans desire to correct his earlier representation of the city as a site predominantly of darkness and regression, but
although Saturday restores the traditional image of the city as the seat of
civilization and culture, and of light and learning, the city also retains

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its qualities as a place of darkness. The evolution of McEwans post-9/11

thought is thus apparent in the recasting of his image of the city, and in
the intertextuality which so distinguishes the form of Saturday. Rather
than adopting the aggressive mode of the highly-politicized work of the
1930s generation of poets, McEwan brings London to life by establishing
a dialogue with, on the one hand, modernist works written during the
third decade of the twentieth century and, on the other, the Victorian
cultural critic and poet Matthew Arnold (18221888).

McEwan and the Modernist Hypercanon

Saturday starts with a quiet homage to a writer whose work has been
instrumental in shaping McEwans fiction: Franz Kafka (18831924). The
opening scene of Saturday engages with the classic Ovidian thematics
of transformation by creating a parallel with Kafkas classic modernist story The Metamorphosis (1912). Both texts begin with the description of the physical sensation of waking, and Perowne repeats Samsas
initial reaction by moving to the window. However, whereas Gregors
arms and legs have changed into those of an unwieldy insect, Perownes
limbs feel better than usual. Whereas Gregor feels depressed and idiotic,
Perowne is euphoric, and presumes that he is entirely rational. Kafkas
domestic anti-fairy tale narrates how Gregor is ousted by his family, but
Saturday is centred on the homecoming of Daisy. McEwan exchanges
the magic realist dimension of Kafkas story for realism, and inverts the
components of the Kafka story. For Kafka, modernity entails a bestial,
alienating experience Gregors mechanical, bureaucratic approach to
his predicament symbolizes a descent into an animal consciousness that
implicitly criticizes the bourgeois conscience. However, rather than fetishizing such alienation, McEwans novel sets out to investigate homeliness and happiness as a public and political realm.
This subversion of Kafka is affirmed later on in the novel when
Perowne recalls John Grammaticus giving The Metamorphosis to
Daisy, who in turn makes her father read it:
Perowne, by nature ill-disposed towards a tale of impossible transformation, conceded that by the end he was intrigued [. . .] He liked the unthinking cruelty of that sister on the final page, riding the tram with her parents
to the last stop, stretching her young limbs, ready to begin a sensual life. A
transformation he could believe in. (McEwan 2005: 133)

Saturday affirms both the significance of classical mythology and the

thematics of transformation by mediating these through modernist
parallels, but the text rejects the more radical experiments of modernist and postmodernist literature, including the McEwan of The Child in
Time (McEwan 2005: 67).

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McEwans opening section also brings to the fore his emulation of

modernist representations of consciousness. The distance between
Kafkas aloof narrator and the bourgeois consciousness of Samsa foregrounds the latters unwillingness to voice his regret at submitting his
life to the greater good of family and the nation, his passivity in the face
of his graceless, pathetic death. The hiatus between narrator and character also implies that language forms an artificial barrier between the
self and its narration, that it fragments experience. Perowne is conscious
of this gap within the world of Saturday (he notes Gretes unthinking
cruelty, suggesting he is aware of Kafkas third-person narrator), but
he is unable to take into account this process when it comes to himself.
When looking out on to two figures in the square below, Perowne not
only watches them, but watches over them, supervising their progress
with the remote possessiveness of a god (McEwan 2005: 13). This process of fragmentation of the self is ironized, however, by Perowne himself being narrated by a fictional authorial presence. It is made clear to
the reader that Perownes experience is at the mercy of the narrators
locutions, which constantly deride him by pointing out the limits of
his frame of reference. For instance, a reference to Shakespeares St
Crispins Day speech [. . .] is lost on Perowne (McEwan 2005: 125), an
allusion to Henry V which gains additional force when Perowne compares himself to a king (McEwan 2005: 269). Perowne also tries to connect his ber-rational mind to the creative members of his family by
referring to Blakes poem Auguries of Innocence (1805) and comparing
surgery to music, for which the narrator mocks him: To see the world
in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping
and aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme (McEwan
2005: 27, my emphasis). This disparagement foregrounds the role of the
reader, who is forced to collude with the curious voice, based in a complex language and referentiality narrating Perownes consciousness
from the inside while incessantly offering a commentary upon him. It is
ironic that many reviewers and critics conflated Perowne with McEwan
himself, given that he the implied author clearly fashions a critical distance from both his narrator and his protagonist (cf. Sardar 2006;
Kowaleski Wallace 2007: 470). In fact, the attentive reader should be
unsure of how to precisely interpret the relationship between Perowne
and his narrator. The loss of narratorial authority undermines any comfortable or simple reading of the novel, while capturing the post-9/11
climate of anxiety.
McEwans reworking of classical ideas via his modernist interest in
consciousness continues with the creation of parallels with two specific
hypercanonic texts, namely James Joyces Ulysses (1922) and Virginia
Woolfs Mrs Dalloway (1925), both of which recount events taking place
on a single day. Each captures the minutiae of the quotidian consciousness, and engages in representing the symbolic journeys of their protagonists through a capital city. Reviewers and critics have stressed the

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similarities between these texts and Saturday (Kemp 2005; Tait 2005;
Head 2007: 192; Currie 2007: 129, 132, and Marcus in this collection).
For Joyce and Woolf, limiting the narration to 24 hours allowed them
to focus on the nature of experience in relationship to time. Yet, as a
narrated space of time, their meditations on temporality found a reflecting metaphor in the complexities of the modern city, whose perpetual
metamorphoses symbolized the modern condition, and drew attention
to the workings of human consciousness.
Saturday overtly acknowledges Joyce in the final line of the novel,
with Perowne thinking faintly, falling: this days over (McEwan 2005:
279), which echoes the final line Joyces story, The Dead (1914), in which
Gabriel Conroy heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling (Joyce 1996: 256). McEwans quotation suggests an
interest in the formally less radical mode of Joyces early work rather
than the more difficult works such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake
(1939). McEwan also refracts Joyces legacy via Saul Bellows riposte to
Ulysses, Herzog (1964), which provides the epigraph to Saturday. This
direct quotation acknowledges that the socio-cultural context is largely
defined and shaped by American power a major concern within
Saturday while also recognizing an important formal influence upon
the representation. Rather than choosing the stream-of-consciousness
technique of Joyce or Woolf, Saturday makes use of Bellows more conventional mode of narration, the restrictive third person discourse combined with the use of free indirect style, which he intensifies by using
the present tense mode. Another sign of McEwans preferred literary
company is to be found in Perownes very name, which is derived from
a character in Ford Madox Fords tetralogy Parades End (192428). This
is significant because Fords novels, which sit outside the conventional
canon of modernist work, are set partly on the Western Front during
the Great War and to a large extent in London: the thematics of war and
place further connect Saturday with Parades End.
The ideas behind Ulysses are, however, important for our reading of
Saturday. The course and detail of events in Saturday echo Joyces masterpiece: while Perowne makes his morning coffee, he meditates on the
technical refinement and aestheticization of the kettle (McEwan 2005:
69), mirroring the scene in which Bloom makes breakfast for Molly, who
orders him to Scald the teapot (Joyce 1992: 75). After breakfast, Bloom
goes to his outhouse to defecate (Joyce 1992: 835), drawing attention to
the mundane and profane aspect of life, and in Saturday we also follow
Perownes thoughts while he urinates and defecates (McEwan 2005: 57).
A subtle but important parallel between Saturday and Ulysses is to be
found in the relationship between the protagonists and their mothers.
In Joyces novel, Stephen Dedalus is ashamed of his refusal to pray at his
mothers deathbed and he is subsequently haunted by her ghost (Joyce
1992: 811). Perownes uneasy relationship with his mother, Lilian, is
fraught with strikingly similar contradictions. We learn that she was

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admired as a great swimmer by the young Henry and his friends, having a superhuman nature and showing off her demonic speed just for
him (McEwan 2005: 157). However, echoes of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein
(1818), in which the creature is described by Frankenstein as a daemon
having superhuman speed (Shelley 1996: 65), give Lilian a monstrous
edge. Like Dedalus, the young Henry patronizes his mother, behaviour
he comes to regret:
There was nothing small-minded about her interests. Jane Austen and
George Eliot shared them too. Lilian Perowne wasnt stupid or trivial, her
life wasnt unfortunate, and he had no business as a young man being condescending towards her. But its too late for apologies now. Unlike Daisys
novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved. (McEwan 2005: 156)

Perowne has no opportunity to be forgiven because his mother suffers

from dementia, and his visit to his mother in the nursing home has the
quality of a deathbed scene. Yet, when he operates on Baxter, he is both
granted and denied his moment of precise reckoning: By saving his
life in the operating theatre, Henry also committed Baxter to his torture (McEwan 2005: 278). The emphasis on a private realm full of idiosyncrasies and contingencies undercuts any grand political scheme and
raises a spirit of anti-authoritarian subversion. In short, both Joyce and
McEwan argue for a narrative structure shaped by our private lives that
mediates our experience of the world.
Saturday addresses such issues still more explicitly via McEwans
engagement with Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway (1925), which also examines an ordinary mind on an ordinary day in order to explore wider
social, cultural and political issues. Dalloways former lover, Peter Walsh,
proclaims that it was the state of the world that concerned him (Woolf
1989: 8); Perowne expresses his own concern in precisely these terms: it is
in fact the state of the world that troubled him most (McEwan 2005: 80).
McEwans investigation of the relationship between the private experience and the public life is heavily informed by Woolfs novel.
McEwans handling of Woolfs imagery is striking. In Mrs Dalloway
a car backfires, causing a violent explosion that made Mrs Dalloway
jump (Woolf 1989: 14). An ur-symbol of modernity ruptures Dalloways
experience, drawing attention to the impact of new technology. Saturday
also foregrounds the car as a symbol of modernity: Perownes silver
Mercedes S500 with cream upholstery is a machine [that] breathes an
animal warmth of its own (McEwan 2005: 75). Giving him padded privacy (McEwan 2005: 121), its motor runs in complete silence; the car idles
without vibration; the rev counter alone confirms the engine is turning
(McEwan 2005: 76). This cocoon is ruptured when Perownes car collides
with Baxters, unleashing a sequence of violent encounters with darkest
London.

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McEwans portrayal of twentieth-century machinery makes it clear

that his novel is reclaiming the modernist territory figuratively and
literarily. Perowne does not copy Dalloways itinerary, but he lives in
the square once occupied by Woolf and covers similar territory to Mrs
Dalloway, centred on Fitzrovia. Perowne visits a fishmonger (Bond
Street in Mrs Dalloway; Paddington Street in Saturday), leading to a
riposte to both Woolf and Joyce. Dalloway finds the window of the fishmongers empty ( That is all, she said [Woolf 1989: 12]), and Joyce
evokes an apocalyptic image of the depleted earth (Vulcanic lake, the
dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth (Joyce 1992: 73)).
However, Perowne finds that everything he needs for his fish stew is
present: Such an abundance from the emptying seas (McEwan 2005:
127). McEwan renegotiates the often pessimistic and apocalyptic language of modernist writers, suggesting ironically that although we find
ourselves in dark, anxious times they also provide space for culture,
leisure and happiness.
The opening episode of Saturday involves an archetypal twentiethcentury machine, the aeroplane, which also directly parallels Mrs
Dalloway, where an aeroplane advertises toffee by writing the brands
letters in the London sky (Woolf 1989: 1921). Like the image of the ocean
liner and the car, this passage illustrates how a symbol of progressive
modernity and scientific optimism is an ambivalent sign that may be
turned against the city as symbol of civilization. Perowne associates the
aeroplane with a potential terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda (McEwan 2005:
17), specifying the novels post-9/11 historical moment while anticipating the terrorist bombings on London on 7 July, 2005: The scale of death
contemplated is no longer an issue; therell be more deaths on a similar scale, probably in this city. Is he so frightened that he cant face the
fact? The assertions and the questions dont spell themselves out. He
experiences them more as a mental shrug followed by an interrogative
impulse (McEwan 2005: 81). The indirect experience of the recent terrorism has shocked Perowne into a paralysing fear that results in an
inability to verbalize his anxieties. McEwans attention to the relationship between the terror of war and linguistic failure is, again, drawn
from Mrs Dalloway. Septimuss shell-shock expresses itself in linguistic
breakdown, which in turn prevents him from constructing the advertisement as a collective narrative and engaging with the world:
The sound bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and
twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Every one
looked up. [. . .] So, Septimus thought, they are signalling to me. Not indeed
in actual words; that is; he could not read the language yet; but it was plain
enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he
looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky. (Woolf 1989:
1921)

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Writing, in the form of the skywriting aeroplane, creates a discourse

which connects individual minds to a collective narrative the urban
experience itself. Whereas Woolf projects our experience of the world as
(linguistically) shared, McEwans novel argues that our understanding
of the contemporary world has become increasingly uncertain because
of the post-war disconnection between the private and the public. This
divorce can be traced historically in the personal growth of Perowne,
who grows up fatherless in west Londons Perivale, where each nearidentical house has an uneasy, provisional look, as if it knows how readily the land would revert to cereal crops and grazing (McEwan 2005:
158). This external uniformity is contrasted with the compulsive ordering of the familys mental landscape by Lilian: Order and cleanliness
were the outward expression of an unspoken ideal of love. [. . .] Surely
it was because of her that Henry feels at home in an operating theatre
(McEwan 2005: 155). This suggests that only through his work as a surgeon is Perowne able to connect the private and the public: in the operating theatre [t]he two were inseparable (McEwan 2005: 45).

Our Grand Centre of Life is London: McEwan and

Matthew Arnold
In the representation of London we nonetheless do find a suggestive
means for tracing Perownes mental and moral trajectory to some form of
self-discovery and reconnection to the public realm. Saturday begins with
an image of the square in which Perownes Fitzrovia home is situated:
Standing there, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards
Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of faades, scaffolding and
pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece millions teeming around the accumulated and layered
achievements of centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work. And Perownes own corner, a triumph of congruent
proportion; the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect
circle of garden an eighteenth century dream bathed and embraced by
modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables,
and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an
instant of forgetting. (McEwan 2005: 5)

Perowne thinks of the city in classical terms of harmony and aesthetic

perfection, successfully merged with (post)modernity. The unclean
water that has been drunk five times before (McEwan 2006a: 73) has
now turned into cool fresh water, while any scatological association is
expelled by the emphasis on the sewage system. Perownes city is a clean,
light and sanitized Eden, a complete inversion of darkest London.

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Perownes description presents the city, and the world around him,
in terms of organic matter (biological masterpiece; coral reef), he also
diagnoses the city in terms of its pathologies, speaking of [s]ick buildings, in use for too long, that only demolition can cure. Cities and states
beyond repair (McEwan 2005: 122). Perowne approaches London like a
patient etherized upon a table, making it clear that his London is a projection of his own medicalized, curative consciousness, again echoing
Peter Walsh: It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse of a perfect
heart, life struck straight through the streets. [. . .] A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilization (Woolf
1989: 50).
However, the reference to coral reef also alludes to the Victorian cultural critic and poet Matthew Arnold. His poems Written in Butlers
Sermons (1849) and To MargueriteContinued (1852) use the image
of coral islands as a metaphor for the idea that although in modernity individuals appear separated from one another, we are in truth all
connected like sister islands, seen/Linking their coral arms under the
sea (Arnold 1965: 52). The central question posed by Saturday, And now
what days are these? Baffled and fearful, he mostly thinks (McEwan
2005: 4) also echoes Arnolds early poem To a Friend (1848), which asks:
Who prop, thou askst in these bad days, my mind? (Arnold 1965: 105).
London itself has a central role within Arnolds work. Asked how we
justify calling ourselves children of God, Arnold answers:
By the works we do, and the words we speak. And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have
builded for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its inutterable external
hideousness, and with its internal canker of public egestas, privatum opulentia [public poverty, private opulence], to use the words which Sallust put in
Catos mouth about Rome, unequalled in the world! (Arnold 1963: 59)

For Arnold the British capital is the finest expression of culture and
civilization, and it is this optimistic vision of the city with which we
are presented at the start of Saturday. However, beneath the lyricism
this passage points out that London is not perfect and harmonious but
rather a place where the public and private realms are divorced from
one another. Arnolds vision of London is a critical one, above all ironic,
self-conscious and ambivalent: the comparison between London and
Rome places London within a historical cycle that will eventually lead
to decline.
Saturday is saturated with reference to Arnold. His work addressed
themes which also recur in McEwan: the changing relationship between
science and religion; the importance and challenges of democracy; the
growing tensions within the English class system; the nature of culture and of society. His analysis of mid-Victorian England, Culture and
Anarchy (1869), which contains his definition of the role of culture in

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society, is particularly resonant within McEwans novel. Arnold divides

culture into two camps. On the one hand, Arnold defines the properly
cultured subject as striving after self-conquest and moral perfection,
making the will of God prevail while seeking a harmonious expansion
of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature
(Arnold 1963: 48). The key words that capture and promote this desired
unity of beauty and intelligence are sweetness and light. The cultured
person has a well-developed critical faculty (the refusal to accept ideas
simply on authority), openness to classical thought, history, literature
and beauty, and is driven by curiosity. On the other hand, Arnold posits
the Philistines, a category he associates with the middle classes, who
define culture as solely a scientific passion that desires to see things as
they are, and as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection (Arnold
1963: 445). This faith is in a predominantly rational and materialist
vision of civilization as a machine that can be analysed, dismantled and
improved, and this is clearly the category to which Perowne belongs:
He cant feel his way past the iron weight of the actual to see beyond the
boredom of a traffic tailback, or the delay to which he is contributing, or the
drab commercial hopes of a parade of shops hes been stuck beside for fifteen minutes. He doesnt have the lyric gift to see beyond it hes a realist,
and can never escape. (McEwan 2005: 168)

Perowne is unable to see beyond the materiality of things, yet the

emphasis on the bounds of his imagination acknowledges his regret.
His experience of his journey back into London after visiting his mother
is particularly striking:
He tries to see it, or feel it, in historical terms, this moment in the last decades
of the petroleum age, when a nineteenth-century device is brought to final
perfection in the early years of the twenty-first; when the unprecedented
wealth of the masses at serious play in the unforgiving modern city makes
for a sight that no previous age can have imagined. Ordinary people! Rivers
of light! (McEwan 2005: 168)

Formally, the use of exclamation marks mimics Arnold, and the effect is
that Perowne appears to represent the nineteenth-century, modern spirit
of progress. However, just as Sallust puts words about Rome in Catos
mouth, McEwan puts Arnolds words into Perownes without the characters being aware of their origins. Perownes reference to ordinary people
sets up a parallel between the anti-war parade in 2003 and the historical
context in which Arnold wrote. Arnold was critical of the Hyde Park
riots of July 1866, and he warned against the fact that Londons working class was beginning to assert and put into practice an Englishmans
right to do what he likes (Arnold 1963: 76). Arnold had a contradictory
sense of class, fearing the destabilization of the class system and the

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increasing working-class agency over the middle class, while acknowledging that the existing social hierarchies were inadequate for effective
government (Williams 1992: 121). Although the class consciousness that
colours Arnolds view no longer applies (Head 2007: 1834), Perowne too
is sceptical of the mass of protesters against the war in Iraq. Yet when
Perowne meets Tony Blair (McEwan 2005: 1404), who mistakes him
for an artist, it is clear that we should be sceptical of state authority too.
McEwan points out the flaw in Arnolds fantasy of the State as the centre
of light and authority by bringing to the fore what Arnold himself calls
the right reason of the community (Arnold 1963: 82).
Perownes exclamation Rivers of light! also aligns him with Arnold.
In his poem The Future (1852), for instance, Arnold notes that [w]hether he first sees light / Where the river in gleaming rings / Sluggishly
winds through the plain [. . .] So is the mind of man (Arnold 1965:
264). However, as we have seen, Perownes philistinism is repeatedly
challenged by the narrative, leaving him in a state of uncertainty: All
he feels now is fear. Hes weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events,
new consequences, until youre led to a place you never dreamed of and
would never chose (McEwan 2005: 277). Perownes and Arnolds rivers
of light foreground McEwans renegotiation of the image of the city.
Raymond Williams reminds us that the city, figuratively and literally, is
indeed a place of light:
This light was an obvious image for the impressive civilisation of the capital,
visibly growing in wealth and in conscious public effect. [. . .] As a centre of
trade and political influence the capital was attracting, also [. . .] every kind
of talent, from many parts of the world. [. . .] This version of a glittering and
dominant metropolitan culture had enough reality to support a traditional
idea of the city, as a centre of light and learning. (Williams 1973: 2289)

McEwans representation of London in Saturday thus corrects his earlier

darkest London by supplementing it with the traditional vision of the
city as a place of light and learning, but new uncertainties, a new darkness, are brought to the fore in the post-9/11 metropolis.
The novel challenges Perowne the philistine but it also challenges
Arnolds preferred definition of culture, embodied by his musician son,
Theo, a talented but smug and lazy young man naively seduced by conspiracy theories: his world-view accommodates a hunch that somehow everything is connected, interestingly connected, and that certain
authorities, notably the US government, with privileged access to extraterrestrial intelligence, is excluding the rest of the world from such wondrous knowledge (McEwan 2005: 30). Theos certainty and conviction
about the Iraq war are mocked as well: Naturally, Theo is against the
war in Iraq. His attitude is as strong and pure as his skin and bones. So
strong he doesnt feel much need to go tramping through the streets to

