I know that Mum did read this one because it was for her book group. I vaguely remember her talking about the group's reactions, although not much of what she actually said. It was a group of women who could all remember what 1962 was actually like. I think that Mum liked it, although with a few reservations.
At that point I think I was feeling pretty disillusioned about Ian McEwan's work. I love some of it. The first collection of short stories, The Cement Garden (also an excellent film, which I saw several years before I'd read a word of McEwan's writing), The Innocent, and Enduring Love are all worth reading. The Child in Time is inconsistent, but still has excellent individual scenes (I'd also already encountered an exploration of David Bohm's ideas of the implicate order in Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man which made it feel somewhat less impressive). That's just it though. Taken as a whole, despite his reputation as one of English literary fiction's great talents, he's just a wildly inconsistent writer. Amsterdam starts fairly impressively but then descends into silliness after about two thirds of the way through. That it's just about the worst prize-winning novel I've ever read was useful in that it helped me finally see the extent to which literary prizes have rather less to do with celebrating quality than with selling books. And Saturday was such a bad book that even the positive reviews put me off reading it. Atonement was better, but also felt a little like McEwan retreating into a kind of greatest-hits of Englishness: the country-house narrative, the blitz, retreat in the Second World War.
"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."
McEwan's fiction has often concerned itself with a single unexpected life-changing event. A very short novel On Chesil Beach narrates in at times minute detail the wedding night of young couple Edward and Florence and the lives which have brought them to this moment. It's set seemingly very deliberately in 1962, the year before sexual intercourse began. A strategy which reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913, a time similarly on the brink of transformation, one which will completely eradicate the world which the novel's characters take for granted. Their approaches are very different though. Fitzgerald's narrative voice is suffused with the commonplace, illuminating the society of pre-revolutionary Russia through rapid accumulation of small details and the tragi-comic story of English printer Frank Reid and his domestic troubles. Everything is implicit. The Russian Revolution is never mentioned, but for the reader it looms over the novel's action. We know that nothing of this will last, soon to be obliterated by the larger historical forces.
By contrast McEwan's narrative voice is always at a distance from the characters, constantly placing their story in ironic relationship to history. From the novel's opening line, their sexual difficulties are placed squarely in the context of their time, which is contrasted with the cultural changes which are about to overwhelm the world that has formed them. I can't help but feel that this risks being a little condescending. They're described as being 'trapped' by history at one point, but surely, isn't everyone? Certainly some of the difficulties between these two fictional newlyweds and their inability to communicate properly with each other - they're essentially strangers to each other despite clearly being 'in love' and intimate - seem to lie in the fact that they grew up in the immediate post war period. Their lives would undoubtedly be different if they'd been born later, but again, isn't that true for everyone? We may now live in a period which is bombarded with sexual imagery, sometimes enough to give one the impression that everyone else must be having sex all the time. There surely must be something inherently wrong with you if you're at a period of your life when you aren't having sex, or if you're one of those people who just isn't interested in it. Even so, I'm sure it's still quite easy to reach one's early twenties still as a virgin, as Edward and Florence do. And although we might think of our culture as more liberated now, I wonder if it can't be just as repressive. At least in some ways. I'm sure that sexless marriages existed in the past, and I see no reason to assume that they would necessarily have been unhappy ones. I think the pressures exerted by our culture would actually make it far less likely for such a marriage to be successful now. Although at least asexual people must now be able to find likeminded souls via the internet. Honestly, I sincerely wish such people every happiness.
Which meandering has all rather taken me rather far from McEwan's novel. It's probably the best thing he's written since Enduring Love. The distanced narrative voice never gets in the way of the emotional kick that his brief fiction provides. There's something delightful in his description of their 'innocent' courtship. The secrets they're both hiding from each mean that neither one is entirely innocent as their disastrous wedding night unfolds. You want to forgive them both for what happens and the sadness which results. The brief sketch of the lives which follow their wedding night suggests that while they are both fairly successful professionally, but also somehow unfulfilled. I don't really see how this means that they have 'dropped out of history' as McEwan's sonorous narrative voice seems to suggest. Possibly he intended their disastrous night to be somehow emblematic of that moment before the 60s began, but they seem rather more particular to me. Their conflicts and difficulties occur within a sharply realised post war Britain, but then so did so many other lives. We don't make the historical moment we find ourselves within, and our lives aren't emblematic of anything. They're just our lives. In my experience life-changing experiences are usually far more gradual than McEwan's fiction often suggests, but that doesn't mean that our lives don't alter in ways we could never have predicted. But they're also our lives, lives that no one living before or coming after us could have lived. And McEwan is quite right, they can always be changed by simply doing nothing.
