McEwan’s World
What do we learn?
First Love, Last Rites; In Between the Sheets; The Cement Garden; The Comfort of Strangers; The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television; The Ploughman's Lunch; The Child in Time; The Innocent; Black Dogs; Enduring Love; The Daydreamer; Amsterdam; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; The Children Act; Nutshell; ‘My Purple Scented Novel’; and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
In ‘My Purple Scented Novel,’ Ian McEwan’s protagonist plots and executes the most audacious kind of literary fraud. He does not only steal. He invades. He annexes. He makes what was someone else’s idea his, and does so as the worm in the apple makes food. He makes food of another’s whole life, whole being — turning what was into what is with cruelty and without care.
The centrepiece of the story is professional envy. One writer is a success and another a dud. They knew each other at university, started their careers together — adopted the same poses, chased the same women. The two believe they are in lock-step. But one of them strikes out on his own, writing urgent work which appeals to the public: television, for instance. And the other decides to have a family. It is in the voice of the loser that the story is told.
Soon their fortunes drift apart. The successful one, the handsome one, he becomes famous, fascinating. And the other languishes first on the mid-list, then on no list at all. He is dropped by his publisher, renounced by his agent. He takes teaching jobs to pay the bills, and moves further and further away from London, from the action.
He has given up, forsaken. Yet one day, a chance encounter offers him a straw to grasp: he can rescue himself — he can attain the success that has given him a miss. But to make it so, he will have to do something awful, and to betray an old and nominally dear friend. What, I ask the class, do we think such a man decides to do?
Envy is a great McEwan theme, whether or not his characters realise it. In The Imitation Game, a play for television that was interestingly enough denounced by many of the people it sought to portray, a woman who was denied her chance to serve in the war goes steadily off the rails. She wants to work at Bletchley Park on Ultra. But she cannot. So she proves difficult.
In ‘Solid Geometry,’ another short story, a wife envies her husband’s focus on obscure scientific history — and in a debt to Freud, she envies also a formaldehyde-preserved object in his possession. Meanwhile her husband envies his own grandfather, who got to pursue his scientific work in a kind of peace. Amsterdam is of course about envy, envy and unnecessary hatred. Atonement is, among other things, about the envy the young feel for the love of those older than them, a love they cannot help but misunderstand and cause to fracture and cease. In Enduring Love, of course, a psycho takes exception to someone who is normal, when the two of them see something so profound, so shocking, so terrible, the one feels an envious, green-ink kind of kinship with the other that the latter does not want — and everything goes quite swiftly to hell.
We move on to film. In The Ploughman’s Lunch, an excellent movie scripted by McEwan, a character played by Jonathan Pryce envies people who have careers and social status and lives, while he tries so desperately to avoid his own — using people, evading his ailing mother for all he is worth, sharing nothing, offering nothing, yet somehow going on ahead. A perfect New Man, built of the acquisitive society. Or so we are supposed, rather heavy-handedly, to think.
And yet, am I perhaps wrong? So much of McEwan is about connection and its lack. Most clearly in On Chesil Beach, when a nervous couple derail their own wedding night; in Solar, when the protagonist tries to make something of himself at this late stage; in Saturday, when a neurosurgeon makes efforts to puzzle his way through a fractious time and to preserve his family from harm; in Black Dogs when history, recent history, is the subject; in The Child in Time, when a father wants so terribly to recover his lost daughter and sees visions of his mother many a year back. Machines Like Me, not a subtle book, asks about the connections between man and mechanism. Can they ever align? Are they yet comparable?
Reading the sick early short stories, including ‘Pornography,’ ‘Dead as They Come,’ ‘Homemade’ and ‘Butterflies,’ and some of the more horrible early novels like The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers, all attempts to find a big theme and to stick it down under glass fall down. Like Kafka’s somewhat obsessive cataloguing of human pain and misery in, for instance, ‘In the Penal Colony,’ one doesn’t know what it is that the writer want to achieve, except to go into those awful things that people think, those dreadful things that people do to each other, and to render them as fully and clearly as possible. There is no judgement, only documentation. ‘Butterflies’ in particular is especially depraved. Naturally, this means it is excellent.
What can we say about The Children Act and Nutshell? Nutshell is about an unborn child — under assault from the outside world. He is a sophisticated narrator, the child. Is this the voice of all children? In The Children Act we have a child from the perspective of adults — bitter, divorcing adults past their best. They are conscientious, some of them. But it’s all falling apart; and the boy who believes his faith will protect him cannot buy what it is the adults are trying to tell him about the contingent, chancy nature of life on earth.
McEwan has always been interested in the lives of children: their experiences, so subjective, so vivid. Their terrible, all-consuming fears. How they are afraid of rats and growing up and losing their parents and ugliness and burglars and dying and all sorts of other things. They find life as difficult as those who are older — just as tragic. But they do not often know why or what they might do about it.
The Daydreamer, an early work but later than the horror grotesquerie, offers a happier picture of childhood. The boy in it is growing up. He thinks a little about things — he dreams vividly about them. Suddenly, without warning, he is in a new world, a new life. Then he dreams again. He is someone else entirely. And steadily, he starts to learn that other people have reasons for doing the things they choose to do. They are not all mysteries. This brings him satisfaction.
The products of envy bring our protagonist happiness in ‘My Purple Scented Novel.’ He begins to feel, as he commits his crime of envy, his great theft, that he is being truly creative. In doing ill, he attains his own higher hope. And for him, that’s all there is to know. It’s worth it. It’s all worth it — in the end.