Lessons - Ian McEwan

 

Now here's an author (like Ali Smith) who seems more unable than me to let Brexit go, and this is saying a lot. 

And here's an author (like Ali Smith) who probably tries to pack too much in too few pages. The story of Roland and Miss Cornell, for me, would have been enough. The persistence of his memory of her throughout his life, and her unexpected brief return, would have made this a great novel. 

Turning the book into a brief history of Britain from WWII to today as seen through the eyes of one person, on the other hand, was stretching it a bit. Even when I find myself agreeing with most of McEwan's points about British politics and society, I don't really see the need to read about them. They are not surprising, they are not particularly engaging. Not for me at the very least. 

A shorter novel on the frenzy, trauma, and confusion caused (?) by Miss Cornell would have ranked among McEwan's finest. Instead, I consider this a great "intro to the current British divisions" for my mum, along the lines of some of Ali Smith's recent books and Jonathan Coe's Middle England. With the added bonus of having large passages set in Suffolk (where we were coincidentally holidaying as I was reading the book) and mentioning Mick Jagger's stint as an LSE student. 

Machines Like Me - Ian McEwan

 

Old-school Ian McEwan beats 2019 Ian McEwan hands down. Next time he writes a sci-fi book, perhaps he could invent a time machine that reminds him of what a good storyteller he was (and most likely can still be). 

This love triangle between two humans and a machine felt as emotionally void as a Tamagotchi's request for affection, which I do realize might have been the whole point, but for me it makes for very uninspiring reading. 

Then again, I was never going to be sold on a book like this, as I can't recollect a single novel with human-like androids/machines/robots that I actually, honestly and thoroughly enjoyed (Never Let Me Go was the one that I appreciated the most, but even there saying that I really liked it would be a bit of a stretch).

The Cockroach - Ian McEwan

  

McEwan has it in for Brexit even more than I do by the looks of it. He might not be originally "from the continent", but he does appear to be perplexed and saddened by his country's botched seppuku attempt. And to think that it was written in 2019, which now to me looks like a wonderfully heady period of friendship and stability. 

This is a light read if there ever was one. It's even funny - at times - when it's not trying too hard. I agree with the bottom line (Brexit is nuts, and why would anyone want it), but for a therapeutic laugh I'd always pick a column by Marina Hyde on top of a novella.

Solar - Ian McEwan

  

I much prefer McEwan doing "science" (or thereabouts) like in this book than him doing sci-fi like in Machines Like Me, but that's not saying much. 

Solar wasn't a bad read, but I have the feeling it's already aged quite a bit over the span of a dozen years. The main driving force behind it shouldn't be the personal life of its main character (which is not as interesting as that of a number of his other characters), but rather its scientific approach, which in 2022/3 already feels quite dated. 

And the finale, with the chickens coming home to roost isn't really the most surprising.

The Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan

  

I often find myself surprised by how prolific a writer is Ian McEwan. And the more I read of his recent works, the more I am attracted to his more macabre past.

The Comfort of Strangers is bold, as it is ultimately a short novel about a death in Venice, but I believe Thomas Mann might have previously written something along those lines. 

Yet this Venice somehow appears even more plagued and insalubrious than Mann's, and despite knowing from the start that it's going to end badly, the reader is left caring for the main characters hoping that they make it out of their twisted predicament (though, as per the spoiler in the previous sentence, that doesn't quite happen).

Black Dogs - Ian McEwan

Blogging at 7 am because, well, why not when you have a wife in pain in bed and a daughter not in pain and very, very much out of bed.

I thought I was done with McEwan, but then the Shaw Library presented me with Black Dogs (my mom's favourite McEwan as far as I can recall) and I just grabbed it. And it simply reconfirmed my thoughts about the author: I've simply read way too many of his books.

Black Dogs is flawlessly written, like all of McEwan's books, but I cared so little about the post-war love story between its two main characters that for me it overshadowed the unusual setting of the novel (unusual in the historical era depicted, not that the French countryside is an unusual literary setting).

On Chesil Beach and In Between the Sheets – Ian McEwan

This time I’m tackling two books at a time, and I can do that because a) I have already talked about McEwan more than enough, and b) put together, the two books barely get over 300 pages. As usual, I got the first of the two from the local farm, and the second was from a wonderful Amnesty International book-sale in Blackheath.