At that point I think I was feeling pretty disillusioned about Ian McEwan's work. I love some of it. The first collection of short stories, The Cement Garden (also an excellent film, which I saw several years before I'd read a word of McEwan's writing), The Innocent, and Enduring Love are all worth reading. The Child in Time is inconsistent, but still has excellent individual scenes (I'd also already encountered an exploration of David Bohm's ideas of the implicate order in Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man which made it feel somewhat less impressive). That's just it though. Taken as a whole, despite his reputation as one of English literary fiction's great talents, he's just a wildly inconsistent writer. Amsterdam starts fairly impressively but then descends into silliness after about two thirds of the way through. That it's just about the worst prize-winning novel I've ever read was useful in that it helped me finally see the extent to which literary prizes have rather less to do with celebrating quality than with selling books. And Saturday was such a bad book that even the positive reviews put me off reading it. Atonement was better, but also felt a little like McEwan retreating into a kind of greatest-hits of Englishness: the country-house narrative, the blitz, retreat in the Second World War.
"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."
McEwan's fiction has often concerned itself with a single unexpected life-changing event. A very short novel On Chesil Beach narrates in at times minute detail the wedding night of young couple Edward and Florence and the lives which have brought them to this moment. It's set seemingly very deliberately in 1962, the year before sexual intercourse began. A strategy which reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913, a time similarly on the brink of transformation, one which will completely eradicate the world which the novel's characters take for granted. Their approaches are very different though. Fitzgerald's narrative voice is suffused with the commonplace, illuminating the society of pre-revolutionary Russia through rapid accumulation of small details and the tragi-comic story of English printer Frank Reid and his domestic troubles. Everything is implicit. The Russian Revolution is never mentioned, but for the reader it looms over the novel's action. We know that nothing of this will last, soon to be obliterated by the larger historical forces.
By contrast McEwan's narrative voice is always at a distance from the characters, constantly placing their story in ironic relationship to history. From the novel's opening line, their sexual difficulties are placed squarely in the context of their time, which is contrasted with the cultural changes which are about to overwhelm the world that has formed them. I can't help but feel that this risks being a little condescending. They're described as being 'trapped' by history at one point, but surely, isn't everyone? Certainly some of the difficulties between these two fictional newlyweds and their inability to communicate properly with each other - they're essentially strangers to each other despite clearly being 'in love' and intimate - seem to lie in the fact that they grew up in the immediate post war period. Their lives would undoubtedly be different if they'd been born later, but again, isn't that true for everyone? We may now live in a period which is bombarded with sexual imagery, sometimes enough to give one the impression that everyone else must be having sex all the time. There surely must be something inherently wrong with you if you're at a period of your life when you aren't having sex, or if you're one of those people who just isn't interested in it. Even so, I'm sure it's still quite easy to reach one's early twenties still as a virgin, as Edward and Florence do. And although we might think of our culture as more liberated now, I wonder if it can't be just as repressive. At least in some ways. I'm sure that sexless marriages existed in the past, and I see no reason to assume that they would necessarily have been unhappy ones. I think the pressures exerted by our culture would actually make it far less likely for such a marriage to be successful now. Although at least asexual people must now be able to find likeminded souls via the internet. Honestly, I sincerely wish such people every happiness.
Which meandering has all rather taken me rather far from McEwan's novel. It's probably the best thing he's written since Enduring Love. The distanced narrative voice never gets in the way of the emotional kick that his brief fiction provides. There's something delightful in his description of their 'innocent' courtship. The secrets they're both hiding from each mean that neither one is entirely innocent as their disastrous wedding night unfolds. You want to forgive them both for what happens and the sadness which results. The brief sketch of the lives which follow their wedding night suggests that while they are both fairly successful professionally, but also somehow unfulfilled. I don't really see how this means that they have 'dropped out of history' as McEwan's sonorous narrative voice seems to suggest. Possibly he intended their disastrous night to be somehow emblematic of that moment before the 60s began, but they seem rather more particular to me. Their conflicts and difficulties occur within a sharply realised post war Britain, but then so did so many other lives. We don't make the historical moment we find ourselves within, and our lives aren't emblematic of anything. They're just our lives. In my experience life-changing experiences are usually far more gradual than McEwan's fiction often suggests, but that doesn't mean that our lives don't alter in ways we could never have predicted. But they're also our lives, lives that no one living before or coming after us could have lived. And McEwan is quite right, they can always be changed by simply doing nothing.
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