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make his point (McEwan 2005: 151). On the other we find the poets John
Grammaticus, a pompous, bohemian drinker (McEwan 2005: 138) who
is jealous of his daughter-in-laws success, and Daisy, who is portrayed
as priggish, pedantic and right-minded: Perowne knows she thinks hes
a coarse, irredeemable materialist. She thinks he lacks an imagination.
Perhaps it is so, but she hasnt quite given up on him yet (McEwan 2005:
134). The same irony and knowingness that undermine Perowne therefore undercut Daisy and Theo, whose positions are too certain and selfassured, and in their own ways fall short of Arnolds ideal.
The influence of Matthew Arnold is the most significant factor in the
uncertain voice of Saturday, a voice which fluctuates from the derisive
to the euphoric, from the meditative to the resolute. This voice is, however, adept at making the reader collude with the author, as Baxters
change of mind when hearing Daisys recital of Arnolds Dover Beach
(1867) evidences. In Stefan Collinis words: To read Arnold at his best is
to find oneself in the company of a mind of such balance and sympathy
that we come, without really noticing, to see experience in his terms,
and, unusually, to think the better of ourselves for it (Collini 1988: 1).
In contrast, McEwan is highly sceptical of our ability to bridge the gap
between the private and public. Perownes obsession with round-theclock news broadcasting is an indication of his thwarted desire to connect with the general public in a wider narrative. Mark Currie suggests
that there is a sense of corroboration between the public narratives of
news and private experience. This sense of the gap between public and
private [. . .] extends more generally to Perownes relation to his historical moment, and to his position in the modern city (Currie 2007: 1301).
Traditionally, it is the city that connects the private with the public, and to
a degree it still performs this function for private matters: The squares
public aspect grants privacy to these intimate dramas (McEwan 2005:
61). However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, our capacity
to express ourselves directly and authentically has been diminished.
Perowne is sceptical about the protest march because it turns into a selfinterested televised event organized by what he considers are Saddams
stooges. When he realizes his encounter with Baxter may become violent, he reads the scene via mass media: This, as people like to say, is
urban drama. A century of movies and half a century of television have
rendered the matter insincere. It is pure artifice (McEwan 2005: 86).
McEwan suggests that our contemporary understanding of the self and
community is a fantasy about the collective mediated by the narratives
and discourses provided by the state, commerce and mass media.
Throughout the novel, reconnections are made between material
spaces and spaces of the imagination: on the one hand we find the city,
the private home and the operating theatre, and on the other there are
music, poetry and the novel. During an epiphany when he watches his
son Theos performance, a passage which recalls the Sirens episode
in Homers The Odyssey, Perowne understands that it is the creative

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imagination that allows a restoration of the private life and the public
world. Theos band performs a song:
Baby, you can choose despair,
Or you can be happy if you dare,
[. . .] So let me take you there
City square, city square. (1701)

The song returns us to the debates about democracy. Perowne refuses

to see the city square, Europes contribution to the architecture of public space tied to the classical Athenian model of democracy, as a place
where the private and public might meet. He does not want him [Baxter]
hanging around the square (McEwan 2005: 147). But now he is moved
and transformed by the music and the lyrics:
No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where hes been leaning,
and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium, towards the great engine
of sound. He lets it engulf him. These are moments when musicians together
touch something sweeter than theyve ever found before in rehearsals or
performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient,
when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love.
This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves,
and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others,
but lose nothing of yourself. (McEwan 2005: 171)

Perowne, swayed by the musical harmony, is able to forge his connection with the wider public, providing him with a brief glimpse of transcending the bounds of his scientific materialism. The whole passage
is couched in an Arnoldian idiom, from terms such as sweeter and
easy and graceful to the specific mention of our best selves. Indeed,
McEwan is effectively paraphrasing Arnolds own claim for culture:
But by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony. We are not in
peril from giving authority to this, because it is the truest friend we all of us
can have; and when anarchy is a danger to us, to this authority we may turn
with sure trust. Well, and this is the very self which culture, or the study of
perfection, seeks to develop in us; at the expense of our old untransformed
self, taking pleasure in doing what it likes or is used to do, and exposing us
to the risk of clashing with every one else who is doing the same! [. . .] We
want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes, checks, and a
deadlock; culture suggests the idea of the State. We find no basis for a firm
State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best
selves. (Arnold 1963: 956)

In conclusion, McEwan brings London to life through an extended attention to the myriad intertexts through which it has been represented.

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Saturday works against both overbearing state authoritarianism and

individual self-righteousness, and suggests a new era full of uncertainties. Perownes conscience and belief system are challenged by a series
of incidents from which he emerges feeling too many things, hes alive
to too many contradictory impulses (McEwan 2005: 262). The novel
raises fundamental questions about, on the one hand, the role of the
arts and literature in culture and society, and, on the other, the limits
of scientific materialism as a means of understanding the world, but
it refrains from offering a clear answer. McEwan does, however, give
the reader pause with his account of Perownes changed perception of
the square, 24 hours after the start of the novel: The air is warmer than
last time, but still he shivers. The light is softer too, the features of the
square, especially the branches of the plane trees in the garden, are not
so etched, and seem to merge with one another (McEwan 2005: 271).
This image unpicks the opposition between darkest London and the
London of light as well as the many other oppositions the novel itself
contains, and leaves us with a sense of unresolved uncertainty: this
is a future thats harder to read, a horizon indistinct with possibilities
(McEwan 2005: 276).

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CHAPTER EIGHT

On Chesil Beach:
Another Overrated Novella?
DOMINIC HEAD

Chapter Summary: This chapter investigates Ian McEwans provocative

use of the novella form in Amsterdam (1998) and On Chesil Beach (2007),
arguing that he stretches the genre by incorporating discussions of society and history that we conventionally find within the novel. It moves
beyond the superficial reception of On Chesil Beach as an exploration of
the pre-Swinging Sixties thematics and history by pinpointing how the
darker subtexts set out to provoke a debate about morality, sexuality,
and taboos in contemporary society. Unlike Martin Amis, who connotes
pornography with the obscenification of everyday life, McEwans novella emasculates the power of pornography by appropriating its imagery
and ridiculing it, and reminds us that repressive morality, idealizations
of innocence, and a lack of communication can lead to disaster in equal
measure.

The publication of On Chesil Beach (2007) brought one or two things into
focus for observers of McEwans career, and occasioned a re-evaluation
of his oeuvre to this point. The publication of another novella and a
book evidently less substantial than his most widely-respected works
confirmed the impression that his books can be divided clearly into
major and minor works, following the taxonomy of traditional literary criticism. Following such a schema, the major books would be: The
Child in Time (1987), Black Dogs (1992), Enduring Love (1997), Atonement
(2001), and Saturday (2005) (with The Innocent (1990), influenced by the
Cold War spy novel, and which therefore does not wear its seriousness
quite so obviously on its sleeve, a debatable case for inclusion.) These are
McEwans ideas books, engagements with demanding concepts (postEinsteinian physics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience), and significant historical and political moments (World War Two, the collapse
of communism, the impact of 9/11).

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Leaving aside the early short-story volumes, the remaining four works
of fiction all of novella length would then form the group of minor
works: The Cement Garden (1987), The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Amsterdam
(1998) and On Chesil Beach (2007). While this seems to me a helpful preliminary way of mapping the career, it runs the risk of obscuring some
of the significance of the minor works. There is also an underlying
truism here: that shorter fiction is determined overtly by structure and
device, and that such considerations restrict the experimental treatment
of larger issues and themes. This does not mean, however, that larger
issues and themes cannot be successfully engaged through a thoughtful application of the novellas formal capacities. This short chapter is
designed to identify some of the ways in which McEwan has exploited
the novella form.
The fuss about McEwans shorter books in the literary press has partly
to do with the high expectations consequent upon the estimation of his
major novels: the novellas pale alongside the weightier books. It has also
to do with the assumption that there is some cynical marketing going
on; and this is a legacy of the furore caused by Amsterdam. I have written elsewhere about this novella in relation to literary prize culture (see
Head 2008); so I will merely summarize the essential points here.
Amsterdam, certainly not McEwans best book, is his only work to
have been awarded the Booker Prize, an eventuality that raised the suspicion that McEwan had been awarded the prize for his previous efforts,
rather than for the book in question. Yet this is to overlook the point of
the project, which was consummated by winning the prize. Amsterdam
engages with the literary consequences of Thatcherism (extending into
the era of John Majors premiership), specifically with the era of entrepreneurial self-promotion and, by extension, the impact that had on the
development of literary prize culture. Amsterdam may not be McEwans
best book; but it is, technically, a fully realized work within the strict
limits McEwan sets himself. Its real significance is how the neatness of
its design contributes to its satirical thrust as a book pointedly written
for the Booker.
Since Enduring Love failed to reach the shortlist in 1997 (as had The
Child in Time a decade earlier), the compelling speculation emerges that
McEwan, sensing that his time had come, produced Amsterdam in quick
time for the 1998 prize. In writing about professional competitiveness,
McEwan seems to have mustered his cultural capital in an archly selfconscious gesture: Amsterdam was, it seems, a form of spoiler designed
to defeat the ambitions of other contenders. There were three other
established authors on the 1998 shortlist who had not won the prize,
and who had also been short-listed before: Beryl Bainbridge, Julian
Barnes and Patrick McCabe. 1998 was the fifth time Bainbridge had
been in contention for the prize, and she was considered the favourite
by many commentators. McEwans success was not well received: Will
Self, on a live TV broadcast, found occasion to do his nut, in the words

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of Nicholas Lezard (Lezard 1999: 11). On Chesil Beach, another novella,

was shortlisted in 2007.
The idea of a spoiler is central to the novella and to McEwans satirical anatomy of the kind of self-contained professionalism that kills off
the ethical sense. Each of the two principal characters, Vernon Halliday
editor of a modernizing broadsheet newspaper and composer Clive
Linley, encounters an ethical dilemma that reveals how morality has
been displaced by self-interest in the world of the contemporary professional. In the case of Halliday, the moral vacuum is iterated through his
decision to publish compromising photographs of the cross-dressing
foreign secretary, Julian Garmony, in order to boost sales by cashing in
on a mood of moral conservatism. Garmony issues a spoiler, however,
and the scoop backfires (McEwan 1998: 124).
Linleys moral test occurs while walking in the Lake District, and
finding inspiration for the finale of his Millennium Symphony in the
call of a bird. He refuses to attend to a disputing couple who disturb his
concentration (a serial rapist and his latest victim, it transpires). When
completed, the symphony is deemed to be flawed by its final movement,
derivative of Beethoven (McEwan 1998: 176).
This is a satire of the politics of self-interest emerging in the
ThatcherMajor era (which Hunter Hayes and Sebastian Groes have
earlier explored in McEwans screenplays, see pp. 2642). For those readers attuned to the self-consciousness of the work, Amsterdams satirical
portrait of left-intellectual achievement after 1979 will also be deemed
to implicate the plight of the writer. In this connection the idea of a
spoiler is the lynch-pin of McEwans gesture. At the end of the novel,
when Halliday understands that Linley has killed him in their parallel dastardly acts of murder disguised as euthanasia, he acknowledges
reverentially this spoiler (McEwan 1998: 173).
The neatness of the plotting is emblematic of the vacuity of the characters, and this underscores the satirical target: an age in which professional standards invite us to revere the act of spoiling. The full impact
of this depended upon the success of Amsterdam perceived as a spoiler
itself in the 1998 Booker Prize: the judging panel dutifully revered
McEwans act of spoiling.
The point of the novella is, then, partly determined by its status as a
literary event, where the satire bleeds out into the world of literary culture. What is spoiled, finally, is any lingering idea that contemporary
literary culture is governed by aesthetic values that can be held aloof
from the marketplace. That first impression of a consummately realized
novella pandering to the false notion of literary form held in isolation is a prelude to the invitation to join a broader debate about consumerism and literary prize culture.
The manner in which Amsterdam, viewed as a literary event, implicates prize culture in the construction of serious literary fiction demonstrates a point that is familiar with academic critics: that aesthetic effects

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must have a contextual function. If that function is partly to be understood through the processes of commodification, there is also a more
palpable aspect to it. These effects highlight McEwans ability to engage
with contemporaneous issues a mark of any writers importance but in
the novellas the effects are exaggerated almost to the point of caricature.
The event of Amsterdam as a Booker winner may have been a one-off.
However, when McEwans next novella, On Chesil Beach, was shortlisted
for the Prize in 2007 history did seem to be on the verge of repeating
itself. But the true parallel is a formal one: there is a similar breaking of
form in On Chesil Beach, which means that the discovery of the limits of
the novella form is part of its meaning.
In common with the way many short stories and novellas depend
upon a single strong symbolic setting or motif, On Chesil Beach uses the
idea of the seaside as a liminal space to embed, symbolically, its central
idea: that one failed wedding night in 1962 can be taken as emblematic
of the dividing line between the sexual liberation of the 1960s and the
repression that preceded it. Specifically, Chesil Beach, that long stretch
of pebbles that separates the English Channel from the Fleet Lagoon, is
made to symbolize this epochal change. As the scene of confrontation
on the wedding night, after the disastrous sexual encounter of newlyweds Edward and Florence, the beach immensely difficult to walk
on, like all pebble beaches embodies their separation and failure to
communicate.
There is, then, an announced historical ambition to the novella, which
seems to rely on the particular strengths of shorter fiction: a focus on
one or two characters, an emphasis on interiorized experience, and a
plot that hinges on a moment of crisis in which the essential nature of
the characters experience is revealed to themselves and/or to the reader.
There is a sense in which the book instructs us to read it in this way.
However, what redeems it from this schematic attempt to summarize an
epoch is that the principle of representativeness upon which it depends,
and which McEwan goes to some lengths to establish, is simultaneously
undermined by the idiosyncratic backgrounds of the central characters,
backgrounds that reveal them to be curiously unrepresentative. For both
protagonists, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, there is an element of dysfunctionality in their upbringing dysfunctional by the standards of 1962 and this implies a degree of emotional and psychological
disorder for both that could be taken as an explanation of their failure to
connect, quite as much as can the social mores of the time.
The Mayhew family life is dominated by the mental illness of the
mother, brain-damaged after an accident on a railway platform when
Edward was small (McEwan 2007: 70). They muddle through, with the
father and the children keeping a modicum of domestic order, while also
sustaining the elaborate fairy tale that the mother is a devoted wife and
mother, that the house ran smoothly thanks to all her work. The fact
that the father and the children colluded in the make-believe is crucial

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(McEwan 2007: 67). It imposes on the children a form of collective secrecy

that suppresses the oddity they know surrounds them: the fantasy could
be sustained only if it was not discussed. They grew up inside it, neutrally inhabiting its absurdities because they were never defined. (68)
When, at the age of fourteen, Edward is told of his mothers condition, a mood of instantaneous withdrawal overtakes him. The very term
brain-damaged, the narrator reports, dissolved intimacy, measuring
his mother by a public standard (McEwan 2007: 72). Edward experiences a sudden space emerging between himself and his mother, and
also between himself and his immediate circumstances so that his
own being, the buried core of it he had never attended to before, come[s]
to sudden, hard-edged existence (McEwan 2007: 72). The sudden sense
of separation from his family makes him realize that one day he would
leave, and would return only as a visitor (McEwan 2007: 72).
These realizations the emergence of a new sense of self, the selfconscious feeling of separation from family are familiar aspects of adolescent experience. The full impact of this, therefore, is slightly cloaked.
Yet Edwards sense of withdrawal, in its suddenness and emotional
coldness, reveals a dramatic intensification of routine adolescent development. These can be seen as effects of the dysfunctional family life. It
is hard not to conclude that the joint failure of Edward and Florence
to commence a family life is partly explained, on Edwards part, by the
lack of a domestic model on which to found his expectations, and the
absence of an emotionally sustaining upbringing.
A sign of Edwards instability is his predilection for brawling, as a
younger man. The culmination of this motif is the recollection of his
last street fight, as a student. Edward attacked a man who had gratuitously hit his best friend, perhaps because this friend, Harold Mather,
was Jewish, perhaps because he was small and studious and the likely
focus of a bullys contempt. This particular incident was, we read,
unusual in that Edward had some cause, a degree of justice on his side
(McEwan 2007: 92). Catching up with the passing thug, he delivers swift
and violent retribution; but, in so doing, he precipitates the end of his
friendship with Mather. To begin with, Edward imagines he has hurt
Mathers pride, by witnessing his humiliation and acting as his champion. However, he then comes to the conclusion that his behaviour was
deemed uncool, his crime a lapse of taste. He makes the conscious
decision to stay out of fights after this (McEwan 2007: 95).
Neither of these explanations seems satisfactory to explain Mathers
withdrawal of his friendship. Edward is unable to formulate a moral
explanation for Mathers apparent disgust at the violent propensity of his
erstwhile friend. A further moral absence is implied in Edwards decision
to give up brawling (to avoid being thought vulgar); and in the apparent
instability of this fresh determination. His violent moods are a kind of
madness he has kept from Florence, but on his wedding night, we read,
he did not trust himself because he could not be certain that the tunnel

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vision and selective deafness would never descend again. In all of this,
there is an implied personal inadequacy. He had preferred to think of his
tendency to fight as an interesting quirk, a rough virtue; disabused of
this, his mortifying reappraisal focuses on his masculine image, merely
(McEwan 2007: 92, 95). Edwards volatility, as well as his moral and emotional lack whether or not we put it down to his dysfunctional home
life is made to hang over the wedding night in Damoclean fashion.
In the case of Florence there is a series of hints that her father has been
abusive, and that her revulsion at the thought of sex may stem from this.
The reported memories of Florence about her father, and about the trips
the two of them made in his boat from Dover to France, reveal emotional extremes which, although plausible in a pubescent girl in a milder
form, suggest an underlying issue when expressed so violently:
They never talked about those trips. He had never asked her again, and she
was glad. But sometimes, in a surge of protective feeling and guilty love, she
would come up behind him where he sat and entwine her arms around his
neck and kiss the top of his head and nuzzle him, liking his clean scent. She
would do all this, then loathe herself for it later. (McEwan 2007: 50)

The physical appeal of the father at such moments, linked to guilty love
and self-loathing, contrasts arrestingly with the times when she finds
him physically repellent (McEwan 2007: 49).
In similar fashion, the account of Florences impatience with her parents political opinions is made to seem typical of a young adult, but
then tips over into something more troubling. She is happy to disagree
with her mother, but finds it harder to contradict her father because
she could never shake off a sense of awkward obligation to him. Among
these obligations she numbers the journeys: just the two of them, hiking
in the Alps, Sierra Nevada and Pyrenees, and the special treats, the onenight business trips to European cities where she and Geoffrey always
stayed in the grandest hotels. (McEwan 2007: 54)
The heavy hint that there is something peculiar about all of these
father-and-daughter trips is apparently confirmed in the novellas key
scene, when Florence is lying on the marital bed and Edward is undressing. The smell of the sea summons the indistinct past, and a memory
of lying still like this, waiting in the cabin of her fathers boat while
he undressed, on a two-day crossing to France when she was 12. In the
remembered scene, her mind was a blank, she felt she was in disgrace.
However, the memory is indistinct, one occasion merging with another:
she was usually sick many times on the crossing, and of no use to her
father as a sailor, and that surely was the source of her shame (McEwan
2007: 99100). Here the writer is evidently asking us to ponder the questions that the character is uncertain about. Is her failure as a sailor the
source of her shame? Or is it that her seasickness renders her of no use to
her father in another capacity? We cannot help wondering what would

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possess a father to continue to take a twelve-year-old daughter with no

sea legs on a two-day crossing in a tiny vessel with a cramped cabin.
Because the memory comes, unbidden, as she is bracing herself for the
unwanted sexual encounter with Edward, we cannot help but imagine
that this is, for her, the repetition of an earlier horror.
When the sexual scene becomes a debacle, Florences disgust at the
feel of Edwards semen on her skin summons memories she had long
ago decided were not really hers. The origin of the repressed sexual
memories is surely confirmed by her reaction to this alien milkiness,
its intimate starchy odour, which dragged with it the stench of a shameful secret locked in musty confinement (McEwan 2007: 1056). The
echo here of being closeted with her father in the boats cramped cabin
with its closed air is obvious (McEwan 2007: 99100). When Florence
makes her brave little joke in her final conversation with Edward, she
summarizes her problem for us: perhaps I should be psychoanalysed.
Perhaps what I really need to do is kill my mother and marry my father
(McEwan 2007: 154, 153). The attentive reader will already have analysed
the character along precisely these lines.
The respective pasts of both Edward and Florence make them entirely
unsuited to establishing a domestic life of their own, with a healthy sexual relationship at its heart not, at least, without prior therapy. Their
home lives, from which model experience is absent, have caused both
of them to develop in ways that militate against marriage. Neither can
these elements of dysfunctionality be taken as exaggerations of broader
and more common psychological restrictions or social failings. The central characters are emotional oddities, their marriage doomed to fail.
There is, then, a quite deliberate contradiction at the heart of On Chesil
Beach, which enriches the work, making it far more than the period piece
it announces itself as. That element of public historical analysis remains
as the important context of the novella, but the central characters are not
ciphers, playing the roles dictated by that historical moment. They are
more complex creations than this implies, with private lives that make
the novellas crisis an emotional (rather than a historical) inevitability.
This leaves us wondering whether or not the apparent central premise
is really achieved. If that premise is to anatomize the social mores of
a distant social world and (implicitly) to contract them with the present we begin to wonder whether or not less dysfunctional characters
would have to be presented as experiencing the same fate.
Other readings or, at least, alternative emphases for reading On
Chesil Beach are opened up when the tidy historical drama is seen to
unravel. One such emphasis flows from the contrast between past and
contemporary sexual mores. Here McEwan would seem to be very much
in debate with contemporary culture, and the perceived sense that we
live in an increasingly sexualized world. McEwan is also in debate with
Martin Amis, whose treatments of pornography may well amount to
the depiction of civilization in crisis. In Yellow Dog (2003), for example,

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pornography is conceived as the obscenification of everyday life (Amis

2003: 335). In his musings on pornography, Amis (since Money [1983])
has been struck by its repetitive codes, one of which is the focus on
ejaculation over a woman (e.g. Amis 2003: 28990). In this context, the
pivotal scene of On Chesil Beach, in which Florence is traumatized as
Edward emptied himself over her in gouts (105), evidently draws on
the contemporaneous debate about pornography and the obscenification of everyday life, and seems some kind of riposte to Amis. The
curious thing, here, is that Amiss moralizing about the Money Shot
(Amis 2003: 289), as a travesty of sexuality in its concentration of money,
power and hatred, stands in contrast to McEwans (frankly) comic climactic moment. Of course, the same questions of power do not obtain;
but McEwan pointedly conceives of a parallel scene in which ejaculation
becomes absurd and disempowering.
Beyond this, there is something arch about the novel, governed by
a sexually knowing narrator manipulating his innocent creations.
Indeed, the gap between their understanding and experience, and the
knowledge of the narrator and also the author, as the governing intelligence is discomfiting.
Yet, if this is another way in which the architecture of the novella collapses slightly, it is another instance of McEwan making his focus bleed
outwards to provoke debate. As with Amsterdam, what could be perceived as an aesthetic limitation, in austere formal terms, becomes the
very means by which McEwan makes his identification with his broader
context. We are more accustomed to reading novelistic form in relation
to society and history than we are the formal attributes of shorter fiction. Perhaps McEwans novellas help us to redress this balance, though
he may be stretching even exhausting, perhaps? the limits of the
novella in the process.