In short: reading the two books quite simply confirmed what I already knew/felt/thought about McEwan. His early stuff (in this case In Between the Sheets) remains dark, incestuous, pornographic and overall – when he doesn’t completely lose the plot (in all senses) – those short stories are frantically interesting and well-written. Most of the books he published recently (in this case On Chesil Beach) read like the author’s celebration of his own talent as a writer: sure, McEwan’s prose remains great, but his plots just bore me these days (and I do realize that the big surprise in the end is meant to make the reader reconsider everything he initially thought about the couple’s troubled wedding night – but is it really that much of a surprise?!?).

So yeah, only a couple more books and then I’ll stop reading McEwan. Well, only a couple more books and I’ll have read everything he actually wrote. 

The Innocent – Ian McEwan

And with this I have officially finished all the hard-copy McEwan books that I own (although I still want to read Black Dogs).

Much like in Sweet Tooth, McEwan develops both a love and a spy story in parallel, and I feel that he doesn’t do either excessively well. Somehow I had very little doubt as to where the love story was going to end (it is pretty much stated from the start that the relationship won’t last, and it’s also quite clear that Leonard doesn’t really understand Maria). As for the spy story, despite the cheesiness of the depiction of the British/American divide, its premises are actually really quite interesting (and Operation Gold something that even I had never heard of) – it’s just so hard to write a great spy story in a country that has produced Graham Greene and John Le Carré (and maybe I should also add to this list Alan Bennett, whose work on the Cambridge Spies was actually really quite interesting). 

Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

Having read so many of McEwan’s books, it’s nice to be able to smugly say “I like his earlier stuff better”. To me Enduring Love falls in between the aforementioned “earlier stuff” and some of his more recent fairly dull works.

Enduring Love is an interesting read, and one that makes me surely really happy to be out of “real” academia (“you aren’t even ripe yet” said the fox to the grapes?!?). The couple’s dynamics seem remarkably plausible (although I would personally like a bit more support for my partner!) –Joe’s bizarre entry in the English underworld a lot less so (like in Saturday, to me it looks as if McEwan doesn’t really know what he’s talking about).

Most of all, this book actually made me realize why so many of McEwan’s character (including Joe) are in the end rather unlikeable – they’re not just posh, they’re just so obscenely judgemental you want to punch them in the face… 

Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan

This is my sixth McEwan novel. Two I thought were magnificent (The Cement Garden and The Child in Time), one was great but had a misleading title (in Atonement Briony doesn’t atone!), and three (Saturday, Amsterdam, and now Sweet Tooth) were just very mediocre.

And why is Sweet Tooth mediocre? Because McEwan has too much sympathy for an awful character (Serena is very much like Briony in Atonement), because it takes for freaking ever to get to the actual core of the plot, because the actual lives of interesting Cambridge spies (just ask Alan Bennett) unlike Serena’s are actually, well, interesting, and most of all because – unsurprisingly – everyone is again so posh that it gets to be really rather unnerving.

Like Briony, Serena is completely self-centred, and even in this case McEwan seems to defend her (the comments the narrator makes about the University of Sussex – where McEwan himself studied – are absolutely awful and yet appear to be justified even when they are unjustifiable). And the plot twist at the very end is just not that ground-breaking or mind-blowing (plus, the letter that constitutes the final chapter is simply way too long). 

The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan

I remember the old times, when reading McEwan (to me) meant reading stories of privileged beautiful people and how they would be able to overcome whatever obstacle they encountered and return to their posh lives before the end of the novel.  As Bob Dylan used to sing, however, The Times They’re a-Changin’

The Cement Garden is an absolutely great read. And weird. And disturbing. I wouldn’t even know how to classify it: it’s not a horror novel, or at least I don’t think so, yet it does give you goose bumps in so many ways. Its effect on me was similar to that of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child or Beryl Bainbridge’s Harriet Said... And much like those books, it’s not something that I would particularly encourage my pregnant wife to read.

And yes, my wife is pregnant. And this is also kind of a test to see how many (if any) of my real-life friends actually read this little blog…

Saturday – Ian McEwan

 

I found an autographed hardback copy of the novel on the second-hand bookshelf at my local urban farm. It was selling for 1£. It says a lot about the value of literature these days...

The book is beautifully written. No wonder, it’s McEwan. The book is about rich people and their perfectly imperfect lives. No wonder, it’s McEwan. The book actually annoyed the hell out of me, which is a shame because, after all, it’s McEwan...