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CHAPTER NINE

Solar: Apocalypse Not

GREG GARRARD

Summary: Ian McEwans novel about climate change Solar (2010) was
eagerly anticipated by those who hoped for a dramatic shift in public
consciousness of the issue in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Most critics found it disappointing, yet the let-down is complex and
instructive, illuminating the cultural politics of climate in the noughties and the intrinsic challenges of climate change as a topic for realist
novels. The novel is limited both by McEwans choice of satirical allegory as a genre, and by the topical parables that continually dissipate
the momentum of the allegorical plot. Solar may also indicate the limit
of McEwans belief in the capacity of Enlightenment science and liberal
democracy to avert climate apocalypse.

The Great Disappointment

Under ordinary circumstances, it would be perverse to chastise an
author for not writing a different book. One may criticize a novel for
being bad, but not for being wrong. The circumstances of the publication of Ian McEwans Solar (2010), though, were not ordinary. The fourth
assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(2007) provided still more data and analysis to support the conclusions
of the previous three: climate change is real; the impacts on humans
and the environment will be, in the main, deleterious; and urgent action
is required to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Prior to the publication of Solar in 2010, McEwan made it clear in interviews that he was
taking up the challenge of responding to this crisis in fiction, even as
he promised the novel would not be didactic and warned that climate
change would be a background hum rather a central concern (Zalewski
2009). In an atmosphere of escalating political activism, environmentalists and ecocritics literary critics with an environmental orientation
dared to hope that McEwans climate change novel would be a pivotal,
if not decisive, influence on public opinion. The present author went so

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far as to pen an enthusiastic anticipatory review of Solar, based on the

notion that, by drawing on key elements of [. . .] his recent novels, one
may hazard the conceptual parameters of the next one (Garrard 2009:
706). I did not consider this a criticism.
Disappointment was general throughout the Anglophone reading
public when Solar came out. Jason Cowley condemned the novel as
excessively neat, ruthlessly schematic thanks to McEwans decision to
write a satirical allegory:
What is absent from Solar, ultimately, are other minds, the sense that people other than [protagonist Michael] Beard are present, equally alive, with
something to contribute. Without them, after a while, it feels as if you are
locked inside an echo chamber, listening only to the reverberations of the
one same sound the groan of a fat, selfish man in late middle age eating
himself. (Cowley 2010)

Like McEwans disappointing novella Amsterdam (1998), McEwans

Booker Prize winner (see Chapter Eight), Solar is a comic allegory on
the destructive consequences of selfishness. Unlike Amsterdam, though,
Solar is not short, and as we will see, the parables with which it is padded make it worse.
Climate change is intrinsically difficult to write about in literary fiction: it is vast in temporal and geographical scale, and it is caused not by
individual protagonists but by the aggregation of myriad acts of human
societies albeit that wealthy people contribute far more than poor people. An authors choice of genre in writing about climate change is crucial: it makes some sorts of action possible and others impossible. The
choice of genre therefore also selectively heightens and constrains the
storys emotional and moral range (Kerridge, forthcoming), as Cowleys
complaint about Solars allegory reveals. Representing Stalin as the
pig Napoleon in Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell knowingly sacrifices innumerable historical details to personify tyranny, while Albert
Camus allegory of the Nazi occupation, The Plague (1947), powerfully
conveys the absurdity, anonymous cruelty and day-to-day oppression
of the regime, but not the ways in which the Nazis unlike the plague
chose their victims deliberately. A satire like Solar cannot acknowledge
the anguish climate change might induce in us, but ought to pinpoint
the moral failings that contribute to it in a way that encourages us to rectify them. This chapter speculates about the motivations of McEwans
choice of genre, and anatomizes its consequences.

Solar and the Noughties

Critics may have found Solar a disappointing novel, but the period it covered was a disappointing time. The leisurely scene-setting of Part One,

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dominated by Beards obsession with fifth wife Patrices infidelity, takes

place in an almost pre-lapsarian year 2000 after the fall of the Iron
Curtain and the apocalyptic anti-climax of the Millennium Bug but just
before the 9/11 attacks recast global politics as a clash of fundamentalisms. Five years later, in Part Two, Beard has embarked upon his craven
plan to commercialize plans for artificial photosynthesis plagiarized from
his dead postdoc Tom Aldous, but finds himself repeatedly buffeted by
distractions: a tussle over salt and vinegar crisps; a media storm concerning gender in science; a pregnant girlfriend. From the depths of George
W. Bushs benighted presidency, we arrive in Part Three in 2009. It was,
so to speak, the high water mark of global climate politics to date: the
year of the post-apocalyptic crowd-funded film Age of Stupid (2009), and
the year the Copenhagen talks were to deliver concerted global action on
emissions at long last. Clive Hamilton recalls that a group of advertising
agencies launched a bizarre campaign to rebrand the [. . .] Conference
Hopenhagen [. . .] centred on creating a popular movement that will
empower global citizens who can, through the website, send messages
of hope to UN delegates (Hamilton 2010: loc.2116). Experts in environmental politics dared to speak of a tipping point in public awareness and
concern across the developed world (Blhdorn 2011).
The year ended far less optimistically. Emails hacked from the
University of East Anglias Climate Research Centre were screened by
professional climate sceptics for phrases that implied a conspiracy to
deceive the public, then released in a blizzard of orchestrated publicity
shortly before the conference. Hopenhagen was little more than a futile
confrontation between the United States and China. Having initially left
the fictional Beard out of the conference, McEwan revised the completed
manuscript to send him there (McEwan 2010: 276). He told The Guardian:
I just slipped something in to reflect the spirit of sadness. Everything
has collapsed around him and he knows that Copenhagen will be just
the place for him. It is where he would be heading to add his confusion
to everybody elses (Adam 2010). Part Three of Solar sees the climax of
Beards farcical romantic and professional career, an individual counterpart to the drama of national self-interest being played out in Denmark.
Yet the artificial photosynthesis plant he builds in New Mexico betrays
McEwans residual Enlightenment optimism: menaced though it is by
lawsuits, recession, energy sector conservatism and a hammer-wielding
builder from Cricklewood, Beards fictional array is completed around
two decades ahead of any probable real ones (Jones 2012). As Richard
Kerridge points out, at the end of Solar it remains just possible that enormous good will come of Beards comically exaggerated selfishness, that
ignoble, clumsy, unselfconscious, earthy vitality may be the saving of us,
not idealism, far-sightedness and a sense of potential tragedy (Kerridge
2010: 156). By telescoping a possible post-carbon future into the grubby
present, McEwan qualifies his satire with the utopian potential he still
detects in advanced technology, even if the artificial photosynthesis

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plant ends the novel with as a pile of useless, glinting shards of glass in
the desert.
However, the novels depiction of futuristic renewable energy is incidental to Beards conspicuous embodiment of self-deception and gluttony. Having rejected the possibility of writing apocalyptic or dystopian
fiction about climate change at an early stage, McEwan discussed the
possibility of writing emblematically rather than realistically: Its got to
be fascinating, in the way that gossip is. Its got to be about ourselves.
Maybe it needs an Animal Farm. Maybe it needs allegory. But if youre
going in that direction, then you need a lot of wit (Tonkin 2007). What
is striking is the degree to which McEwan, speaking three years before
the publication of Solar, appears to be under a compulsion to respond to
climate change (its got to be; it needs; you need), an imperative that
has in turn necessitated the turn to comic allegory.
Though McEwan often takes inspiration from contemporary events
(the Falklands War prompted McEwan to revise the screenplay for The
Ploughmans Lunch (1983) and the fall of the Berlin Wall was incorporated into Black Dogs (1992)), his most accomplished novels start from
a glimpse of a character or situation rather than a motivating issue:
I started Atonement [. . .] with a careless sentence, and then a paragraph,
and then thought maybe theres something here (Guardian 2012). By
contrast, when McEwan was invited on the Cape Farewell expedition to
the Arctic the very one Beard is depicted as joining he seems to have
taken it as a commission to produce just the sort of motivated work of art
gently mocked in that section of the novel:
Beard would not have believed it possible that he would be in a room drinking with so many seized by the same particular assumption, that it was art
in its highest forms, poetry, sculpture, dance, abstract music, conceptual art,
that would lift climate change as a subject, gild it, palpate it, reveal all the
horror and lost beauty and awesome threat, and inspire the public to take
thought, take action, or demand it of others. (McEwan 2010: 77)

Solar disavows such nave intentions; it is about ourselves, about

human nature. It is so full of metafictional minimization of expectations, it ought to wear a badge: This novel will not save the planet.
Yet alongside the satire is an admiring portrait of an artist called Stella
Polkinghorne, who sounds like another Cape Farewell alumnus, Rachel
Whiteread. How could McEwan elude the trap of idealistic art while still
responding to the moral burden Cape Farewell imposed on him? Solars
solution is to nest a set of ironic parables within the overarching allegorical narrative of Beards grotesque body. The problem is that these
anecdotes keep disrupting the plot: while the latter describes a predictable trajectory towards calamity in what Jeremy Tambling dubs the old
A equals B mode of allegory (Tambling 2010: loc.1916), the former butt
in with distracting allusiveness.

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The Tyranny of the Grotesque Body

The comedy of Solar, such as it is, lies in the greedy, womanizing, ultimately farcical career of Michael Beard, whose character or rather,
persona, since he is a rounded fictional being in only the physical sense
dominates the novel entirely. As Thomas Jones points out, it is not hard
to deduce the implications: Through a combination of incontinence and
inertia, Beard gluttonous, avaricious, lustful, slothful, proud, envious,
angry abuses his spherical body for the sake of instant gratification
in a manner that all too obviously echoes the way his species abuses
the planet (Jones 2010). As the septuplet of deadly sins suggests, Beard
is far more a personification of human fallibility in general than a persuasive character of the kind McEwan usually writes. The exaggeration
is often to excellent effect, as when an insomniac Beard reflects on the
previous day sitting on his girlfriend Melissas toilet at 4 a.m. The bodys
demands for pleasure and comfort cannot be gainsaid:
The black slate floor was heated all night and felt good beneath his cold
white feet. Let the planet go to hell. . . . [Beard] made a tally of the previous
days drinking just about average and began to form the familiar resolution, then dismissed it, for he knew he was no match for that late-morning
version of himself, for example, en route from Berlin, reclining in the sunlit
cabin, a gin and tonic in hand. (McEwan 2010: 1834)

He recalls peer-reviewing scientific papers predicting peak oil production in five to eight years; another modelling a Great Extinction already
under way; and a third predicting an ice-free Arctic by the summer of
2045. Yet rather than feeling guilty about being on an aircraft venting
greenhouse gases into the stratosphere, or becoming cowed or depressed
by these apocalyptic findings, an inebriated Beard admits that he was
content with his self-image as a frowning serious man at work, not
even thinking at that point of the lunch to come (McEwan 2010: 184).
The birds eye perspective of 30,000 feet had stimulated a delighted
sense of power rather than anxiety, while to his left, the southern sun,
too high for clouds, sent its photon torrent to illuminate and elevate his
labours. Yet it is the body rather than the mind that has the last word in
this instance: How could he ever give up gin? (McEwan 2010: 184).
Still suffering a physical and moral hangover from his earlier excess,
Beards nocturnal reflections take a darker turn as he considers his plan
for geoengineering the oceans, dumping tonnes of iron filings from
ships to encourage carbon-fixing plankton blooms, a plan realized off
the coast of Canada, illegally, in July 2012 (Lukacs 2012). McEwan anticipates precisely the objections that were raised:
Some marine biologists, no doubt with secret plans of their own, had heard
rumours of his science and had been arguing in the press that interfering

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with the base of the food chain was dangerous. They needed to be blasted
out of the water with some sound science. Beard already had two pieces
ready for publication, but it was important to hold back until the right
moment. (McEwan 2010: 188)

These thoughts might be considered a satire on the manipulation of science, and yet Solar shows little interest in what might actually make
scientific findings either credible or contestable. As a result, nothing
and no one challenges the dangerous conflation of sound science with
naked self-interest.
Having reconciled to his own satisfaction the vast economic potential of the artificial photosynthesis project with a high-minded vision
of its utopian promise, Beard stirs from his throne to attend to another
pressing physical need:
There he stood in gloom before the man-sized fridge, hesitating a moment
before pulling on its two-foot-long handle. It opened invitingly with a soft
sucking sound, like a kiss. The shelves were subtly lit and diverse, like a
glass skyscraper at night, and there was much to consider. Between a radicchio lettuce and a jar of Melissas homemade jam, in a white bowl covered
with silver foil, were the remains of the chicken stew. In the freezer compartment was a half-litre of dark chocolate ice cream. It could thaw while he got
started. He took a spoon from a drawer (it would do for both courses) and
sat down to his meal, feeling, as he peeled the foil away, already restored.
(McEwan 2010: 1889)

The details are telling. There is the ordinary consumerist excess of

the gigantic fridge, which is compared to another symbol of rampant
capitalism and human arrogance, a glass skyscraper. The continually
growing scale of both technologies correlates with Beards waistline,
his greed for food aligning neatly with the avarice that distorts his scientific and ethical perspective. Beards efficient decision to use only
one spoon suggests the revolutionary capacity of capitalism to streamline the means of production and consumption, while the appeal of
the remains of the stew might, at a stretch, imply the displacement of
waste and death the old world of cradle to grave production by a
new cradle to cradle recycling economy. Finally, the sucking sound of
the fridge door recalls lust, the third irresistible appetite alongside food
and wealth.
The corporeal foci of Beards obsessions, his mouth and penis, are
effectively tropes within a trope: the synecdochal parts that stand in for
his whole grotesque body, which in turn personifies the limitless appetites with which human nature has supposedly endowed us. Beards
penis, in particular, is seen not merely as the physical sign of his sexual
desire, but an enthusiastic competitor with his brain for control of his

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life as well as his blood supply (McEwan 2010: 33). In an extended, somewhat laboured, sequence in the Arctic, Beard accedes to the demands
of a full bladder in subzero temperatures only to get his penis stuck on
the metal zip of his snowsuit. At first he thinks he is going to die, but
then confronts a possibility almost as sobering: Nonsense, of course he
would survive. But this was it, a life without a penis. How his ex-wives,
especially Patrice, would enjoy themselves. But he would tell no one.
He would live quietly with his secret. He would live in a monastery, do
good works, visit the poor (McEwan 2010: 59). A virtuous existence is
possible only for a man without a penis. In a moment of rational clarity,
Beard defrosts his member by pouring brandy over it, then spends several hours convinced his penis has dropped off inside his snowsuit only
to discover his lipsalve has fallen down his trouser leg. The episode
confirms both McEwans modest gifts as a humorist and Beards phallocentrism: with his penis out of action he considers other kinds of sex
with Stella Polkinghorne, but then concludes What would be the point
of that? (McEwan 2010: 64).
The motif of the roaming, autonomous penis confirms that Beard
epitomizes what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the grotesque body. The bowels
and the phallus, Bakhtin tells us:
play the leading role in the grotesque image, and it is precisely for this reason that they are predominantly subject to positive exaggeration, to hyperbolization; they can even detach themselves from the body and lead an
independent life, for they hide the rest of the body, as something secondary.
(Dentith 1995: 226)

As we have seen, everything is secondary to the seemingly autonomous demands of Beards penis: his work, his relationships, even the
future of the planet (that moronic word again thinks Beard at one
point [McEwan 2010: 36]). Moreover, just like the figures from French
literature of which Bakhtin writes, McEwans protagonist is comically
distended to emphasize his gluttony: The grotesque face is actually
reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss (Dentith 1995: 226). In one of the funnier scenes in the book, Beard stuffs himself with smoked salmon
just before a lecture on climate change, not because he is hungry but
because he is, in his own term, pre-hungry (McEwan 2010: 146). The
enlightened economic self-interest of the Stern Report pervades the
speech itself, but this infodump of sustainable energy policy is leavened
throughout by interventions from Beards stomach. So, for example, a
fishy reflux rising from his gorge, like salted anchovies, with a dash of
bile hits him just as a wave of denialist muttering in his audience of
business-people prompts in him the contempt of the recent convert
(McEwan 2010: 151). The rhetorical climax of his speech includes two

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parables: the Parable of the Crisps, discussed below, and the Parable of
the Woodcutter:
Imagine we came across a man at the edge of a forest in heavy rainfall. This
man is dying of thirst. He has an axe in his hand and he is felling the trees
in order to suck sap from the trunks. There are a few mouthfuls in each tree.
All around him is devastation, dead trees, no birdsong, and he knows the
forest is vanishing. So why doesnt he tip back his head and drink the rain?
Because he cuts trees expertly, because he has always done it this way, and
because the kind of people who advocate rain-drinking he considers suspicious types. (McEwan 2010: 153)

The punchline, like the parable, is plagiarized from one of the monologues to which Tom Aldous, the Swan of Swaffham, subjected
Beard (cf. McEwan 2010: 27): That rain is our sunlight. The moral: it
is not high ideals but solar technology rationally developed in our economic self-interest that will save us from resource depletion and climate change. Yet those hopes are satirically undercut a few pages later
when Beard nips backstage to vomit the evidence of his own irrational
over-indulgence: To the sound of respectable applause, he bent double while his burden, well lubricated by fish oil, slid soundlessly from
him (McEwan 2010: 156). Unconsciously sickened by his own hypocrisy, Beard proves unable to control the promptings of his grotesque gut,
whether guzzling down or puking up.
If the synecdochal parables of the penis are largely affectionate, even
indulgent, the metonymic allegory of Beards body is sardonic. As the
smoked salmon incident illustrates, it is overwhelmingly a Swiftian
comedy of disgust rather than a carnivalesque comedy of delightful inversion. Indeed, whereas Bakhtin claims that cosmic terror and
apocalyptic anxiety are conquered by laughter (Dentith 1995: 242) in
the Renaissance carnival, we might argue that the bodys peremptory
greed and the frailty of our morals are their very source in Solar. Yet
the potential of this satirical portrait remains disappointingly undeveloped. Beards voracious appetites recall Raymond Williamss definition of the consumer as a very specialized variety of human being
with no brain, no eyes, no senses, but who can gulp (Williams 1989:
216) only Beard certainly has a brain and McEwan is uninterested
in making him part of a critique of consumerism. Williamss satirical portrait draws attention to the consistent representation of human
beings, with all their varied interests and priorities, as nothing more
than consumers by politicians and advertisers with a vested interest
in keeping us gulping. By contrast, Beards grotesque body seems to
be an unalterable evolutionary fact rather than a cultural construct,
perhaps because McEwans commitment to Enlightenment values
makes fundamental critique of capitalism almost inconceivable for
him, a point taken up in the conclusion.

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A Nest of Mouldy Parables

Michael Beard personifies human nature in the same way that bubonic
plague embodies the scourge of Nazism in Camus novel. At the same
time, though, the novel is over-populated with exemplary episodes,
which frequently have a strange and distracting dj vu quality. As
Evi Zemanek points out, Beards story [. . .] is peppered with allegorical episodes that function as mise en abyme (Zemanek 2012: 56). But in
truth, some of the episodes merely disrupt the plot thanks to the hall
of mirrors (mise en abyme) effect she mentions, while others prefigure
its allegorical message as she suggests. In the former category, Beard
is co-opted irrelevantly, for the purposes of the climate change narrative onto a scientific committee alongside various old male physics
professors and one woman: Nancy Temple, a professor of science studies, who treats science as a social practice rather than a source of truths
about physical reality. Responding to a journalists question about the
under-representation of women in physics, Beard replies that although
his committee would look at ways to address the problem, There might
always be more men than women who wanted to work in physics
(McEwan 2010: 133). Citing widely observed innate [gender] differences
in cognitive ability (McEwan 2010: 134), he suggests that inclination and
aptitude, not sexism, might explain the gender imbalance in physics.
It is the violent response of Professor Temple to his arguments that
provokes the ensuing media storm, rather than any intemperate claims
on Beards part. A colleague whispers in his ear: Youve put your foot in
it now. Shes postmodern, you see, a blank-slater, a strong social constructivist. They all are, you know (McEwan 2010: 135). Before long newspapers are referring to him as the neo-Nazi professor. The episode
alludes to at least three similar ones: the vicious attacks on Edward O.
Wilson in the wake of the publication of his groundbreaking Sociobiology
(Segerstrle 2000); the furore surrounding a speech by Harvard President
Larry Summers, which eventually contributed to his resignation (Staff
2008); and the accusations of Islamophobia levelled at Martin Amis in
2007, which brought McEwan out in his defence (McEwan 2007b). No
wonder the reader feels as if he has heard it all before. The debate later
staged within the novel between Beard and a cognitive psychologist
called Susan Appelbaum (Temple is unaccountably absent) is essentially
a paraphrase of one between Stephen Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke, which
McEwan cites in his acknowledgements. Given how McEwan found his
close friend Amis represented in the press by an unrecognizably evil avatar (McEwan 2010: 144), the anecdote comes across as understandable,
if intrusive, personal axe-grinding, as well as a reiteration of attacks on
postmodernists by Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Richard Dawkins, E. O.
Wilson and others. As if in recognition of that risk, McEwan has biologist
friends who urge Beard to forget the argument about gender difference:
That was old hat, that was seventies stuff, there was a new consensus

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now, not only in genetics, but in academic life in general. He was too bitter.
Have another drink! (McEwan 2010: 144). Assuming his friends are right,
there seems little value in the rehearsal of such an anachronistic argument.
A second mouldy parable concerns a battle of wills over a packet
of crisps on a train. The episode begins well, with a description of the
snack food that hinges Beards inability to resist its allure upon a comically alienated description flavoured with a soupon of national pride:
It was a plastic foil bag of finely sliced potatoes boiled in oil and dusted in
salt, industrialised powdered foodstuffs, preservatives, enhancers, hydrolysing and raising agents, acidity regulators and colouring. Salt and vinegar flavoured crisps. He was still stuffed from his lunch, but this particular
chemical feast could not be found in Paris, Berlin or Tokyo and he longed for
it now, the actinic sting of these thirty grams a drug dealers measure. One
last jolt to the system, then he would never touch the stuff again. (McEwan
2010: 118)

Again the gaping mouth of Beards resistless appetite is displayed with

humour and precision: he knows exactly what is in the bag, yet remains
in thrall to the synthetic actinic sting it promises. He delays gratification
just long enough to torment himself pointlessly over his mistreatment
of Melissa, then dedicates himself to intense enjoyment of the artful
laboratory simulation of the corner fish and chip shop, an enactment of
fond memories and desire and nationhood (McEwan 2010: 122). When
a young man starts helping himself from the same bag, experienced
McEwan readers might anticipate an explosion of violence in the near
future, such as those in Black Dogs and Saturday, but the punchline
arriving with all the surprise of a hooting, puffing steam train from a
few miles off is that Beard still has his own bag of crisps in his pocket.
And that other bag? What a cascade of recalibration of every instant,
every impulse, of the nature of the man he never wanted to see again,
and of how he, Beard, must have seemed a vicious madman (McEwan
2010: 127).
The anecdote, trivial and long-winded as it is, seems a familiar urban
legend over-freighted with allegorical significance the first time around,
but then Beard retells it, with exaggerated self-deprecation, during the
nauseating speech discussed above. In the process, he turns it into a
feeble climate change parable designed to show that the problem lies
not in other people, but in ourselves, our own follies and unexamined
assumptions, and furthermore that there are moments when the acquisition of new information forces us to make a fundamental reinterpretation of our situation (McEwan 2010: 155). In other words, the message of
Solars allegory is summarized within the Parable of the Crisps. Yet, in
the moments before his gut expels the pile of sandwiches, Beard reflects
that his conclusions were hollow after all (156) a judgement we seem
bound to apply to the larger allegory of which this is a microcosm.

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Even then we are not to be allowed off the train. Immediately after
the lecture, Beard is button-holed by Jeremy Mellon, a lecturer in urban
studies and folklore with a jutting ginger beard and large accusing
eyes (McEwan 2010: 147). Mellon insists that the story is familiar to
folklorists as the tale of the Unwitting Thief (McEwan 2010: 157), and
that it has some stable characteristics among the variants notably
that the wrongly accused is generally a marginal figure, often threatening, just like the antagonist in the Parable of the Crisps. The reader
of quality broadsheets will in any case recognize both the Parable and
the argument about it, because, like Beard, McEwan was reminded at
a pre-publication reading at Hay book festival that an almost identical episode appears in his friend Douglas Adamss novel So Long and
Thanks for All the Fish (1985). Mellon points out the resemblance along
with a number of other Unwitting Thief variants, most of which happen
to appear, together with much of Mellons dialogue, under the heading
Pinched Cookies on Snopes.com, a website of urban legends. And now,
as if to complete the whirl of allusion, the apparent source of McEwans
information includes Solar as an additional example.
The problem with these diversions is that they ruin the allegorical
drive of main plot with their authorial self-reference and distracting
intertextuality. A key instance is the Parable of the Boot Room, a variant
of the Prisoners Dilemma from game theory, which explains how selfish
behaviour can ultimately be self-defeating. According to McEwans Cape
Farewell blog, as the artistic idealists in the Arctic focus on fighting climate change, the boot room of the ship becomes a wasteland of broken
dreams (McEwan 2005a): people take other peoples boots and gloves
ruthlessly or mistakenly, put things back in the wrong place, accuse
comrades of pilfering and so on. As soon as one person takes the wrong
boots, a chain reaction of well-intentioned selfishness ensues, or as
McEwan puts it: With the eighth Commandment broken, the social contract is ruptured too. Using a quotation from Miltons Paradise Lost (1667),
McEwan emphasizes that this is indeed a parable of Mans Fall from a
Paradise of plentiful, properly allocated Arctic survival equipment. But
just as the essay youre reading ironically appropriates the religious language of parables in its analysis of a thoroughly secular novel, McEwan
reminds us that the origin of this sin the fine balance in human nature
between cooperation and selfishness is in evolution, not Eden.
The parable leads McEwan to reflect that only good rules can make
good citizens out of untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans.
McEwans view is also Beards: Leave nothing, Beard decided, to science
or art, or idealism. Only good laws would save the boot room. And citizens who respected the law (McEwan 2010: 80). It is an eminently sensible conclusion, but it reduces Solar as a whole to a distended illustration
of a parable that is itself linked in a metonymic chain through McEwans
Cape Farewell blog to Enduring Love and then on to Matt Ridleys The
Origins of Virtue (1997), Richard Dawkinss The Selfish Gene (1976) and

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other excellent accounts of evolutionary ethics by McEwans friends.

The momentum of the satiric, mediaeval-type allegory, which hopes to
convey the timeless truths of human nature, keeps being deflected by
these ironic parables. Paul de Man calls such shifts of register parabasis, a term originally used of Greek drama, when the chorus interrupts
the drama to address the audience directly. As Tambling explains:
Irony, surfacing as parabasis repeatedly within a text, means that the texts
discontinuity with itself is constantly being advertised, so that the text is,
actually, mad, disconnected, and ecstatic in the literal sense in that each part
of it stands outside those parts surrounding and succeeding it. (loc.2554)

In this case the effect of parabasis is due to the way the parables are
insistently du jour and, at the same time, conspicuous reiterations of
other stories. Yank on the end of any one of these untimely metonymic
chains and Beards instructive personification bursts at the seams.

Against Apocalypse Now and Again

One of the shortest such chains links a passing compliment about Beards
last girlfriend Melissa to a telling observation in The London Review of
Books on the cultural politics and psychology of climate change: in the
course of a lengthy disquisition on her beauty, kindness and intelligence, we discover that:
She approved of [Beards] mission and loyally read climate-change stories in
the press. But she told him once that to take the matter seriously would be
to think about it all the time. Everything else shrank before it. And so, like
everyone else she knew, she could not take it seriously, not entirely. Daily life
would not permit it. (165)

As Kerridge points out, Melissa closely paraphrases a passage by John

Lanchester (2007), with the difference that for her it is a throwaway
remark whereas for him it is an agonized statement, trapping the argument in an impasse between the two unbearable propositions of not thinking about global warming at all and thinking about nothing else (159).
Its very different place in Solars world is emphasized by Beards acknowledgement that He sometimes quoted this observation in talks (McEwan
2010: 165) merely another parable for him to cite in his sales pitch.
As parabasis, though, Melissas admission opens the novel to the terror that Lanchester can neither disavow nor endure. Helen Simpsons
In-Flight Entertainment (2010), a collection of lightly comic climate change
parables and ironic reflections on apocalyptic anxiety, concludes with
a brief, horrific dystopia that clarifies the ultimate emotional import of
the episodes that precede it. In non-fiction, Clive Hamiltons Requiem for

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135

a Species (2010) presents a closely reasoned argument for accepting that it

is too late to prevent severe climatic disruption, parts of it reliant on the
same ideas about human nature to which McEwan subscribes. Although
he understands our desire not to think about it, Hamiltons conclusion
is startling: Sooner or later we must respond and that means allowing
ourselves to enter a phase of desolation and hopelessness, in short, to
grieve (2010: loc.3247). Melissas paraphrase of Lanchester introduces
into Solar violently disruptive emotions of mourning and terror that
McEwan has chosen not to address.
For an acknowledged master of psychological realism not to make use
of its resources is a puzzle. As we have seen, McEwan himself seems to
have been stumped, and resorted to comic allegory as an escape route.
One of the obstacles was Norman Cohns The Pursuit of the Millennium
(1957), a magisterial study of apocalyptic movements McEwan cites in
a lecture called End of the World Blues, delivered in 2007 during the
writing of Solar. McEwan compares the mortifying disenchantment
of religious sects due to failed apocalyptic prophecy with contemporary secular apocalyptic beliefs (McEwan 2007a: 356). He distinguishes
carefully between environmental calamities . . . posed as mere possibilities in an open-ended future and unavoidable outcomes driven by
ineluctable forces of history or innate human failings (McEwan 2007a:
358). In the latter form, environmental apocalypses share much with
their religious counterparts notably fatalism.
McEwans reading of Cohn seems to have inoculated him against the
temptation of apocalyptic fiction: Two Fragments, a short story from
In Between the Sheets (1978) aside, he has consistently avoided writing it.
Indeed, in Sweet Tooth (2012) the narrator Serena Frome expresses disappointment when she reads a modish apocalypse that indicted and
rejected all we had ever devised or built or loved, that relished the entire
project collapsing into the dirt, which she decries as the luxury and
privilege of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes of progress for the
rest (McEwan 2012a: 196). There is a striking contrast between the dystopian London of The Child in Time (1987) and Saturday (2005), McEwans
paean to Enlightenment scientific progress, which extols the miracle
of the modern metropolis: the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a
biological masterpiece millions teeming around the accumulated and
layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef,
sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most
part, nearly everyone wanting it to work (McEwan 2005b: 5). The naturalizing simile of city and reef reflects the Enlightenment confidence
with which McEwans mature work is imbued: the great city is the highest material expression of the human species, not the incipient dystopia
or disaster area of popular fictions. Solar is, above all, not apocalyptic.
Yet climate change is a formidable test of the belief that science and
liberal democracy can steer us clear of catastrophe. For Timothy Clark, it
has initiated the destruction-testing of the institutions and assumptions

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of democracy and capitalism, including the elusive ideal of sustainable

development: The environment is no longer thinkable as an object
of crisis for us to decide on or manage: it ceases being only a passive
ground, context and resource for human society and becomes an imponderable agency that must somehow be taken into account, even if we are
unsure how (Clark 2010: 134). Climate change confounds received ideas
about individual agency, for example, because the more humans there
are, the greater our cumulative impact, but the less the action of a single
person or even nation makes a difference: The very element that
renders some trivialities [such as unplugging mobile phone chargers or
switching off lights] potentially disastrous in the longer term, the effects
of scale, necessarily includes the almost complete irrelevance of my own
decision at the present time (Clark 2010: 137). We might call this paradox the unbearable lightness of green (Garrard 2012: 241).
If Clark is right, climate change is the insoluble limit case for McEwans
liberal humanist progressivism. Conceding the possibility of apocalypse would therefore be more than an aesthetic decision; it would be a
devastating admission of moral and political failure. Seen in this light,
McEwans mild satirical reproof to Michael Beards bumbling destructiveness teeters on the brink of the dizzyingly savage indictment the
crisis more truly requires. Solar may be as far as McEwan can go while
keeping faith with the Enlightenment. We will know, probably in the
next two decades, whether such reformist hopes were justified. A great
deal more than disappointment is at stake.

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INTO THE ARCHIVE

Untitled: A Minute Story

IAN McEWAN

The sky a blank and gleaming white, the afternoon heavy with wasted
time. He indicates a seat. Youve come about the operation? . . . Behind
his head a lizard on the wall blinks and disappears. He takes a comb
from his pocket and runs it through his hair and beard. Yellowish flakes
settle on the black desk top. She stares over his head at where the lizard
was, seems to be thinking hard before replying, How much?
He takes a black leather notebook from his pocket. He opens it at
the last page. You want this operation performed without the patients
knowledge? She nods. Removal of bladder and genitalia? She nods.
Removal of the tongue? She nods. Removal of the tendons in both wrists?
She nods and barely smiles. He replaces his book. Difficult, you know,
without the patients knowledge. Falls asleep one evening . . . wakes up
the next morning? Thats right, she says. Thats how I see it. Its the best
way, he agrees.
The sky a blank and gleaming white, the afternoon heavy with wasted
time. Behind his head a lizard. He removes mucus from his nose hairs
with medical tweezers. He shrugs. Lets say 60 the lot. She smiles and
they agree on 55.
He was not what most people consider a doctor, nor was he really a
dissident. But he had ideas of his own.
He wanted to stage one of his own nightmares. He went into business.
He performed little odd things for different people . . . mostly grotesque,
but he did not overcharge. Very humdrum it was at first in the office.
Mostly angry women wanting bladder jobs on their husbands. When it
was quiet he jacked off in closet and came (little girlish gasps) into the
roller towel.
Then came his first eye job. He almost refused. It was a young girl, 17,
quiet, light fine hair, mouth that flickered. She wanted the eyes out of her
boyfriend. 1st interview she said she wanted to be sure he would marry
her. She was afraid he would be wanting to get his end in other women
soon. 2nd interview it came out, it always came out in the end. She had a
fantasy . . . being fucked by a blindman. Her father was blind.
The sky a blank, gleaming white. He leaned back in his chair. On the
wall behind his head a lizard blinked and disappeared.
There will be adaption problems of course. She whispered, Hell get
used to it. She leaned forward. I love him doctor.

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Yes . . . a lot of women come . . . they want their husbands to need

them, more than that, to be dependent on them. They see love in terms
of dependency. . . . Possibly their own experience in childhood. . . . Their
husbands, ten years into marriage, are successful, mobile, probably promiscuous. . . . Secretly they would rather do without their wives and
have a manservant to wash the dishes. . . . The women know this. They
are not valued. They come to me. I recommend a bladder job. The man
without his bladder (he doesnt know hes lost it) has a terrible secret. He
wets his pants. He cannot function socially. He hurries home after work,
just like he used to. He shares the secret with his wife. To his relief she
is sympathetic, understanding, loving. It is a secret he can share with no
one else in the world. He abandons his mistress. With difficulty his wife
persuades him into a diaper. The net is closing around him. He insists
on putting it on himself, but its difficult. She does it for him one night,
tickles his cock before she snaps the pin shut. It becomes a routine. He
wonders what is happening to him. She has the hold now. She consents
to make love only occasionally. If she does not get her way she threatens
to expose him to his friends, or hang the drying diapers in the garden,
or pursue a divorce on the grounds of irretrievable breakdown. He visits doctors and specialists and they tell him there is nothing they can do.
His bladder seems to have disappeared. Perhaps he never had one. Very
mysterious. They tell him hes lucky to have such an understanding
wife. She insists he sleep in a crib bed if the marriage is to continue. He
refuses. She leaves a letter to the family solicitor lying around. The letter
describes her husbands condition in embarrassing detail. He agrees to
the crib bed. And as the months go by he agrees in the same way to his
bibs, potty, bottle . . . but it no longer matters. He has discovered that he
loves his wife blindly.

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AFTERWORD

Ian McEwans Sweet Tooth: Put in

porphyry and marble do appear
PETER CHILDS

Chapter Summary: In the early 1970s, Ian McEwans first published

stories appeared in the United Kingdom and the United States, some
of which remain uncollected. This stage of his career is reflected but
distorted in the biography of the writer Tom Haley in McEwans Sweet
Tooth (2012), a complex, polyreferential, sly, refracted novel whose debts
range from non-fiction works like Frances Stonor Saunders Who Paid the
Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) to Edmund Spensers piece of
late sixteenth-century juvenilia Ruines of Rome.

While many novelists produce a debut that is rooted in autobiography,

Ian McEwan has taken quite a different path. First came his unsettling
short stories and then a novel(la), The Cement Garden (1978), that was less
born of experience than his childhood wish for siblings (Haffenden 1985:
171). While other novels are contenders in any debate over McEwans
most autobiographical fiction, the one that draws most clearly on his
own literary history is his fifteenth book, the 2012 novel Sweet Tooth,
which gives the reader a distorting lens through which to see McEwans
early career as a newly published writer.
In the early 1970s, McEwans first printed stories appeared in the
United Kingdom and the United States. He published in (New) American
Review, Transatlantic Review, TriQuarterly, Amazing Stories, Harpers/Queen,
Bananas, New Review, Time Out and De Revisor, as well as Avenue (Holland)
and Nagy Vilag (Hungary). Some of these stories are uncollected,
including Intersection (TriQuarterly, Fall 1975: 6386) and Untitled
(TriQuarterly, Winter 1976: 623). This stage of his career is reflected but
warped in the biography of the writer Tom Haley in Sweet Tooth. Haley is
the target of the lead character in the novel, Serena Frome, who works
for the British Intelligence services. Partly because Sweet Tooth is set in
the early 1970s, it is easy to think the character of Serena is indebted to

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the example of Stella Rimington, who is mentioned in Sweet Tooth and

whose autobiography Open Secret (2001) features in McEwans acknowledgements. However, resemblances are almost certainly deceptive, and
of most significance is perhaps the fact that Rimington became a spy
novelist after retiring as Director General of MI5.
In its opening sentence, Sweet Tooth seems to warn the reader that all
is not as it looks: My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with Plume) (p. 1).
Indeed, drawn into a world of espionage, this narrator is herself not
what she seems; she is, it transpires, someone else undercover. At the
end of the novel, the reader learns that Serena is not the person who has
written those words in the present of 2012, but that they were instead
penned forty years earlier by her lover Tom Haley, an aspiring novelist
and the object of her secret service operation, itself named Sweet Tooth.
At least, that is one reading offered by the novels closing chapter. In this
deceptive novel, there can be other interpretations, and the overriding
message is that the reader has to choose, to the extent that the narrative
even explains a method for making choices in terms of mathematical
probability.
Sweet Tooth is set in and around 1972 at a time when McEwan was
a promising but largely unknown writer. The novel is in one sense a
shadowy piece of refracted memoir. McEwans twisted doppelganger
is the writer T. H. Haley, who has published a few short stories and
some journalism. Hes looking for a publisher (McEwan 2012a: 93).
Tom has a degree in English from Sussex, and an MA in international
relations, and now teaches at Sussex while researching a doctorate on
Spensers The Faerie Queene (McEwan 2012a: 93, 183). The details are in
some cases the same as for McEwans biography (English degree from
Sussex University), occasionally altered (McEwans MA was in Creative
Writing from East Anglia) and sometimes different in time or nature
(McEwan did not embark on a PhD and teach at Sussex).
When mention is first made of Tom, Serena is tasked with reading
everything hes published to date. The non-fiction work includes an article for History Today on East Germany and a piece about the Berlin Wall
in Encounter. In comparison, McEwan has also had a long interest in
European relations, has written on several occasions about German history, including in his introduction to Peter Schneiders The Wall Jumper
(1984), and has for example set a scene at the fall of the Berlin Wall
in Black Dogs (1992). But it is the reference to Encounter that resonates
most for the plot of Sweet Tooth (as intimated in its discussion on pages
2434 and 276). Encounter was an Anglo-American literary magazine
and cultural journal published in the United Kingdom and co-founded
by Stephen Spender and influential neoconservative American writer
Irving Kristol. Contributors believed that funding for the magazine
came from US philanthropists but it became increasingly clear in the
1960s that Encounter received covert funding from the CIA, putatively
abetted by MI6 in its aim at nurturing liberal support for US foreign

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141

policy in the Cold War, and which led to the resignation of Spender and
his successor Frank Kermode (Kermode 1997: 23142). McEwan himself
published a story in Encounter, entitled Without Blood; but the story
fittingly appeared under another name Saturday, March 199-, in his
second story-collection, In Between the Sheets (1978).
In terms of his fiction, when Serena is first told about him, Tom Haley
has published five stories: one in Encounter, and then things youve
never heard of the Paris Review, the New American Review, Kenyon
Review and Transatlantic Review [. . .]. A well-known publishing house
has said they like the stories but wont publish them until he comes up
with a novel (McEwan 2012a: 956). Toms short-story publishing career
is not the same as McEwans but is similar in several ways. Transatlantic
Review printed McEwans first story in 1971 (Begley 2009: 91). Also, from
1972 Ted Solotaroff started publishing McEwans stories in the New
American Review, including Disguises and Homemade, the first story
in McEwans debut collection First Love, Last Rites (Hamilton 2009: 11).
Soon after McEwan returned post-MA from travelling in Afghanistan
in 1972, Tom Maschler (McEwan 2012a: 224) at Jonathan Cape offered to
publish a collection of short stories, pinching McEwan from Secker and
Warburg, who had asked him to come up with a novel first (Hamilton
2009: 1415).
In Sweet Tooth, Tom meets Maschler at Capes offices in Bedford Square
(McEwan 2012a: 224), leading to the publication of his first novella, the
140-page From the Somerset Levels. Haley is also courted by another figure
key in McEwans literary fortunes: Ian Hamilton. McEwan, a kind of literary country mouse moved to London and would meet with Hamilton
(Begley 2009: 92), who was then starting up The New Review, and others like Martin Amis at the Pillars of Hercules pub in Greek Street
(McEwan 2012a: 261). This autobiographical element appears in outline
as Tom visits the pub, where he finds Hamilton and Amis (McEwan
2012a: 264). In terms of McEwans actual career, Hamilton went on to
publish in The New Review four stories that subsequently appear in his
first and second collections, Solid Geometry, To and Fro, In Between
the Sheets, and Reflections of a Kept Ape. The last of these, one of
McEwans self-reflecting stories according to its author (Hamilton 2009:
15), bears a remarkable similarity to one of Tom Haleys stories, the reaction to which by Tom-as-Serena is a multilayered piece of metafiction:
Only on the last page did I discover that the story I was reading was actually the one the woman was writing. The ape doesnt exist, its a spectre, the
creature of her fretful imagination. No. And no again. Not that. Beyond the
strained and ludicrous matter of cross-species sex, I instinctively distrusted
this kind of fictional trick. I wanted to feel the ground beneath my feet.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer
must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim. The invented had to

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be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded

on mutual trust. (McEwan 2012a: 193)