I’m not quite sure whether McEwan depicts a Henry Perowne that is irritatingly detached from reality or if that’s actually a reflection of the author’s outlook on life in London (the autobiographical elements in Saturday are clearly many and at times it’s hard to disentangle pure fiction from McEwan’s experiences).

The book annoyed me because Henry Perowne and McEwan seem to mock those who protested against the invasion of Iraq. I did back in the day, I’m quite proud of that, and I’m happy I carried those signs that he seems to find fairly meaningless. It annoyed me because I had little intention of spending half an hour reading about a stupid squash game. It annoyed me because during the squash game one of those supposedly average athletes in their 50s jumps “two or maybe even three feet into the air” (you’re either a real athlete, or you are delusional if you think you can jump that high with a couple of steps). Similarly, you don’t run a half marathon in less than an hour and a half if you’re little more than a casual jogger (trust me on that).

It annoyed me because the book hates on the student halls in Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia where I lived and worked for years. It annoyed me because, protected by his fancy car on Tottenham Court Road, Henry Perowne/McEwan thinks that everyone around him is fundamentally happy (the guy selling The Big Issue? The old lady diving for reduced to clear sandwiches at Tesco? The underpaid McDonald’s staff?). It annoyed me because, for all the medical research he’s had to do to write this book, Perowne’s mom has the same illness that Briony develops in Atonement (which he wrote four years before, without publishing any other novel in the meantime).

The novel’s greatest merit has been that of arousing something similar to a weird nationalist pride in me (something I’ve never possessed and that I hope I’ll get rid of by tomorrow morning). As an unknown Italian archaeologist impregnates Perowne’s flawless daughter, McEwan allows himself to label the Italians as pueri aeterni (eternal teenagers) and says that Italian men won’t get up in the middle of the night for the cries of their teething children. Screw that, I have a right to say those things if I want to. You, rich and pompous foreigner, don’t.

Atonement – Ian McEwan

Rarely has such a great book had a more misleading title. Despite her attempts, Briony doesn’t atone not so much for her sins, but for her awfulness. I probably wouldn’t be so harsh on her if she wasn’t rich and successful (like essentially all McEwan’s characters) – but she is. McEwan takes the meanness and the fantasy of children to an extreme in this novel. And the fact that elderly Briony in the movie is portrayed by the wonderful Vanessa Redgrave is still not enough for me to find it in my heart to forgive her.

There is really no need to point out that the book is brilliantly written, this is McEwan after all. Clearly, I enjoyed the sections set during the war (together with the huge research work that was surely needed) more than the scenes of aristocratic life in the English countryside. Atonement is a book that has made me suffer like few others (similarly to Child in Time for 95% of its length) – but the end didn’t really make me suffer, it just made me want to karate-chop Briony and her vascular dementia (which she got at 70-something, after a life spent as a hugely successful writer and a little time as a nurse – the poor thing can get lost).

I’m kind of surprised by how, having read the book more than a year ago, I am still so mad at the spoiled little brat.

The Child in Time – Ian McEwan

And this is two almost-consecutive books by McEwan. Unlike with Amsterdam, I am really quite sure The Child in Time is one of the greatest books of the last few decades. There is no point in saying that it’s beautifully written, with McEwan it can be taken for granted. But this book is one of the most touching ones I’ve ever read.

I was almost in tears during the initial supermarket scene, desperately reading to get to the happy ending of the section as soon as possible. Except that the happy ending never came. And then the changing dynamics between Stephen and Julie, with the reader unable to take sides because both of them appear to be – sadly – reasonable, and most of all because who could make a judgement in such a situation?

But Stephen ends up realizing his childhood dream and driving a train. And the actual driver figures things out before Stephen – or any reader – does, and I think that’s just poetry.

Amsterdam – Ian McEwan

I often wonder whether McEwan is the greatest writer of his generation. Books like Atonement and Child in Time make me think he could be (although I generally end up concluding that he isn’t), but others like Amsterdam make me wonder whether he might have enjoyed more success than he deserved.

The book is, like all others by McEwan, about rich people, charming rich people (at least, they are not always awesome charming rich people). In this book, the author seems to have a preference for one of his two main characters: the musician, whose brilliant symphony is (or might be?) destroyed by his former old-time friend (who, on the other hand, is criticized for the absolute lack of morality of some of his actions). The final showdown between the two is farcical and makes me question the literary value of the novel.

Sure, this is a quick read and written beautifully like all of McEwan’s books – but the annoying protagonists make the awful Tory minister appear likeable and defendable. And I don’t like that.