However, in Sweet Tooth such an unwritten contract between reader

and writer is no more inviolable than the mutual trust between Serena
and Tom. Deception of the reader is as possible as deception among the
characters, and indeed is expected of the genre with which McEwan
is concerned in the novel. Serena, as written by Tom, wishes for solid
ground beneath her feet but the fiction in which she is caught draws
more of its lineage from the Jamesian idea that the writers exquisite
scheme is woven into the entire tale, is patterned something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet for the critic or the attentive reader to
perceive (James 1964: 289).
To again hold up the distorting mirror to McEwans writing, Sweet
Tooth contains tantalizing and eerie accounts of several of Tom Haleys
stories. On first reading, it appears plain that these are summarized
by Serena but, as noted above, by the end it seems that they are Toms
accounts of Serenas renditions of his stories. One of the stories is a parallel version of McEwans early work Dead As They Come in which,
for example, Haley has the love-object shop dummy named Hermione
(possibly in reference to the plot-twist of the statue-come-to-life in The
Winters Tale) rather than McEwans more obvious name for a fetishized
beauty: Helen (McEwan 2012a: 123). As mentioned, another story reworks
the Kafka-influenced Reflections of a Kept Ape (McEwan 2012a: 193),
while a third is entitled Pawnography (McEwan 2012a: 160), rather than
McEwans Pornography, the homophone re-emphasizing the hint from
the novels opening sentence that the narrative concerns distorted words
and re-inflected perceptions. That people and probabilities are not what
they seem is of course also pointed up by the novels central concern
with deceptive appearances and impersonation, echoing McEwans earlier script for the Bletchley Park television play The Imitation Game (1981).
Sweet Tooths central set-piece is in fact a conversation in which Serena
explains to Tom how mathematical probability is counter-intuitive
through a game show reference to the Monty Hall problem (McEwan
2012a: 203). Tom reworks this into a story called Probable Adultery (208),
but distorts, or adulterates, it because he has misunderstood the logic.
This is the pattern of the novel in which Haleys career appears as
a distortion of McEwans: it was warped in its frame (McEwan 2012a:
134). So, From the Somerset Levels wins the Austen Prize (McEwan 2012a:
273) whereas McEwans debut, exposing the pun inserted into Toms
title, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1976. Had McEwans own
attempt at a gloomy, dystopian novel been completed successfully it
would have been his first, but instead he revives it for Tom (Wark 2012).
Again, at one point Tom Haley and Ian Hamilton have a conversation
about the closing lines of Larkins Whitsun Weddings (McEwan 2012a:
262), which is a poem McEwan discusses movingly, quoting the same

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lines, in his December 2011 appreciation of rather than obituary for

Sweet Tooths dedicatee Christopher Hitchens (McEwan 2011). There is
also a sequence in which Tom shares a bill in Cambridge with Martin
Amis, each reading from debut novels (McEwan 2012a: 248, 254) while
the real-life occasion that McEwan is reworking occurred in New York.
The book is studded with other references to McEwans life and writings, some of which may go unnoticed by all but the author.
Sweet Tooth emerges as a book that has narratives within narratives,
fictions about fictions, stories that tell other stories. It takes the familiar
spy novel image of the matryoshka doll and inserts Toms nested and
refracted short stories: fictional fragments within the usual tales, tricks
and lies. It is perhaps also not coincidental that McEwan has gone on to
champion the short story and declare that the novella is the perfect form
of prose fiction in a New Yorker blog post (McEwan 2012b). McEwans
choice of the supreme example of the short form is Joyces The Dead
(from Dubliners 1914), which he himself drew on in Saturday, reminding
us of Eliots much misquoted and distorted words:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they
take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something
different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is
unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws
it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow
from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
(Eliot 1921)

In McEwans case, the novelist may self-steal, but it is clear that in

Sweet Tooth he has also written something utterly different than that
from which it is torn. There may also be a clue to McEwans exquisite
scheme in the example of Edmund Spenser, Tom Haleys thesis subject. For Spenser, the poet alien in language from whom he borrowed
was Joachim du Bellay, whose sonnet sequence Antiquits de Rome (1558)
Spenser wrought into Ruines of Rome (c.1591) in recognition of the first
Garland of free Poesy / That France brought forth, as Spenser notes in
an appended verse, addressed to Bellay. This verse is entitled by Spenser
LEnvoi, following in the old French poetry tradition of a detached
verse, often used to address the poem to a particular person. Is it not
thus part of Sweet Tooths pattern, that Ruines of Rome is quoted by Haley
(McEwan 2012a: 225), who composes the many chapters of Sweet Tooth as
his version of Serenas words, before a final appended chapter written in
his own voice, addressed to her?
Perhaps so, perhaps not. In this deceptive novel of surfaces and distorted reflections, we are simply left to calculate the probability of the
pattern in the carpet being woven by the writer or simply (mis)perceived
there by McEwans target: the reader.

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Journeys without Maps:

An Interview with Ian McEwan
BY JON COOK, SEBASTIAN GROES AND VICTOR SAGE

Sebastian Groes: In recent years, the disappearance of children has

increasingly featured in the British media, and also abroad. One may
think of the Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman murders, and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Belgium saw the Mark Dutroux
scandal and in Austria Natascha Kampusch was locked up for eight
years. What is striking about the media coverage, and particularly in the
Madeleine McCann case of 2007, is the intense, non-stop proliferation of
pictures of innocent children in the public realm. One of Contemporary
Critical Perspectives contributors calls this a form of cultural pornography: children are obsessively equated with innocence and adulthood
is perceived as a state of loss, which becomes politicized in a variety of
ways. Not only did you write about the effect of a disappeared child on
parents in The Child in Time, but your entire work is interested in analysing changing cultural and socio-political notions of innocence. How
do you read this iconography of innocence as a change in the collective
consciousness?
Ian McEwan: Weve got to make a distinction between, on the one hand,
what we might imagine is public fear or a troubled public consciousness, and, on the other hand, a media environment. The term media
is now doubly apt: the media become the mediators of this strange, not
entirely trustworthy outpouring of sadness over, for instance, Madeleine
McCann. But its not clear that children are in more danger now than
they were in the fifties. It is not for nothing that the disappearing child
story has become a staple of the summer holidays: newspapers the
world over are suffering from a shrinking readership and therefore the
competition is intense. What used to be called the silly season has now
taken on a darker meaning.
That said, when I wrote The Child in Time, disappearing children were
not as often in the news as they are now, and I do think a shift in the collective emotional life in Britain has occurred, right around the death of
Diana, which saw an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. The nation
woke up from this a year later, as if after a terrible party, wondering at
what it had said and done. Since then weve had a number of tragedies,
which have given rise to what one writer has called the damp teddy
syndrome: a person or a child dies, not someone known to you, and yet

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you take along the teddy bear, the flowers, the poems, the rain comes
and finally its all cleared away by the dustman.
Calling these images of disappeared or murdered children pornographic has a degree of truth. As the influence of Freud in literary
and intellectual culture has faded, we have returned to the idea that
childhood is a form of innocence, that children are not consumed by
hidden sexual impulses or possessed by the polymorphous perverse.
They come into the world not responsible for it, and they are sometimes
acted upon by people with terrible intent. This frightens us. The literary imagination is bound to go into dark corners to explore this fear.
For most people, the loss of a child is the worst thing that can happen.
Deep love breeds a fear of loss, I wrote in an oratorio. It troubles us,
especially given that we, compared to most other places in the world,
lead relatively stable lives here in northwest Europe. The lost child is
the ghost that haunts us. As those terrible thoughts run through your
mind, your hand tightens on your childs. The imagination flows into
unwanted places, and perhaps this is its evolutionary function: to foresee bad outcomes and try to avoid them. Fear may lie at the root of the
imagination itself.
S. G.: In the preface to oratorio you just mentioned, Or Shall we Die?,
you talk about the way imagination operates in the conception of your
work. You say that the prospect of making shape, a form that is selfsustaining, self-justifying and balanced in terms which you cannot
quite define or prescribe [. . .] makes you excited and miserable [. . .]
This hypothetical beginning, this particular sweat, is what I take to be
imaginative freedom (McEwan 1983: ix). As your body of works has
progressed and youve explored more and more possible storylines, to
what extent has this particular sweat changed? Do you feel you need
to artificially trigger this particular sweat in order to continue opening up original, exciting narratives that entail a meaningful progression of your authorship?
I. M.: I dont think the creative starting point the blank page has
changed. Writing continues to involve retreat and silence; often doing
nothing at all, creative hesitation, are all-important precursors to starting. I dont have, and never have had, publishers breathing down my
neck demanding the next book. A work of art has to be self-generated.
What has changed is the background noise, which is now, with the
spread of email, for instance, far greater than it was in the seventies.
We live in an age of marvellous machines. I like computers, but it does
require conscious effort to close it down, to not go near the email program or the Internet. I liked the old days, a brief window, when the computer was simply a clever form of typewriter.
And what is constant is the element of self-reinvention: in a sense,
every new book is the first book, for which a language has to be discovered. Often now, the first few months of writing a novel are not about

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whats going to happen in it, but about how its going to be told. I come
up with an opening of fifteen hundred words, maybe three thousand
words, and I stop and spend a lot of time just messing around with it
to get the voice, the taste of it. Once Ive got the feel of the prose, I feel
happier about pushing on.
Victor Sage: This reminds me of when I first met you. You were writing very short pieces and I was impressed by the desire in you to write
blind: you would do anything to void yourself of all plans. It was in the
knowledge that one cannot know oneself. It connected with the kind of
strangely ritualized regressions that form a stream in your work. When
you first began with those concentrated short stories, sometimes youd
wait five or six weeks for the end of a story to arrive and when it did, it
was delivered whole out of your head. Do you still write blind? Are you
still interested in testing yourself with the advantage of our not being
able to know ourselves in the act of writing?
I. M.: Theres always a tension in fiction, and maybe in all arts, between,
on the one hand, a sense of the artist in control of his or her material, and, on the other hand, needing to embrace a degree of chance, a
degree of luck. To some extent writing a novel has to be a journey without maps. A later draft allows one to smooth the edges and make that
tension operate so that it looks as if everything was intended, but in the
actual process I feel like Im only partially in control of the material.
There is a self-organizing quality about a novel: the deeper you get
into it, the more your options close down. But Atonement certainly began
blind. I wrote a paragraph about a girl with some wild flowers stepping
into a room looking for a vase, aware of a young man outside. I liked
the sentences. I had about seven or eight hundred words and I thought:
This is the beginning of a novel.
I picked my way slowly and wrote what became the second chapter
of Atonement. Even then, I had no clear idea what I was doing; I thought
perhaps this was a novel set in the future in which a privileged elite
had turned its back, luxuriously, on technological civilization in order
to live out a fantasy eighteenth-century Jane Austen-like country house
world. Only the lower classes bothered with technology. Im slightly
ashamed of saying this, but in my very first draft Robbie had implants
in his brain that permitted him to download directly from the Internet.
Cecilia thinks this is terribly lowbrow, like having three ducks flying
over your mantelpiece. Thats flying blind, I guess.
By the time I started the second chapter, I was already moving in
another direction. I needed to give this woman a younger sister and
Briony just launched herself on to the page fully-formed, and what is
now the first chapter of the novel wrote itself relatively quickly, in two
or three weeks. Robbies implanted electrodes were nonsense he now
was a living character. There was no plan for this novel, but writing it
created a plan.

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The Child in Time started as a comic novel, and then I stalled for
eighteen months before I started again and found another way into it.
Enduring Love really started as a riposte too. Vic [Sage] once said to me:
We dont really hear the case for rationality in Black Dogs. I thought
I would like to write about a character who is almost pathologically
rational but also right in his judgements. But I had no idea how it would
begin. There was a lot of floundering before those characters emerged
and I discovered Enduring Love.
Its an inefficient way of working. It sometimes means sitting days,
weeks on end, not filling the page because you cant think how to get
out of the corner youve written yourself into. But this kind of writing,
if youre prepared to wait, will give it a cohesion you could never get
with a back-of-an-envelope plan. It will be cleverer in some important respects. It will be something you never could have elaborated in
advance. In Atonement, Brionys dying confession is something that she
could never have foreseen. When she wrote her first draft, she could
not have foreseen her last. Its this element of exploration in the dark,
of investigation, and surprise, which lies at the heart of the pleasure of
fiction for me.
Jon Cook: I want to ask you about the role of ideas in your fiction. Ideas
might be important in two respects. One of them is the way in which
your novels are responsive to intellectual or ideological preoccupations
in modern culture. Your early work engaged with feminism and the
politics of nuclear disarmament, and your subsequent work has been
responding to the ways in which we seek to or perhaps cannot
remember traumatic or catastrophic events such as the Second World
War. Ideas also are present in your fiction in the way arguments occur
in your fiction. The argument between Joe and Clarissa in Enduring
Love, for instance, is to do with the troubled affair encountered in their
relationship, but they represent two different ideas about what madness signifies: one offers an inter-subjective account of mental disturbance; the other offers a scientific account of mental disturbance. To what
degree are you aware of those intellectual preoccupations? And do you
write novels to engage with a specific idea in mind?
I. M.: I do have a useful and, I hope, practical sense of what ideas do in
the novel. My thoughts on this are also contradictory, and conflicted.
They range from Kunderas notion that ideas have no place at all because
they are the death of the novel, to the notion of the novel as a fundamentally intellectual preoccupation. I like novels, beside emotional and
sensual content, to have some muscularity of intellect, and engagement
with the world.
In his essay Art of Fiction (1884), Henry James said that one of the
prime duties of the novelist is to be interesting, which can mean anything you want it to. When I look back, I want to group together four
books, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs and Enduring Love.

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During that period, before I actually started work, many of the notes,
the messages I sent to myself were about finding dramatic or sensual
ways in bringing ideas to life rather than about characters or settings
or plots. In other words, I set out to make a novel of ideas not the true,
expository thing that Diderot might write, but rather something which
has life and energy at the level of the plots intricacy and the characters
emotions at the same time as indulging an intellectual preoccupation.
But then I abruptly fell out of love with that notion. When I wrote
Amsterdam, I had no specific ideas in mind. I had a distinct set of ambitions, but they were not intellectual. Amsterdam was a form of farce I
abandoned myself purely to the possibilities of its characters. Although
I gave them ideas Clive Linley, the composer, is introduced with a
manifesto about what he thinks music should be they seemed subsidiary. Amsterdam was light-hearted, and it liberated me from abstraction.
Without this novel I could not have begun writing Atonement. Once
I finished the former, the only notes I made when working towards
Atonement were character notes. There were no grand organizing ideas
for Atonement in advance of the writing. In fact, I didnt even think of the
title until the end. It developed piecemeal, and it fell into place. I felt that
the series of four novels Ive mentioned actually had trapped me. I cant
say that Atonement has no ideas at all, but the ideas contained in it rise
like a mist off a swamp of private lives. I hope it is a creative confusion
about what kind of position ideas really have inside fiction.
J. C.: During the last decade, you have become interested in science,
biology, neuroscience and the like. Does this interest in science have any
relationship to this change of ideas you are describing?
I. M.: My interest in science is actually lifelong. It represents for me the
only available and credible metaphysics given that I have no religion.
The past 20 years biologists have been invading the territory of novelists. I have always thought the defining call of literature is to do with
the exploration of human nature, which is also a dominant issue within
cognitive and evolutionary psychology. Fundamental notions like consciousness as well as the emotions surely the novelists domain are
studied. Emotions like anger, shame and even revenge are studied in
beautifully constructed experiments.
Yesterday, I was writing a passage in the novel Im currently doing
[Saturday] about my character stopping by a television shop and seeing,
multiplied on several screens of different sizes, Tony Blair being interviewed [See McEwan 2005: 14041]. He cant hear what Blairs saying,
but as hes watching, the camera is slowly zooming in on Blairs mouth.
We humans are very good at looking at each others faces, and we have
many good evolutionary reasons to be so. Paul Ekman, a psychologist
who Ive come admire a great deal, talks interestingly about the smile
in his work. If you ask someone to fake a smile, there are muscles in
the face that are not activated. What Ekman has shown is that the lying

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smile actually has a real physiological foundation; there are muscles that
do not kick in, which do when a smile is honest. As the camera zooms
in, I thought, this is the question we want to pose about a politician: is
that an honest smile, or not. I could not have had such a speculation
without the work of Ekman.
So, science parallels literature as a means by which the world can be
understood. There are great, noble and ingenious insights which science has brought us and which literature could never equal. Of course,
there are many complex facets of experience for which science has no
language and literature does.
Vic Sage reads a passage from Black Dogs, in which the main character, Jeremy, gropes his way through his own home, which, in the dark,
seems to have changed unrecognizably:
The shapeless deeper black of the switchboard cupboard was twenty feet
or so away and I was guiding myself towards it by trailing my hand along
the edge of the kitchen table. Not since childhood had I been so intimidated
by the dark. Like a character in a cartoon, I hummed softly, without conviction. No tune came to mind, and my random sequence of notes was foolish.
My voice sounded weak. I deserved to be harmed. Once again, the thought
came, clearer this time, that all I needed to do was leave. [. . .] I was trapped
between my reason, which urged me to move quickly, turn on the power
and see by bright artificial light how ordinariness simply continued, as it
always did; and my superstitious dread, whose simplicity was even greater
than the everyday. (McEwan 1992: 115)

V. S.: That darkness and that superstitious dread are, for me, an important part of the dynamo of your writing. You have a dialectic in this
passage that seems very much part of the dialectic of the whole book,
which is about rationalism and the regressive aspects of the psyche.
It is also about the post-world-war period in which the public life is
divorced from the private life, which becomes a kind of regression away
from rationalism. Why should there be such darkness in your writing if
youre so interested in science?
I. M.: I have no religious faith, but I dont for a moment believe that
rationalism, science, some version of positivism, is going to suddenly
sweep the religious impulse away. Although I might not subscribe to
any supernatural beliefs, I cant count myself free of all of those basic
dreads that have impelled religion. Including the fear of dying. The
ground can sometimes drop away from you; it is a core feeling. It can
steal up in a night of insomnia or when we visit a friend who is dying.
I honestly feel the religious, or the numinous urge in people, is deeply
stitched into human nature. Some years ago I wrote a lecture on human
nature [the Van der Leeuw Lezing, 2002: Literature, Science and Human
Nature]. Anthropology used to dwell on human variation, attempting

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to show how vastly different people in contemporary Manhattan were

from people in Papua New Guinea. Now, it gives a degree of credence
to what is universal in human societies from the social organization of
Stone Age cultures to the post-industrial West. Donald Browns Human
Universals (1991) demonstrates that one feature strong in all human culture is religion. In religion there is always a core of dread, as well as
other elements of delight and transcendence.
J. C.: Another kind of fear which is strong in your fiction is the impossibility of self-knowledge. Although the examined life is the life to be preferred, Atonement seems to be about this impossibility of self-knowledge:
acts of knowledge turn into forms of rationalization or protection, so
that we suddenly become strange to ourselves. One of the compelling
moments in your work takes place where this kind of thing arises. In
Black Dogs for instance, when a father is beating a child in the restaurant,
the father himself is slapped across the face. Any impulse to say Stop
is suddenly vanquished by the sheer fact of this happening because of
this strangeness within human experience.
I. M.: Yes, thats true. But also, what redeems Briony in Atonement is
precisely the fact that she has led an examined life. Her great misdeed
pursues her through the years. She will not let herself forget and this
is her atonement.
That episode of Black Dogs was drawn from my own experience:
I once saw a woman giving a child, a toddler, such a thrashing in a
playground that I wondered if she could really be a conscious, sentient
human being. I went across I said: I dont think you should be doing
that. She told me to fuck off. I was completely ineffectual, but perhaps
there was an element of guilt in the vigour of her response.
However, the apparent impossibility of self-knowledge must not
allow us to think we exist in a swamp of relative truths. We know more
than we once did about ourselves. We know that epilepsy is not caused
by possession by the Devil, the plague, or by our wickedness and Gods
revenge. But its difficult. Were good at persuading ourselves that things
are true when theyre not, generally for reasons which are self-serving.
The reason I like novels is that theyre good at dramatizing the ways in
which we fool ourselves. Motivation and belief is a fascinating subject.
S. G.: Vic Sage asked you about darkness and irrationalism in your writing, and in your answer you mention we often forget the light we can
shine too. Your dark vision seems supplemented by a vision of love and
goodness in people. In the same novel that Sage reads from, the narrator, Jeremy, juxtaposes two distinct visions. On the one hand, there
is Bernard, an existentialist who sees no patterns and purpose to life,
and his wife June is a semi-religious determinist who sees purpose,
God, in everything. Jeremy dismisses both these views and states that I
would be false to my own experience if I did not declare my belief in the

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possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life (McEwan 1998:

20). I was wondering whether you could say something about the way,
on the one hand, this tendency towards dark regression, and, on the
other hand, this vision of love as a positive force, relate to one another.
I. M.: As far as this word darkness goes, I thought at the time my early
short stories were darkly comic. It was only when they were bundled up
into a book and reviewed that I saw them described in summary and
thought: What have I done?! Clearly, these stories were very odd, and
I could hardly complain about the Ian Macabre tag. I can never satisfactorily explain where these stories and the first two novels came from.
Ultimately, they led to a loss of faith in fiction, an impasse, in the early
eighties.
I suppose its an easily acceptable premise that love redeems. But
when The Beatles sang all you need is love, that never seemed enough.
The range of problems, large- and small-scale, we face now are not going
to be settled by people being nicer to one another, or even loving each
other. Yet within the frame of personal lives, love is a great motivating
hunger and when it satisfies there is a sense of happiness. The secondorder problem is how to hold on to it, once weve found that precious
thing. We have built an entire literature around this dual problem: finding happiness, then keeping it.
Saturday was an attempt to describe happiness in a troubled world.
Some critics were shocked by the description of a man who wasnt having a divorce, who loved his wife after 20 years, who got on well with
his teenage children. To some intellectuals this was an abomination.
It shocked people more than any of my child-raping short stories ever
did. I think theres bad faith in intellectual culture whereby pessimism
has become too easy, too automatic, its a badge that people wear. There
are many terrible, even unsolvable problems we face at present, but I
reject the indulgent pessimism of the liberal arts culture. Thats why Ive
come to value the company of scientists. They are not interested only in
how things originate or work, but also how problems might be solved.
Science is organized curiosity, which is a fundamentally optimistic
state: you might not know it now, but you might know it one day. In my
work, Im torn between the truthful description, which is often painful
or bleak, and wanting to affirm something about our extraordinary gift
of consciousness and the delight of the natural world. As a species, as
well as our crudity and vulgarity and cruelty, we have a capacity for
courage, kindness, love, and amazing humour. If I ever wrote a science
fiction novel, it would involve two or three people on a spaceship speeding away from earth and after 50 years they would feel this intense nostalgia for their imperfect home; theyd miss this wild, inventive, comic
imperfection.
S. G.: I would like to discuss this loss of faith in fiction you mentioned
earlier in more detail. At the outset of your oeuvre there is a great sense

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of unease about writing as an artistic form. Around the time you were
writing The Comfort of Strangers, you had a difficult time in allowing fiction to function as a means of communicating ideas about the world. In
Margaret Drabbles biography of your mentor at UEA, Angus Wilson,
she notes that you were staying at Wilsons house at Felsham Woodside.
You were restless and walked the woods amidst the wild garlic, brooding on The Comfort of Strangers [. . .] Could the contemporary world be
rendered in fiction at all, McEwan asked himself? (Drabble, 1995: 523).
To what extent did your early writing emerge from a sense of crisis
about novelistic representation that manifested itself in the late sixties
and seventies?
I. M.: Id forgotten about that, wandering about in Anguss woods, wondering what kind of fiction could please me, or excite me. I had lost faith
in writing. I had been tied to a restricted aesthetic of the novel that I now
find quite puzzling. It was the existential trap, the novel cleansed of all
reference to place or recognizable public spaces, with no connection to
time or historical context. This mode of writing didnt permit itself the
luxury of describing inner states; it was all down to what someone said
or did. This was my home-grown version of Kafka. Kafka doesnt tell
you exactly where Gregor Samsa [in the short story Metamorphosis] is
when he wakes up, or what year it is. So, by the early eighties I was feeling deeply dissatisfied and I decided to write screenplays. Maybe the
depressing, dark quality of my writing at the time reflected my sense of
the limits of fiction itself. Working with the director Richard Eyre in the
early eighties loosened me up: I returned to the novel with more appetite, more pleasure.
S. G.: In the light of this remark on existentialist writers, I was wondering whether Alain Robbe-Grillet, the writer and literary critic who
defined the roman nouveau, was part of the influence on this crisis of
representation?
I. M.: I read Jealousy (1957), and one or two others, but they didnt have
much impact. His writing seemed as much of a cul-de-sac as my own.
When I was researching The Innocent in the mid-eighties, I spent a lot
of time wandering along the Wall and the perimeter of West Berlin,
thinking: What a great subject. The Wall ran right through peoples
lives, right through their houses, a huge political fact, the frontier of
a war, divider of families: a perfect subject for a novelist. I remember asking friends in West Germany who had written well about the
Wall, and everyone mentioned the same novel, Peter Schneiders Der
Mauerspringer (1982). But nothing else. My friends explained that the
general view was that the Wall was a subject for journalists, not for
novelists. Novelists wrote about higher things. I felt a twinge of guilt,
because only three years before I could have lived in a city with a
wall down the middle and not written about it, for those same lofty

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existential reasons. If Chicago had a Wall, the Chicago Wall, could you
imagine Saul Bellow ignoring it? If it ran through New Jersey, would
Philip Roth ignore it? If it ran across New England, would Updike
ignore it? No. Nor would Mailer, nor would Pynchon. And here in
Europe, some of us had written ourselves into a corner. Martin Amis
and I once decided on the archetypal existential plot: a guy without a
name arrives in a nameless town on an unnamed mission and waits in
a nameless hotel for a nameless guy to phone him . . . and of course, he
never does. No wonder I was unhappy in Angus Wilsons woods.
S. G.: However, it seems to me that the early influence of Kafka on your
work can also be retraced in the Surrealism that is part of the aesthetics of your work. In particular a strong sense of nausea brought about
by vertigo is present throughout your work. There is a great example
of this in The Child in Time, when Stephen, lying in bed looking at his
wife, imagines having an out-of-body experience of sorts: He was looking down at her from an immense distance now, from several hundred
feet. He could see the bedroom, the Edwardian apartment block [. . .]
the mess of South London, the hazy curvature of the earth [. . .] He was
rising still higher, faster. At least, he thought, from up here where the
air was thin and the city below was taking on geometric design, his feelings would not show, he could retain some composure (McEwan 1987:
22). In your latest novel, On Chesil Beach, Florence associates her love for
Edward with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo
(McEwan 2007: 97). The difference between these examples is that in
the first the vertigo is shown, mimetic, and in the second it is told, diegetic. In what ways have your attempts at creating nausea and vertigo
changed as youve grown older?
I. M.: I think you are referring to certain states of mind when the
world appears super-real, either because you are in an emotional state,
or because you havent looked before and now you do need to look.
Sometimes you can only impart the nature of the physical world, especially its particular visual quality, by trying to convey that strong, dizzying sense of how amazing it is that anything exists at all, and that there
are conscious beings like ourselves to notice it. Put simply, this is the
sweat for writers, to find a persuasive language for things and events
in the world.
This is a commonplace example: you return to the room you left hours
or days before. No one has been in it, all items are exactly as you left
them, everything is exactly the same. But the sameness can be highly
charged; the exact arrangement of the objects in the room might be the
product of the intentions you have forgotten that discarded shirt, that
shoe on its side. Perhaps you even prefer to forget. The objects seem to
hold a memory, perhaps they even accuse you. But of course, they hold
nothing at all. They are merely themselves.

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This dual aspect can be dizzying. We are visual creatures. Forty per
cent of our brains are involved in visual processing. Our language is
saturated with visual references, far more than any other sense. The key
to emotions, feelings and the swirl of human exchange is best fixed if
you can capture the visual essence correctly. In his famous preface to
The Nigger of Narcissus (1897), Conrad wrote: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to
make you feel it is, before all, to make you see.
But I dont know whats changed. Im sure I could find plenty of
mimetic moments in my recent work, particularly Saturday and On
Chesil Beach. But yes, there is always a danger that the world is not
so keenly observed or felt as you age. The senses dim somewhat and
there is the danger that you simply become desensitized to the miracle of being alive. I hope not, but this goes back to the earlier question about loss of faith in the nature of fiction. Capturing a single
detail can revive my pleasure in writing: if its vertiginous, Id be very
pleased.
S. G.: This surrealism and sense of vertigo in your work is tied into
questions about narrative authority, and more generally about how your
poetics have changed over the course of more than 30 years of writing.
While in your early novels we often encounter first-person narrators,
your later novels have a clear authorial presence in the form of a thirdperson narrator, which may suggest a growing occupation of realist territory as a basis for your narratives?
I. M.: Ive lost all interest in first-person narrative. I could hurl a book
across the room when I feel that the writer is hiding slack writing and
clichs behind his characterization writing badly because this is how
a character speaks. I want narrative authority. I want Saul Bellow, I
want John Updike, I want Chekhov, I want Nabokov and Jane Austen.
I want the authorial presence taking full responsibility for everything.
Although the narrator of On Chesil Beach is not a character you could
describe, or has any past or future, it is a presence which assumes the
aesthetic task of describing the inside of two peoples minds. Then the
reader can make a judgement. Of course there is a way of loading a
first-person narrative voice with authorial insight, or brilliant turns of
phrase, but most writers dont try for this its difficult.
S. G.: To conclude, youve mentioned walking in Felsham Woods and
West Berlin. You are a keen walker, and a particular fan of the Chilterns,
where the heart-stopping opening scene of Enduring Love is set. In Black
Dogs, Jeremy states that he feels purged after [his] five hour walk
(McEwan 1992: 123). In Amsterdam, the narrator states: Everyone he
knew seemed perfectly happy to get by without wilderness a country restaurant, Hyde Park in Spring, was all the open space they ever
needed. Surely they could not claim to be fully alive (McEwan 1998: 80).

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I was wondering what walking, besides getting away from London and
work, means to you?
I. M.: Walking returns me to the essentials: we live on a giant rock
hanging in sterile space. If you walk for several days, its surprising how
quickly everything else in your life drops away. And how quickly a long
walk translates itself into metaphor lifes journey, if you like. To stand
in some high, beautiful place and reflect how easily you might not have
existed at all thats benign vertigo. I dont know how people can live
without it.
This interview is a compilation of two separate conversations with
Ian McEwan. The first took place with Jon Cook and Victor Sage at the
University of East Anglia, Norwich, on 15 November 2003. The second
interview was conducted by Sebastian Groes at McEwans house in
London, on 4 December 2007.

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References

Works Cited by Contributors

Foreword: Ian McEwan and the Rational Mind, Matt Ridley

Connolly, C. (1997), Literary Review, 19 September, 34.

Introduction: A Cartography of the Contemporary: Mapping

Newness in the Work of Ian McEwan, Sebastian Groes
Amis, M. (2003), Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape.
Banville, J. (2005), A Day in the Life, New York Review of Books, 26 May.
Barker, N. (2004), Clear: A Transparent Novel. London: Fourth Estate.
Bragg, M. (2005), South Bank Show. Season 28, Number 638. First broadcast 20
February 2005.
Colebrook, C. (2006), Gilles Deleuze. Oxford: Routledge. First published in 2002.
Dawkins, R. (1976), The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Drabble, M. (1995), Angus Wilson. London: Secker & Warburg.
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Groes, S. and Amis, M. (2004), A Hatred of Reason, in The London Magazine,
June/July, 4451.
Haffenden, J. (1985), Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen.
Leith, W. (1998), Form and Dysfunction, The Observer, Life, 20 September,
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Lloyd, J. (2002), George W. Bushs Unlikely Bedfellows, New Statesman, 11 March,
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Martin, Nicole (2008), Ian McEwan: I Despise Militant Islam, The Telegraph,
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(1986), Schoolboys, in Carey, J. (ed.), William Golding: The Man and his Books.
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(1989), A Move Abroad: Or Shall We Die and The Ploughmans Lunch. London:
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(2005b), Save the Bootroom, Save the Earth, 19 March, The Guardian, www.
guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/mar/19/art1 [Accessed 8 July 2008.]
(2005c), How Could we have Forgotten That This was Always Going to
Happen?, The Guardian, 8 July, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/08/
terrorism.july74 [Accessed 16 July 2008.]
(2005d), The Master, The Guardian, Review, 7 April, www.guardian.co.uk/
books/2005/apr/07/fiction.saulbellow
(2006a), First Love, Last Rites. London: Vintage.
(2006b), In Between the Sheets. London: Vintage.
(2006c), A Parallel Tradition, The Guardian, 1 April, www.guardian.co.uk/
books/2006/apr/01/scienceandnature.richarddawkins [Accessed 18 June 2008.]
(2007a), On Chesil Beach. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2007b), End of the World Blues, The Royal Society of Arts/New Writing Worlds
Lecture 2007, first delivered at the University of East Anglia, 27 June 2007,
first published in The Guardian, Review, 31 May 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/
books/2008/may/31/fiction.philosophy [Accessed 7 August 2008.]
(2008a), For You. London: Vintage.
(2008b), McEwan Addresses Recent Statement on Islamism, 26 June, www.
ian-mcewan.blogspot.com [Accessed 18 August 2008.]
(2008c), The Child in Time, The Guardian, Review, 12 July, www.guardian.
co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/jul/12/familyandrelationships.elementsoffiction
[Accessed 3 August 2008.]
(2012a), Sweet Tooth. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2013), Ian McEwan: when faith in fiction falters and how it is restored, The
Guardian, Review, 16 February, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/16/
ian-mcewan-faith-fiction-falters [Accessed 3 March 2013.]
Sage, L. (1981), Dreams of Being Hurt, Times Literary Supplement, 8 October, 1145.
(1992), Women in the House of Fiction. Houndmills and London: Macmillan.
Sardar, Z. (2006) The Blitcon Supremacists, The Guardian, 9 December, www.
guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1968091,00.html [Accessed 15 May
2007.]

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REFERENCES

Soal, J. (2008), McEwan Sees Funny Side of Climate Change in Novel Reading,
The Guardian, 2 June, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/02/hayfestival2008. hayfestival [Accessed 17 July 2008.]
Wood, J. (2009), The Manipulations of Ian McEwan, London Review of Books,
31 (8), 20 April, www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n08/james-wood/james-wood-writesabout-the-manipulations-of-ian-mcewan [Accessed 31 December 2012.]

Chapter One: Surrealist Encounters in Ian McEwans

Early Work, Jeannette Baxter
Barthes, R. (1990), The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller. Oxford: Blackwell
(1973).
Bataille, G. (2001), Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood. London: Penguin (1957).
Bataille, G. (ed.) (1995), Formless, in Critical Dictionary, Encyclopaedia
Acephalica. London: Atlas Press (1929).
Bradbury, M. (1993), The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin.
Breton, A. (1972), Second Manifesto of Surrealism in Manifestoes of Surrealism,
trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
(1929).
Broughton, L. (1991), Portrait of the Subject as a Young Man: The Construction
of Masculinity Ironized in Male Fiction, in P. Shaw and P. Stockwell (eds),
Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day. London: Pinter,
pp. 13545.
Foster, H. (1993), Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freud, S. (1920), Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, trans. A. A. Brill. New
York: Plain Label Books.
Haffenden, J. (1985), Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, 16890.
Krauss, R. (1986), Corpus Delecti, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone
(eds), LAmour Fou: Photography and Surrealism. Hayward Gallery, London,
JulySeptember, 1986. London: Arts Council.
Lomas, D. (2007), V is for Vertigo, Papers of Surrealism, D. Ades, D. Lomas and
J. Mundy (eds) (December 2007), ISSN 17501954, www. surrealismcentre.
ac.uk/ papersofsurrealism/journal7/index.htm
Martin, J.-H. (2005), Andy Warhol: The Late Work. New York: Prestel Publishing.
McEwan, I. (1997a), First Love, Last Rites. London: Vintage (1975).
(1997b), In Between the Sheets. London: Vintage (1978).
(2006), The Cement Garden. London: Vintage (1978).
Moore-Gilbert, B. (1994), Art in the 1970s. London: Routledge.
Nairn, T. (1977), The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London:
New Left Books.
Ricks, C. (1979), Adolescence and After: An Interview with Ian McEwan, The
Listener, 101, 12 April, pp. 5267.
Ryan, K. (1994), Ian McEwan. Plymouth: Northcote House.
Sontag, S. (2001), The Pornographic Imagination, in George Bataille, Story of the
Eye, trans. J. Neugroschal. London: Penguin (1967).

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REFERENCES

159

Chapter Two: Profoundly dislocating and infinite in

possibility Ian McEwans Screenwriting,
M. Hunter Hayes and Sebastian Groes
Edemariam, A. (2008), Enduring Fame, The Guardian, August 18, www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/18/film.aidaedemariam [Accessed 4 August 2008.]
Haffenden, J. (1985), Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen.
Hamilton, I. (1978), Points of Departure, New Review, 5 (2), 912.
Hutcheon, L. (2006), A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
McEwan, I. (1979), In Between the Sheets and Other Stories. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
(1981), The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television. London: Jonathan Cape.
(1983b), Writers and the Cinema A Symposium, Times Literary Supplement,
18 November, 12878.
(1985), The Ploughmans Lunch. London: Methuen.
(1988), Soursweet. London: Faber and Faber.
(1989), A Move Abroad. London: Picador. [Contains Or Shall We Die? and The
Ploughmans Lunch, and an illuminating preface on fiction writing.]
(2002), Mother Tongue, in Z. Leader (ed.), On Modern British Fiction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 3444.
(2006), A Parallel Tradition, The Guardian, 1 April.
Mo, T. (1990), Sour Sweet. London: Abacus. First published by Andr Deutsch
in 1982.
Ryan, K. (1999), Sex, Violence and Complicity: Martin Amis and Ian McEwan,
in An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 20318.
(2007), Ian McEwan. London: Northcote House. First published in 1994.

Chapter Three: The Innocent as Anti-Oedipal Critique of

Cultural Pornography, Claire Colebrook
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004), Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum. First published by the Athlone Press, 1984. Originally published as LAnti Oedipe
(1972) by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.
Freud, S. (1950), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth.
(1959), On Narcissism, in J. Riviere, and J. Strache (eds), Collected Papers, Vol.
4. New York: Basic Books.
Laplanche, J. (1999), in J. Fletcher (ed.), Essays on Otherness. London: Routledge.
McEwan, I. (1988), The Child in Time. London: Picador. First published in 1987
by Jonathan Cape.
(1990), The Innocent, or The Special Relationship. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2005), Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2007), On Chesil Beach. London: Jonathan Cape.
Wicke, J. (1991), Through a Gaze Darkly: Pornographys Academic Market,
Transition, 54, 689.

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160

REFERENCES

Chapter Four: Words of War, War of Words Atonement and

the Question of Plagiarism, Natasha Alden
Andrews, L. (1977), No Time For Romance. London: Harrap.
(2005), Personal communication. 11 December.
Broughton, L. (1991), Portrait of the Subject as a Young Man: The Construction of
Masculinity Ironized in Male Fiction, in Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell
(eds), Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day. London:
Pinter.
Elias, A. J. (2001), Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hutcheon, L. (1995), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London:
Routledge.
Langdon, J. (2006), Revealed: How Booker Prize Writer Copied Work of the
Queen of the Hospital Romance, The Mail on Sunday, 27 November, 367.
Lee, H. (2001), If your Memory Serves you Well . . ., The Observer, Review, 23
September, 16.
Lyall, S. (2006), Novelists Defend One of Their Own, New York Times, 7
December, late edn, E1.
McCrumb, R. (2006), Warning: the Words you Are About to Read may be
Stolen, The Observer, Review, 3 December 2006, 13.
McEwan, I. (2001), Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2006), An Inspiration, Yes. Did I Copy from Another Author? No, The
Guardian, 27 November, 12.
Radloff, A. (2005a), Interview with Natasha Alden on 11 November 2005.
(2005b), Personal communication.
(unpub.), The Memoir of Mrs. A. Radloff, in possession of Department of
Documents, Imperial War Museum, London.
Roberts, G. (2006), Plagiarism (or Why I Need Atonement) by Ian McEwan, The
Daily Mail, 4 December, Sect. ED IRE.
Sutherland, J. (2002), Life Was Clearly Too Interesting in the War: An Interview
with Ian McEwan, The Guardian, 3 January, books/guardian.co.uk/ departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,627239,00.html [Accessed 17 June 2007.]
Talk of the Nation (2006), radio broadcast, National Public Radio, Washington
DC, 13 December.
Wagner, E. (2006), Plagiarism? No Its Called Research, The Times, 27
November, 3.

Chapter Five: Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in

Atonement, Alistair Cormack
Belsey, C. (1980), Critical Practice. London: Methuen.
Butler, M. (1997), Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. First published in 1975.

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REFERENCES

161

Finney, B. (2002), Brionys Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwans Atonement,

Journal of Modern Literature, 27 (3), 6882.
Head, D. (2007), Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kermode, F. (2001), Point of View, London Review of Books, 23 (19), 4 October, 8.
Leavis, F. R. (1982), The Great Tradition. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First published in London by Chatto & Windus, 1948.
Lee, H. (2001), If your Memory Serves you Well . . .. The Observer, Review, 23
September, 16.
MacCabe, C. (1979), James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London and
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
McEwan, I. (2001), Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape.
Reynolds, M. and Noakes, J. (2002), Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide. London:
Vintage.
Wood, J. (2002), The Trick of the Truth, The New Republic Online, www. powells.
com/review/2002_03_21.html [Accessed 21 March 2002.]
Woolf, V. (1992), Mrs Dalloway, with notes by E. Showalter. Harmondsworth:
Penguin. First published in 1925.

Chapter Six: Ian McEwans Modernist Time Atonement and

Saturday, Laura Marcus
Banfield, A. (2007), Remembrance and Tense Past, in M. Shiach (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 4864.
Bowen, E. (1949), The Heat of the Day. London: Jonathan Cape/The Reprint
Society, 1950.
Currie, M. (2007), About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Finney, B. (2002), Brionys Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwans Atonement,
Journal of Modern Literature, 27 (3), 6882.
Head, D. (2002), The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 19502000.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(2007), Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
James, H. (2003), Preface to A Portrait of a Lady. London: Penguin. Preface originally published in the 1908 New York edition of the novel.
McEwan, I. (1987), The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape.
(1998), Black Dogs. London: Vintage.
(2002), Atonement. London: Vintage. First published in 2001.
(2005), Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape.
Middleton, P. and Woods, T. (2000), Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space
in Postwar Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Noakes, J. and Reynolds, M. (2002), Ian McEwan: the Essential Guide. London:
Vintage.

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162

REFERENCES

Ricoeur, P. (1985), Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, trans. K. McLoughlin and D.

Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Royle, N. (2003), The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Woolf, V. (1931), The Waves. London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
(1992a), To the Lighthouse. London: Penguin. First published in 1927.
(1992b), Orlando. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1928.
(2000), Character in Fiction, in D. Bradshaw (ed.), Selected Essays. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. First published in 1924.
(2008), Mrs Dalloway. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in
1925.

Chapter Seven: Ian McEwan and the Modernist

Consciousness of the City in Saturday, Sebastian Groes
Arnold, M. (1963), Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
(1965), The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. K. Allott. London: Longmans, Green
and Co.
Bragg, M. (2005), The South Bank Show: Ian McEwan. Produced for ITV. Season
28, Episode 13. First broadcast 20 February.
Collini, S. (1988), Arnold. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Currie, M. (2007), About Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Dickens, C. (1986), Our Mutual Friend. London: Penguin. First published
18645.
Edwards, P. (1995), Time, Romanticism, Modernism and Modernity in Ian
McEwans The Child in Time, English, 44 (178), 4851.
Eliot, T. S. (1969), The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays.
London: Faber and Faber, 5980.
Ford, F. M. (2002), Parades End. London: Penguin. First published 19248.
Head, D. (2007), Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester UP.
Joyce, J. (1992), Ulysses. London: Penguin. First published in Paris by Shakespeare
and Co. in 1922.
(1996), The Dead, in Dubliners. London: Penguin. First published in 1914.
Kemp, P. (2005), Master of the Mind Game. The Sunday Times, Culture, 30
January, 412.
Kowaleski Wallace, E. (2007), Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwans
Saturday, Studies in the Novel, 39 (4), 46580.
McEwan, I. (1988), The Child in Time. London: Picador. First published by
Jonathan Cape, 1987.
(1998), Enduring Love. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2001), Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2005), Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2006a), Butterflies, in First Love, Last Rites. London: Vintage.
(2006b), Cocker at the Theatre, in First Love, Last Rites. London: Vintage.
(2006c), Disguises, in First Love, Last Rites. London: Vintage.

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163

(2006d), Homemade, in First Love, Last Rites. London: Vintage.

(2006e), Pornography, in In Between the Sheets. London: Vintage.
(2006f), Two Fragments: Saturday and Sunday, March 199, in In Between the
Sheets. London: Vintage.
Sardar, Z. (2006), The Blitcon Supremacists, The Guardian, 9 December, www.
guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1968091,00.html [Accessed 15 May
2007.]
Shelley, M. (1996), Frankenstein, ed. P. Hunter. London and New York: Norton.
Tait, T. (2005), A Rational Diagnosis, Times Literary Supplement, 3515, 11 February,
212.
Williams, R. (1973), The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus.
(1992), Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell. London: Hogarth. First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 1956.
Woolf, V. (1989), Mrs Dalloway. London: Grafton. First published by the Hogarth
Press, 1925.

Chapter Eight: On Chesil Beach Another Overrated Novella?,

Dominic Head
Amis, M. (1983), Money. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2003), Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape.
Head, D. (2008), The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lezard, N. (1999), Morality Bites, The Guardian, Saturday Review, 24 April, 11.
McEwan, I. (1998), Amsterdam. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2007), On Chesil Beach. London: Jonathan Cape.

Chapter Nine: Solar: Apocalypse Not, Greg Garrard

Adam, D. (2010), Ian McEwan: Failure at Copenhagen Climate Talks
Prompted Novel Rewrite, The Guardian, 5 March 2010, www.guardian.
co.uk/environment/2010/mar/05/ian-mcewan-climate-copenhagen-solar
[Accessed 29 November 2012.]
Blhdorn, I. (2011), The Politics of Unsustainability: COP15, Post-Ecologism,
and the Ecological Paradox, Organization & Environment, 24 (1), 3453.
Canby, V. (1984), The Ploughmans Lunch, an exercise in duplicity. The New
York Times, www.nytimes.com/1984/10/19/movies/movies-the-ploughman-s-lunch-an-exercise-in-duplicity.html [Accessed 29 November 2012.]
Clark, T. (2010), Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental
Politics and the Closure of Ecocriticism, Oxford Literary Review, 32 (1),
13149.
Cowley, J. (2010), Solar by Ian McEwan, The Observer, www.guardian.co.uk/
books/2010/mar/14/solar-ian-mcewan [Accessed 29 November 2012.]
Crichton, M. (2004), State of Fear. London: HarperCollins.

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164

REFERENCES

Dentith, S. (1995), Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London:

Routledge.
Garrard, G. (2009), Ian McEwans Next Novel and the Future of Ecocriticism,
Contemporary Literature, 50 (4), 695720.
(2012), Ecocriticism, The Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 20 (1),
20043.
Guardian, The (2012), Ian McEwan: I started Atonement with a careless sentence, Guardian Open Weekend. www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2012/
mar/26/ian-mcewan-open-weekend-atonement-video [Accessed 12 March
2013.]
Hamilton, C. (2010), Requiem for a Species : Why We Resist the Truth about Climate
Change. London: Earthscan.
Hardin, G. J. (1968), The Tragedy of the Commons. American Association for the
Advancement of Science.
Jones, N. (2012), New Leaf: The Promise of Artificial Photosynthesis, New
Scientist, http://newscientist.com/article/mg21428601.200-new-leaf-the-promise-of-artificial-photosynthesis.html [Accessed 29 November 2012.]
Jones, T. (25 March 2010), Oh, the Irony, London Review of Books. 32 (6).
Kerridge, R. (2010), The Single Source, Ecozon@, 1 (1), 15560.
(forthcoming), Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency,
Depth, Provisionality, Temporality, in G. Garrard (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Ecocriticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lanchester, J. (2007), Warmer, Warmer, London Review of Books, 29 (6), 39.
Lukacs, M. (2012), Worlds Biggest Geoengineering Experiment Violates UN Rules,
http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisationgeoengineering [Accessed 28 November 2012]
McEwan, I. (2005a), A Boot Room in the Frozen North, www.capefarewell.
com/climate-science/comment-opinion/ian-mcewan.html [Accessed 28
November 2012.]
(2005b), Saturday, QPD.
(2007a), End of the World Blues, in C. Hitchens (ed.), The Portable Atheist:
Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. London: Da Capo Press, pp. 351365.
(2007b), Martin Amis Is Not a Racist, The Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk/
world/2007/nov/21/religion.race [Accessed 28 November 2012.]
(2010), Solar. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2012a), Sweet Tooth. London: Jonathan Cape.
Segerstrle, U. C. O. (2000), Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the
Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Staff, A. B. I. (2008), Chronicle of a Controversy, http://anitaborg.org/news/
archive/chronicle-of-a-controversy/ [Accessed 24 October 2012.]
Sutcliffe, W. (2010), Ian McEwans Climate-Change Comedy, Financial
Times,
www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db777db427e011df-959800144feabdc0.
html#axzz2Db7Au1Ii [Accessed 28 November 2012.]
Tambling, J. (2010), Allegory. London, Routledge.

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REFERENCES

165

Tonkin, B. (2007), Ian McEwan: I Hang on to Hope in a Tide of Fear, The

Independent, www.edge.org/images/Independent_McEwan.pdf [Accessed
29 November 2012.]
Williams, R. (1989), Resources of Hope : Culture, Democracy, Socialism. London:
Verso.
Zalewski, D. (2009), The Background Hum: Ian McEwans Art of Unease, The
New Yorker, 2012, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_
fact_zalewski [Accessed 29 November 2012.]
Zemanek, E. (2012), A Dirty Heros Fight for Clean Energy: Satire, Allegory,
and Risk Narrative in Ian McEwans Solar, Ecozon@, 3 (1), 5160.

Afterword: Ian McEwans Sweet Tooth: Put in porphyry and

marble do appear, Peter Childs
Begley, A. (2009), The Art of Fiction CLXXIII: Ian McEwan, in Ryan Roberts
(ed.), Conversations with Ian McEwan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
pp. 89107.
Eliot, T. S. (1921), Philip Massinger, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and
Criticism. London: Faber. www.bartleby.com/200 [Accessed 14 December
2012.]
Haffenden, J. (1985), Novelists in Conversation. London: Methuen.
Hamilton, I. (2009), Points of Departure, in Ryan Roberts (ed.), Conversations
with Ian McEwan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 318.
James, H. (1964), The Figure in the Carpet (1896), in Leon Edel (ed.), The
Complete Tales of Henry James, Vol. 9. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
Kermode, F. (1997), Not Entitled: A Memoir. London: Flamingo.
McEwan, I. (2011), Christopher Hitchens: the consummate writer, the brilliant
friend, The Guardian, 16 December, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/16/
christopher-hitchens-appreciation-by-ian-mcewan [Accessed 14 December
2012.]
(2012a), Sweet Tooth. London: Jonathan Cape.
(2012b), Notes on the Novella, The New Yorker, 29 October, www.newyorker.
com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/some-notes-on-the-novella.html#entrymore [Accessed 14 December 2012.]
Spenser, E. (1908), Ruines of Rome: by Bellay, in R. E. Neil Dodge (ed.), The
Complete Poetical Works. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. www.
bartleby.com/153/ [Accessed 14 December 2012.]
Wark, K. (2012), Ian McEwan: In Conversation, The Book Review, 23 September.

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Further Reading

The most rigorous and up-to-date bibliography of McEwans work can

be found on the official Ian McEwan website: www.ianmcewan.com/
bib/. The details of McEwans work below are of the first edition published in the United Kingdom, followed by the first US edition. Editorial
annotations are enclosed in brackets where suitable.

I Works by Ian McEwan

Short story collections
(1975). First Love, Last Rites. London: Cape; New York: Random House.
(1978). In Between the Sheets. London: Cape; New York: Simon and Schuster.

Uncollected stories
(1975). Intersection. Tri-Quarterly, Fall, 6386.
(1975). Untitled. Tri-Quarterly, Winter, 623.
(1977). Deep Sleep, Light Sleeper. Harpers and Queen, August, 825.
(1984). Disguises. Utrecht: De Roos. [A limited edition of the short story with
illustrations by Tom Eyzenbach.]

Novels
(1978). The Cement Garden. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1981). The Comfort of Strangers. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Simon and
Schuster.
(1987). The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape; Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
(1990). The Innocent. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Doubleday.
(1992). Black Dogs. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Nan A. Talese.
(1997). Enduring Love. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Anchor Books.
(1998). Amsterdam. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Nan A. Talese, 1999.
(2001). Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Nan A. Talese, 2002.
(2005). Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Nan A. Talese.
(2007). On Chesil Beach. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Nan A. Talese.
(2010). Solar. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Nan A. Talese.
(2012). Sweet Tooth. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Nan A. Talese.

Childrens fiction
(1985). Rose Blanche. London: Jonathan Cape. [Picture book about a young girl
who discovers a concentration camp in her Nazi-occupied hometown. With
illustrations by Roberto Innocenti.]
(1994). The Daydreamer. London: Jonathan Cape.

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FURTHER READING

167

Screenplays
(1985). The Ploughmans Lunch. London: Methuen.
(1988). Soursweet. London: Faber.
(1993). The Good Son. [Unpublished.]

Oratorio/Libretti
(1983). Or Shall We Die? London: Jonathan Cape.
(2008). For You. London: Vintage.

Collections
(1981). The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television. London: Cape; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1982. [Contains three plays for television: Jack Fleas
Birthday Celebration, Solid Geometry and The Imitation Game, originally
published in Quarto, April 1980.]
(1989). A Move Abroad. London: Picador. [Contains Or Shall We Die? and The
Ploughmans Lunch, and an illuminating preface on fiction writing.]

Key articles, essays, interviews and lectures by McEwan

(1978). The State of Fiction A Symposium, The New Review, 5:1, Summer,
501.
(1982). An Only Childhood, The Observer, 31 January, p. 41. [On McEwans
upbringing.]
(1986). Schoolboys, in J. Carey (ed.), William Golding: The Man and His Books.
London/New York: Faber/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 15760.
(1990). An Interview with Milan Kundera, in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), The Novel
Today. London: Fontana, pp. 20522.
(2001). Beyond Belief, The Guardian, G2, 12 September, p. 2. [Reaction to the
terrorist attacks on America on 11 September 2001.]
(2001). Only Love and Then Oblivion, The Guardian, 15 September, p. 1. [Reaction
to the terrorist attacks on America on 11 September 2001.]
(2001). Lets Talk about Climate Change, openDemocracy.net, 21 April, www.
opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2114882.jsp [Accessed 22 November
2007.]
(2002). Mother Tongue a Memoir, in Leader, Z. (ed.), On Modern British Fiction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. [On the death, and his memories, of his
mother.]
(2003). Strong Cases For and Against War But we Dont Hear Them, The Daily
Telegraph, 10 February. [On the war in Iraq.]
(2005). Faith v Fact, The Guardian, 7 January, p. 6.
(2005). How Could we have Forgotten That This was Always Going to Happen?,
The Guardian, 8 July. [On the terrorist attacks on London, 7 July 2005.]
(2006). Literature, Science and Human Nature, in Human Nature, Fact and Fiction:
Literature, Science and Human Nature, Robin Headlam-Wells and Johnjoe
McFadden (eds). London and New York: Continuum. [This is a reprint of the
Van der Leeuw Lezing, a lecture given by McEwan in 2002.]

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(2006). A Parallel Tradition, The Guardian, 1 April. [On the 30th anniversary of
Richard Dawkinss The Selfish Gene.]
(2008). The Day of Judgement, The Guardian Review, 31 May. [McEwans
analysis of end-time thinking in relationship to the rise in religious
fundamentalism.]
(2008). The Child in Time, The Guardian Review, 12 July. [McEwans foreword to
his newfound brother Dave Sharpes memoir Complete Surrender.]
(2008). A New Dawn, The Wall Street Journal, 8 November. [McEwan discusses
global climate change and the election of Barack Obama.]
(2009). Beyond the Bounds of Realism, The Guardian, 31 January. [On John
Updike.]
(2009). On John Updike, New York Review of Books, 12 March.
(2012). Some Notes on the Novella, The New Yorker, 29 October.

II Critical Material
Book-length studies
Ahrens, R. and Antor, H. (eds) (2011), Anglistik, 21 (2). [Special issue with a focus
on Ian McEwan and the media.]
Byrnes, C. (2002), The Work of Ian McEwan: A Psychodynamic Approach.
Nottingham: Paupers Press.
(2008), McEwans Only Childhood: Development of a Metaplot. Nottingham:
Paupers Press.
Childs, P. (ed.) (2006a), The Fiction of Ian McEwan: A Readers Guide to Essential
Criticism. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
(ed.) (2006b), Ian McEwans Enduring Love. Routledge Guides to Literature.
London: Routledge.
Clarke, R. and Gordon, A. (2003), Ian McEwans Enduring Love: A Readers Guide.
London and New York: Continuum.
Ellam, J. (2009), Ian McEwans Atonement. London and New York: Continuum.
Grant, D. (1989), Contemporary Writers: Ian McEwan. London: Book Trust and the
British Council.
Head, D. (2007), Contemporary British Novelists: Ian McEwan. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Malcolm, D. (2002), Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: South Carolina Press.
Mller, S. (2011), Coming to Terms with Crisis: Disorientation and Reorientation in
the Novels of Ian McEwan. Heidelberg: Winter.
Nicklas, P. (ed.) (2009), Ian McEwan: Art and Politics. Heidelberg: Winter.
Reynolds, M. and Noakes, J. (2002), Ian McEwan: the Essential Guide. London:
Vintage. [Discusses The Child in Time, Enduring Love and Atonement.]
Rooney, A. (2006), York Notes on Atonement. London: Longman.
Ryan, K. (1994), Ian McEwan. Writers and their Work. Plymouth: Northcote House.
Schemberg, C. (2004), Achieving At-one-ment. Frankfurt and Oxford: Peter Lang.
Slay, J. (1996), Ian McEwan. Twaynes English Authors Series. Boston, MA:
Twayne.

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169

Wells, L. (2010), Ian McEwan. New British Fiction Series. Houndmills,

Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Book chapters
Adams, M. (1986), Ian McEwan, in L. McCaffery (ed.), Postmodern Fiction: A
Bio-Bibliographic Guide. New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 45962.
Ascari, A. (2011), Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural
Narratives. London and Jefferson: McFarland.
Bentley, N. (2008), Ian McEwan, Atonement, in Contemporary British Fiction.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 14859.
Berthold, S. (2009), Families Against the World: Ian McEwan, in The Cosmopolitan
Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 3765.
Blakey, V. (2004), God Novels, in A. Richardson and E. Spolsky (eds), The Work
of Fiction: Cognition, Culture and Complexity. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 14765.
Bradley, A. and Tate, A. (2010), Ian McEwans End of the World Blues, in The
New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosopy and Polemic after 9/11. London and New
York: Continuum, pp. 1635.
Broughton, L. (1991), Portrait of the Subject as a Young Man: The Construction
of Masculinity Ironized in Male Fiction , in P. Shaw and P. Stockwell
(eds), Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day. London:
Pinter, pp. 13545.
Brown, R. (1994), Postmodern Americas in the Fiction of Angela Carter, Martin
Amis and Ian McEwan, in A. Massa and A. Stead (eds), Forked Tongues?
Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. London:
Longman, pp. 92110.
Childs, P. (2005a), Fascinating Violation: Ian McEwans Children, in N.
Bentley (ed.), British Fiction of the 1990s. London and New York: Routledge,
pp. 12334.
(2005b), Ian McEwan: The Child in All of Us, in P. Childs (ed.), Contemporary
Novelists: British Fiction since 1970. Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 16079.
Civelekoglu, F. (2007), Gothic Literature from a Cultural Ecological Perspective:
Ian McEwans The Comfort of Strangers, in I. van Elferen (ed.), Nostalgia or
Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 8694.
Currie, M. (2007), Fictional Knowledge, in M. Currie (ed.), About Time. London:
Edinburgh University Press, pp. 10737.
Davies, R. (2003), Enduring McEwan, in D. Lea and B. Schoene (eds), Posting
the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and Contemporary British Literature.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 10523.
De Michelis, L. (2011), Risk and Morality in Ian McEwans Saturday, in P.
Crosthwaite (ed.), Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual
Horizons in an Age of Global Risk. Oxford: Routledge, pp. 12744.
De Waard, M. (2012), Redemptive Realism? History and Intertextuality in On
Chesil Beach, in S. Isomaa, S. Kivisto, P. Lyytikainen, S. Nyqvist, M. Polvinen
and R. Rossi (eds), Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary
Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 22950.

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Driscoll, L. (2009), Unworkable Subjects: Middle-Class Narratives in Pat

Barker, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro, in Evading Class in Contemporary
Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 2960.
Dyer, G. (2010), Ian McEwan: Atonement, in Working the Room: Essays. Edinburgh:
Canongate, pp. 1814.
Docherty, T. (1999), Now, Here, This, in R. Luckhurst and P. Marks (eds),
Literature and the Contemporary. Harlow: Longman, pp. 5062.
Foley, A. (2009), The Imagination of Freedom: Critical Texts and Times in Contemporary
Liberalism. Johannesburgh: Wits University Press.
Garrard, G. (2010), Reading as an Animal: Ecocriticism and Darwinism in
Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, in L. Volkmann, N. Grimm and I.
Detmers (eds), Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on
the New English Literatures. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 22342.
Groes, S. (2011), Beyond the Responsibility of Place: Ian McEwans Londons,
in S. Groes (ed.), The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature.
Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 14366.
Jackson, T. (2009), The Alphabetic Story of Atonement, in T. Jackson (ed.), The
Technology of the Novel: Writing and Narrative in British Fiction. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 16891.
James, D. (2012), The Dead Hand of Modernism: Ian McEwan, Reluctant
Impressionist, in Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the
Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13560.
Johnstone, S. (1985), Charioteers and Ploughmen, in A. Martin and N. Roddick
(eds), British Cinema Now. London: BFI Publishing, pp. 99110.
Ledbetter, M. (1996), The Games Body-politics Plays: A Rhetoric of Secrecy in
Ian McEwans The Innocent, in M. Ledbetter (ed.), Victims and the Postmodern
Narrative, or Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethic of Reading and Writing.
Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, pp. 88103.
Lewis, P. (1991), McEwan, Ian (Russell), in L. Henderson (ed.), Contemporary
Novelists. London: St James Press, pp. 6213.
Locatelli, A. (2011), Conjectures of Uneasiness: Trauma in Fay Weldons The
Heart of the Country and Ian McEwans On Chesil Beach, in S. Onega and J.
Ganteau (eds), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction. Amsterdam
and New York: Rodopi, pp. 22740.
Macphee, G. (2011), Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Mars-Jones, A. (1990), Venus Envy, in Chatto Counterblasts, 14. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Massie, A. (1990), The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 19701989.
London: Longman, pp. 4952.
Matthews, S. (2006), Seven Types of Unreliability, in Childs, P. (ed.), Ian
McEwans Enduring Love: Routledge Guides to Literature. London: Routledge.
Morrison, J. (2003), Unravelling Time in Ian McEwans Fiction, in Contemporary
Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 6779.

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171

Moseley, M. (1998), Ian McEwan, in M. Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since

1960, Second Series, The Dictionary of the Literary Biography, Vol. 194. Detroit:
Gale.
Nicieja, S. (2012), Forays into the Scientific Mindset: The Two Cultures in
Ian McEwans Saturday and Solar, in J. Fabiszak, E. Urbaniak-Rybicka and
B. Wolski (eds), Crossroads in Literature and Culture. New York: Springer,
pp. 44350.
Pifer, E. (2000), Ian McEwans The Child in Time, in E. Pifer (ed.), Demon or Doll:
Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. Charlottesville and
London: University of Virginia Press, pp. 1921.
Ragachewskaya, M. (2011), Fiction in Search of Theory: I. McEwans Enduring
Love, in M. Knezevic and A. Batricevic (eds), The Face of the Other in
Anglo-American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011,
pp. 18796.
Richter, V. (1999), Tourists Lost in Venice: Daphne Du Mauriers Dont Look
Now and Ian McEwans The Comfort of Strangers, in M. Pfister and B. Schaff
(eds), Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, pp. 18194.
Rostek, J. (2011), Small Men at Big History: Graham Swifts Last Orders (1996)
and Ian McEwans On Chesil Beach (2007), in J. Rostek (ed.), Seaing Through
the Past: Postmodern Histories and the Maritime Metaphor in Contemporary
Anglophone Fiction. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 10320.
Ryan, K. (1999), Sex, Violence and Complicity: Martin Amis and Ian McEwan,
in R. Mengham (ed.), An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge:
Polity, pp. 20318.
Seaboyer, J. (2005), Ian McEwan: Contemporary Realism and the Novel of
Ideas, in J. Acheson and S. C. E. Ross (eds), The Contemporary British Novel
Since 1980. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 2334.
Takolander, M. (2009), The Sensational Imagination: Ian McEwans Saturday,
in A. Uhlmann and H. Groth (eds), Literature and Sensation. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars, pp. 5060.
Tancke, U. (2011), Misplaced Anxieties: Violence and Trauma in Ian McEwans
Saturday, in V. Bragard, C. Dony and W. Rosenberg (eds), Portraying 9/11:
Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre. London and
Jefferson: McFarland, pp. 89101.
Taylor, D. J. (1989), Ian McEwan: Standing Up for the Sisters, in A Vain Conceit:
British Fiction in the 1980s. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 559.
Walkowitz, R. L. (2005), Ian McEwan, in Brian W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to
the British and Irish Novel 19452000. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 50414.
Wells, L. (2006), The Ethical Otherworld: Ian McEwans Fiction, in P. Tew and
R. Mengham (eds), British Fiction Today. London and New York: Continuum,
pp. 11727.
Wood, J. (1996), England, in J. Sturruck (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Contemporary
Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1347.
(2011), Ian McEwan, Atonement, in L. McIlvanney and R. Ryan (eds), The
Good of the Novel. London and New York: Continuum, pp. 120.

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Journal articles
Albers, S. and Caeners, T. (2009), The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ian McEwans
Atonement, English Studies: A Journal of English Letters and Philology, 90 (6),
70720.
Amigoni, D. and Ruston, S. (2008), The Luxury of Storytelling: Science,
Literature and Cultural Contest in Ian McEwans Narrative Practise, Essays
& Studies, 61, 15168.
Banks, J. R. (1982), A Gondola Named Desire, Critical Quarterly, 24 (2), 2731.
Benyei, T. (1997), Places in Between: The Subversion of Initiation Narrative in
Ian McEwans The Innocent, British and American Studies, 4 (2), 6673.
Behrman, M. (2010), The Waiting Game: Medieval Allusions and the Lethal
Nature of Passivity in Ian McEwans Atonement, Studies in the Novel, 42 (4),
45370.
Butler, H. (2011), The Masters Narrative: Resisting the Essentializing Gaze
in Ian McEwans Saturday, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 52 (1),
10113.
Childs, P. (2008), Atonement: The Surface of Things, Adaptation, 1 (2), 1512.
Crosthwaite, P. (2007), Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwans
Atonement, Cultural Politics, 3, 5170.
Dancer, T. (2012), Towards a Modest Criticism: Ian McEwans Saturday,
Novel-Providence, 45 (2), 20220.
DAngelo, K. (2009), To Make a Novel: The Construction of a Critical Readership
in Ian McEwans Atonement, Studies in the Novel, 41 (1), 88105.
Delrez, M. (1995), Escape into Innocence: Ian McEwan and the Nightmare of
History, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 26 (2), 723.
Delville, M. (1996), Marsilio Ficino and Political Syncretism in Ian McEwans
Black Dogs, Notes on Contemporary Literature, 26 (3), 1112.
De Waard, M. (2009), Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination:
The Case of Ian McEwan, The Yearbook of Research into English and American
Literature, 25, 14562.
DHoker, E. (2006), Confession and Atonement in Contemporary Fiction: J. M.
Coetzee, John Banville, and Ian McEwan, Critique: Studies in Contemporary
Fiction, 48 (1), Fall, 3143.
Edwards, P. (1995), Time, Romanticism, Modernism and Modernity in The
Child in Time, English, 44 (178), 4155.
Finney, B. (2004), Brionys Stand against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian
McEwans Atonement, Journal of Modern Literature, 27 (3), 6882.
Foley, A. (2010), Liberalism in the New Millenium: Ian McEwans Saturday,
Journal of Literary Studies, 26 (1), 13562.
Forceville, C. (2002), The Conspiracy in The Comfort of Strangers: Narration in
the Novel and Film, Language and Literature, 11 (2), 11952.
Garrard, G. (2009), Ian McEwans Next Novel and the Future of Ecocriticism,
Contemporary Literature, 50 (4), 695720.
Green, S. (2010), Consciousness and Ian McEwans Saturday: What Henry
Knows, English Studies: A Journal of English Letters and Philology, 91 (1), 5873.
Hidalgo, P. (2005), Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwans Atonement,
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 46 (2), 8291.

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173

Ingersoll, E. G. (2004), Intertextuality in L. P. Hartleys The Go-Between and Ian

McEwans Atonement, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 40 (3), 24158.
(2005), City of Endings: Ian McEwans Amsterdam, Midwest Quarterly: A
Journal of Contemporary Thought, 46 (2), 12338.
(2010), The Moment of History and the History of the Moment: Ian McEwans
On Chesil Beach, Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought, 52 (2),
13147.
Jacobi, M. (2011), Who Killed Robbie and Cecilia? Reading and Misreading Ian
McEwans Atonement, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 52 (1), 5573.
James, D. (2003), A Boy Stepped Out: Migrancy, Visuality, and the Mapping of
Masculinity in Later Fiction of Ian McEwan, Textual Practice, 17 (1), 81100.
Johnstone, R. (1985), Television Drama and the Peoples War: David Hares
Licking Hitler, Ian McEwans The Imitation Game, and Trevor Griffithss
Country, Modern Drama, 28 (2), 18997.
Kohn, R. E. (2004), The Fivesquare Amsterdam of Ian McEwan, Critical Survey,
16 (1), 5976.
Kosmalska, J. (2011), Dichotomous Images in McEwans Saturday: In Pursuit of
Objective Balance, Text Matters, 1, 2707.
Levy, E. P. (2009), Postlapsarian Will and the Problem of Time in Ian McEwans
Enduring Love, Renascence, 61 (3), 16992.
OHara, D. K. (2011), Bryonys Being-For: Metafictional Narrative Ethics in Ian
McEwans Atonement, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 52 (1), 74100.
MacCabe, C. (2007), Critical Quarterly, 49 (2). [Edition devoted to the plagiarism
case surrounding Atonement.]
Matthews, P. (2006), The Deeper Impression of Darkness: Ian McEwans
Atonement, ESC, 32 (1), 14760.
Moriarty, M. (1984), A Pint of Barthes and a Ploughmans Lunch, LTP: Journal of
Literature Teaching Politics, 3, 7990.
Mller-Wood, A. and Carter Wood, J. (2007), Bringing the Past to Heel: History,
Identity and Violence in Ian McEwans Black Dogs, Literature and History, 16
(2), 4356.
Palmer, A. (2009), Attributions of Madness in Ian McEwans Enduring Love,
Style, 43 (3), 291308.
Reynier, C. (1994), Psychic Journey into Artistic Creation: A Reading of Ian
McEwans Reflections of a Kept Ape, Journal of the Short Story in English,
22, 11525.
Robinson, R. (2010), The Modernism of Ian McEwans Atonement, Modern
Fiction Studies, 56 (3), 47395.
Roger, A. (1996), Ian McEwans Portrayal of Women, Forum for Modern Language
Studies, 32 (1), 1126.
Root, C. (2011), A Melodiousness at Odds with Pessimism: Ian McEwans
Saturday, Journal of Modern Literature, 35 (1), 6078.
Ross, M. L. (2008), On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwans Saturday and the
Condition of England Twentieth Century Literature, 54 (1), 7596.
Ryle, M. (2010), Anosognosia, or the Political Unconscious: Limits of Vision in
Ian McEwans Saturday, Criticism, 52 (1), 2540.

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Salisbury, L. (2010), Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwans Mother Tongue,

Textual Practice, 24 (5), 883912.
Sampson, D. (1984), McEwan/Barthes, Southern Review, 17 (1), 6880.
Seaboyer, J. (1999), Sadism Demands a Story: Ian McEwans The Child in
Time, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 45 (4), 95786.
Shah, B. M. (2009), The Sins of Ian McEwans Fictive Atonement: Reading his
Later Novels, New Blackfriars, 90 (1025), 3849.
Shapiro, Alexander H. (2011), McEwan and Forster, the Perfect Wagnerites, The
Wagner Journal, 5 (2), 2045.
Spitz, A. (2010), The Music of Argument: The Portrayal of Argument in Ian
McEwans On Chesil Beach, Language and Literature: Journal of the Poetics and
Linguistics Association, 19 (2), 197220.
Stan, S. (2004), Rose Blanche in Translation, Childrens Literature in Education, 35
(1), 2134.
Sumera, A. (2011), Women and Authority in Ian McEwans Conversation with a
Cupboard Man and its Film Adaptation, Text Matters, 1, 12334.
Thrailkill, J. (2011), Ian McEwans Neurological Novel, Poetics Today, 32 (1),
171201.
Wallace Kowalski, E. (2007), Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwans
Saturday, Studies in the Novel, 39 (4), 46580.
Winterhalter, T. (2010), Plastic Fork in Hand: Reading as a Tool of Ethical
Repair in Ian McEwans Saturday, Journal of Narrative Theory, 40 (3), 33863.

III Interviews
Alter, A. (2010), Can Climate Change Be Funny? Wall Street Journal, 26 March.
Appleyard, B. (2007), The Ghost in My Family. The Sunday Times, Review, 25
March, p. 1.
Begley, A. (2002), The Art of Fiction CLXXIII: Ian McEwan. The Paris Review, 44
(162), Summer, pp. 3060.
Billen, A. (1992), A Goodbye to Gore. The Observer, 14 June, p. 29.
Bradbury, L. (2010), Ways With Words 2010: Ian McEwan Interview. Telegraph,
20 May.
Brown, M. (2010), Warming to the Topic of Climate Change. Telegraph,
11 March.
Casademont, R. G. (1992), The Pleasure of Prose Writing vs. Pornographic
Violence: An Interview with Ian McEwan. The European English Messenger,
1 (3), Autumn, pp. 405.
Cowley, J. (1997), The Prince of Darkest Imaginings. The Times, 6 September, p. 9.
Danziger, D. (1987), In Search of Two Characters. The Times, 27 June, p. 13.
Daoust, P. (1997), Post-shock Traumatic: Profile of Ian McEwan. The Guardian,
4 August, p. 6.
Franks, A. (1992), McEwans Best Bitterness. The Times, 27 June, p. 4.
Gerard, J. (2005), The Conversion of Mr Macabre. The Sunday Times, Review,
23 January, p. 5.

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Gormley, A. (2005), The Consolation of the Elemental. The Independent, 1 July,

pp. 202.
Griggs, J. (2010), Ian McEwan: Mr Sunshine. New Scientist, 30 March.
Grimes, W. (1992), Rustic Calm Inspires McEwan Tale of Evil. The New York
Times, 18 November, p. 5.
Haffenden, J. (1985), Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, pp. 16890.
Hamilton, I. (1978), Points of Departure. New Review, 5 (2), pp. 921.
Hunt, A. (1996), Ian McEwan. New Fiction, 21, Winter, pp. 4750.
Johnson, D. (1990), The Timeless and Timely Child. The Times, 8 September,
pp. 1617.
Kemp, P. (1992), Hounding the Innocent. The Sunday Times, 14 June, pp. 611.
Lawless, J. (2010), British Writer Ian McEwan Tackles Global Warming in New
Novel Solar. Canadian Press, 30 March.
Lawley, S. (2000), Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4, 16 January.
Leith, W. (1998), Form and Dysfunction. The Observer, 20 September, pp. 48.
Pilkington, E. (1992), Berlin mon Amour. The Guardian, 13 June, p. 29.
Pim, K. (2009), McEwans Novel Take on Climate Change. Eastern Daily Press
Books, 3 August.
Roberts, R. (ed.) (2010), Conversations with Ian McEwan. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi.
Ross, T. (2011), Ian McEwan: The Full Interview. Telegraph, 12 February.
Smith, A. (1987), Ian McEwan. Publishers Weekly, 232, 11 September, pp. 689.
Tonkin, B. (2005), The Difference a Day Makes. The Independent, 28 January,
pp. 245.
Walter, N. (1997), Looks Like a Teacher: Writes Like a Demon. The Observer, 24
August, p. 2.
Wroe, N. (2010), Ian McEwan: Its good to get your hands dirty a bit. The
Guardian, 6 March.

IV Filmography
Jack Fleas Birthday Celebration (1976), written by I. McEwan, directed by M.
Newell and produced by T. Prem for the BBC. UK.
Solid Geometry (1979), adapted by I. McEwan from his own story, directed
by M. Newell and produced by S. Gilbert for the BBC. (Production halted
1979.) UK.
The Imitation Game (1980), written by I. McEwan, produced and directed by R.
Eyre. Script first published in Quarto, 1980. UK.
The Ploughmans Lunch (1983), written by I. McEwan, directed by R. Eyre and
produced by S. Relph and A. Scott for Greenpoint Films Limited. UK.
The Last Day of Summer (1984), adapted by I. McEwan from his short story,
directed by Derek Banham for the BBC. UK.
Soursweet (1988), adapted by I. McEwan, directed by Mike Newell for British
Screen Productions. UK.

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The Comfort of Strangers (1990), adapted by H. Pinter, directed by P. Schrader for

Erre Produzione. Italy.
The Cement Garden (1993), adapted and directed by A. Birkin for Laurentic Film
Productions. UK.
The Good Son (1993), written by I. McEwan, directed by J. Ruben.
The Innocent (1993), written by I. McEwan, directed by John Schlesinger and
produced by N. Heyman for Island World. USA.
First Love, Last Rites (1997), adapted by D. Ryan, directed by J. Peretz for Forensic
Films. USA.
Solid Geometry (2002), adapted and directed by D. Lawson for Grampian
Television. UK.
Enduring Love (2004), adapted by J. Penhall and directed by R. Michell for Path
Pictures International. UK.
Butterflies (2005), adapted and directed by M. Jacoby for Samsa Film.
Luxembourg.
Atonement (2007), adapted by C. Hampton and directed by J. Wright for Working
Title Films. UK.

V Websites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McEwan [Provides useful links and a
bibliography.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McEwan
www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?=auth70 [Chronology and Critical
Perspective by Sean Matthews.]
http://www.ianmcewan.com [McEwans official website edited by Ryan
Roberts.]
www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3041 [Critical Overview
by Peter Childs. requires subscription.]

9781441139221_Ref02_Final_txt_print.indd 176

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Index

Adams, Douglas 133

adolescence 119
agency 136
allegory 124
Allen, Penny 2
American culture in fiction 489, 105
Amis, Martin 10, 1212, 141, 143
Andrews, Lucilla 8, 578, 629
anger x
anthropology 14950
Arnold, Matthew 4, 10, 53, 10814
Atwood, Margaret 11
Austen, Jane 4, 71, 789, 801, 154
authorial presence 133
authority, government 47, 111
autobiography 12, 13940
Bakhtin, Mikhail 12930
Ballard, J.G. 11
Banfield, Ann 95
Banville, John 10
Barker, Nicola 45
Barnes, Julian 60
Bataille, Georges 7, 1416, 18, 20, 235
Beckett, Samuel 30
Bellow, Saul 3, 105, 154
Bergson, Henri 75
Berlin 3
Berlin Wall 3, 126, 140
Bletchley Park 35
Booker Prize 11618
Bowen, Elizabeth 934
Bradbury, Malcolm 6, 22
Brecht, Bertolt 2930
Breton, Andr 14, 20
Brown, Dan ix
Brown, Donald 129
Burroughs, William 6, 15
Butler, Marilyn 801
Camus, Albert 124
Cape Farewell Art/Science
Expedition 3, 126

9781441139221_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 177

Cline, Louis Ferdinand 6, 15

characters ix, 91
childhood 4356
city, the 845, 934, 99114
Clark, Timothy 135
climate change 11, 123, 1346
Cohn, Norman 135
Cold War 50
Collini, Stefan 112
Connolly, Cressida xi
Connolly, Cyril 75, 912
Conrad, Joseph 154
consciousness ix, 1045
conservatism 56
contemporary, the 2
Culkin, Macaulay 39
cultural pornography 4356, 1212
Cunningham, Michael 85
Currie, Mark 957, 112
Darwinism xii, 9
Dawkins, Richard 3, 356, 131
Deleuze, Gilles 45
dementia 95
desire 14
desublimation 15, 21, 23
Dunbar, Robin ix
Dunkirk 603, 656
Eagleton, Terry 10
ecocriticism 11, 123
economic growth 3
Ekman, Paul 148
Elias, Amy J. 60
Eliot, T. S. 100, 143
emotions ixx
Encounter (Magazine) 1401
Enlightenment 130, 135
environmentalism 123
ethics 4
Falklands War 36, 126
family 8, 41, 119

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178

INDEX

father figures 8
feminism 2, 7, 33
fiction writing 67
film, feature writing 7
film adaptations 1
Finney, Brian 768, 93
first-person narrative 154
Ford, Ford Madox 88
formlessness 203
Forster, E. M. 58
Foster, Hal 1415
Freud, Sigmund 78, 14, 45
fundamentalism 2

Kafka, Franz 10, 15, 1034, 142

Keats, John 4
Kermode, Frank 75, 141
knowledge 8790
Kureishi, Hanif 41

genes x
Genet, Jean 6, 15
Golding, William 3
government, authority 47, 111
Greene, Graham 30
grotesque, the 12730
Guattari, Flix 45

MacCabe, Colin 77
McCann, Madeleine 44, 144
McCrumb, Robert 58
McEwan, Ian
childhood 56
divorce 2
education 6
interest in science 1278
lectures 2
librettos 2, 26
life chronology xviiixx
television plays 2836
writing habits 67, 124
Amsterdam 1, 4, 10, 53, 11618, 124
Atonement
blind writing 126, 146
critical reception 1
knowledge 8795
literary tradition 34
plagiarism 89, 5769
postmodernism 7082
self-knowledge 102
time 8398
Woolf, Virginia 905
Black Dogs 3, 8, 84, 126, 132, 140
Butterflies 99100
Cement Garden, The 3, 6, 7, 235, 139
Child in Time, The
child abduction 85
childhood 437, 545
critical reception 1
family relationships in 8
London in 1001, 135
modernist tradition 6
time in 85, 867
Cocker at the Theatre 1617, 100

Haffenden, John 1, 8, 139

Hamilton, Clive 125, 1345
Hamilton, Ian 141
Hampton, Christopher 1
Hartley, L. P. 74
Hawking, Stephen 86
Head, Dominic 11, 35, 79, 86,
94, 97
historical fiction 5769
Hitchens, Christopher 142
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 7
horror x
humanism 11, 712, 136
Hutcheon, Linda 356, 60
ideas in novels 878, 126
immigrants 401
incest 1718, 245
infancy 47
infantilization 502
innocence 43, 467, 100
intentionality ix
intertextuality 12
Iraq war 10, 55, 101, 11112
Islam 10
James, Henry 48, 88, 142
Joyce, James 3, 6, 1045, 143

9781441139221_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 178

Lanchester, John 134

Langdon, Julia 57
Leavis, F. R. 4, 9, 702, 7980
literary awards 1, 116
Lomas, David 23
London 99114
love 138

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INDEX
Comfort of Strangers, The 1, 5, 6, 8
Daydreamer, The 2
Dead as they Come 7, 13, 223, 142
Disguises 13, 1819, 99, 141
End of the World Blues 2, 135
Enduring Love ixx, 1, 4, 8, 101, 133
First Love, Last Rites 1, 6, 7, 1519, 141
For You 2, 4
Good Son, The 7, 3642
Homemade 13, 1718, 99, 141
Imitation Game, The 7, 336, 142
In Between the Sheets 6, 7, 203, 141
In Between the Sheets (short
story) 141
Innocent, The 8, 345, 4356
Jack Fleas Birthday
Celebration 11, 2833
Mother Tongue 6
Move Abroad, A 26
On Chesil Beach 4, 10, 35, 53, 11522,
153, 154
Or Shall We Die? 2, 145
Ploughmans Lunch, The 7, 26, 369,
126
Pornography 11, 100, 142
Reflections of a Kept Ape 1412
Rose Blanche 2
Saturday
Arnolds poem in 4, 53
critical reception 1, 1011
idealism in 55
modernism 9, 85, 9598, 10111
science in xxi, 135
Saturday March 199- 141
Solar 3, 11, 12336
Solid Geometry (short story) 141
Solid Geometry (television play)
2833
Soursweet 7, 402
Sweet Tooth 5, 12, 135, 13943
To and Fro 141
Two Fragments: March 1999
201, 100, 135
Untitled 11
Mallon, Thomas 58
manipulation 45
materialism 203
metafiction 5961
Middleton, Peter 86
Milton, John 133

9781441139221_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 179

179

mind, theory of ix
Mo, Timothy 40
modernism 10, 736, 958, 1038
Nairn, Tom 21
narrative 52, 131
neuroscience x
novel, the 22, 278
novella, the 101, 11617, 122
nursing 629
obscenity 156
Orwell, George 3, 124
paedophilia 19
parody 16
Pinter, Harold 1, 27
plagiarism 89, 5769
politics 545
see also government; Iraq war
pornography 11, 1516, 1212
see also cultural pornography
postmodernism 2833, 7082
prisoners dilemma 133
prizes 1, 11617
psychoanalysis 7
radicalism 56
Radloff, A. 8, 625
reason xxi
religion 10, 150
Ricoeur, Paul 956
Ridley, Matt 1334
Rimington, Stella 140
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 6, 152
Roberts, Glenys 58
Royle, Nicholas 90
Rushdie, Salman 3, 10
Ryan, Kiernan 13, 14
Sage, Lorna 67
Sardar, Ziauddin 10
satire 117, 12430
Schneider, Peter 3, 140
science
and art xi, 1, 523, 55
and literature 2, 129
McEwans interest in x, 128
nature of 130
screen adaptations 27, 313

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180
screenwriting 2642
sexual desire 14, 17
see also pornography
sexuality 512, 1212
Sharpe, David 2
Shelley, Mary 106
Simpson, Helen 134
Smith, Zadie 58
social pornography 44
Sokal, Alan 131
Sontag, Susan 1517
Soviet Union 3
Spenser, Edmund 140, 143
Suez 367
Summers, Larry 131
surrealism 7, 1425
suspension of disbelief 4
synechdoche 12830
television 7
terrorist attacks 23, 107

9781441139221_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 180

INDEX
Thatcherism 3642, 116
Thompson, E. P. 378
time 8398
Tremain, Rose 58
vertigo 7, 235, 1534
visual, the 154
Voltaire xi
walking 1545
Whiteread, Rachel 126
Wicke, Jennifer 44
Williams, Raymond 99100, 111
Wilson, Angus 5
Wilson, Edward O. 131
Womens Movement 336
Wood, James 4, 72
Woods, Tim 86
Woolf, Virginia 4, 10, 85, 905, 1068,
109
Wright, Joe 1

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