The Fiction of Ian McEwan

M. Hutton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781403919083
• eBook ISBN: 9781350309104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most established, and controversial, writers. This book introduces students to a range of critical approaches to McEwan's fiction. Criticism is drawn from selections in academic essays and articles, and reviews in newspapers, journals, magazines and websites, with editorial comment providing context, drawing attention to key points and identifying differences in critical perspectives. The book features selections from published interviews with Ian McEwan and covers all of the writer's novels to date, including his latest novel Saturday.

CHAPTER ONE

The Fleshly Grail: First Love, Last Rites (1975)

As well as winning him the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award, Ian McEwan’s short stories in First Love, Last Rites earned him the reputation of a macabre writer of ‘literature of shock’; this was not least because the title itself plays menacingly on the famous 1860 autobiographical story by Turgenev (1818–83), ‘First Love’ (Pervaya lyubov).¹ Yet several reviewers were also able to discern the importance of the author’s style and humour. On its publication in the summer of 1975, First Love, Last Rites was enthusiastically received by John Mellors in the London Magazine as ‘a brilliant and devastating début’ because of its blend of comedy and perversity, its paradoxically absurd yet logical plots, and its style, observation and grotesque detail.² In the New York Review of Books, Robert Towers went further when he reviewed McEwan’s work up to 1979, by concluding that over the previous thirty years, First Love, Last Rites was perhaps the most ‘brilliantly perverse’ and ‘sinister’ short-story collection to emerge from England.³

Generally, reviews of this first book were positive but focused on the sensational and sexual aspects of the stories. McEwan himself has said that he was taken aback by the extreme reactions to his work in some, perhaps most, quarters. John Haffenden discussed this with him in interview:

[John Haffenden:] You are on record as saying that you were surprised when critics chose to emphasize the shocking and the macabre aspects of your early stories, their concern with degenerate or dislocated behaviour.

[Ian McEwan:] I honestly was very surprised. My friends, most of whom had had a literary education, seemed to take for granted the field of play in the stories; they had read Burroughs, Céline, Genet and Kafka [William Burroughs (1914–97), American novelist; Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), French novelist; Jean Genet (1910–86), French novelist and dramatist; and Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Austro-Czech novelist], so that lurid physical detail and a sense of cold dissociation did not stun them. I was not aware of any pattern, and each story seemed to me at the time of writing to be a fresh departure, often with very trivial rhetorical ambitions like writing a story in the present tense (‘Last Day of Summer’). They often proceeded out of doodles that had a certain kind of automatic quality.

I was quite surprised, for example, when the BBC banned ‘Solid Geometry’ [days before it was due to be filmed in March 1979], but then TV is so safe and dull. It doesn’t put on anything funny about sex. I’ve never seen good sexual jokes on TV.⁴

What was the especial significance for you of the bottled penis that figures in ‘Solid Geometry’?

On the most basic level it was playful, to show a man working on his great-grandfather’s diaries with a preserved penis on his desk. It had to be an erect penis, because that’s apparently how they’re preserved. By extension, the fact that he won’t make love to his wife suggests that his own penis is bottled up, as it were, and it provides her with a splendid opportunity (which would have been great fun to do) to bust it open: it’s an appropriation, since she quite reasonably wants his cock. But once the penis is out of the jar he goes and buries it and carries on with his work. There’s no stopping him. […]

Was ‘First Love, Last Rites’ in any way written as an allegory of your own experience? It is perhaps your most heavily symbolic story; it’s about a relationship and a pregnancy, and it includes fishing for eels, which you have at some time done.

Oddly enough I had no sense of its symbols when I was writing it, none at all. I certainly wasn’t inserting symbols into the story. I was remembering and changing certain events in my own life. I think the story is about pregnancy. The narrator has a sure sense of the girl’s power as she kneels by a dead rat. I’ve always thought it was an affirmative and tender story, as I do ‘In Between the Sheets’, and that was part of the source of my astonishment at the sensational copy reviewers made out of the stories. Reviewers seemed to be fixated by things that weren’t central.

I agree with you there: ‘First Love, Last Rites’ seems to me to concern the characters purging themselves of false images of an as yet unsatisfactory relationship. Whatever is macabre in the story works towards a positive resolution.

I also had a simple-silly desire to end the story with the word ‘Yes’. I was dazzled by the end of Ulysses [1922, by James Joyce]. My problem was how to get to this ‘Yes’. The problem almost preceded the content, and when you concentrate on that sort of trivial puzzle you find yourself drawing quite freely and unconsciously on surprising material: you come upon an eel in a bucket and it’s not a symbol – it’s a memory. When the eel is set free, I was not thinking of it as a thinly disguised phallus, nor did I think of eel traps as vaginas. One doesn’t think about symbols, though there comes a time when one can’t deny that they are there.

But another story. ‘Butterflies’, concerns a man abusing and finally killing a child, and that is an appalling subject.

Yes, ‘Butterflies’ is appalling; it’s a story written by someone who had nothing to do with children. I couldn’t possibly write that story now, it would frighten me too much. As children come more into your life the possibility of their death is not something you can play with lightly.

(John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 1985)⁵

In an earlier interview, with one of his mentors, the poet, critic, editor and biographer Ian Hamilton (1938–2001), McEwan described the influences on the stories in First Love, Last Rites and the importance of pastiche to his early approach to writing.

[Ian Hamilton:] ‘Solid Geometry’ was … very ingeniously put together, rather more planned out than some of your other stories of the same period.

I suppose it’s the most anecdotal. It had different sources. I’d been reading Bertrand Russell’s diaries, which had just come out in paperback and I suddenly wished that I had a grandfather or a great-grandfather who had been as interesting or as literate, who had written about his own life in the way that Bertrand Russell [1872–1970] had – those were the origins of the narrator obsessed by his great-grandfather’s diaries. I had had some lengthy and fascinating conversations with an Argentinian mathematician. I also wanted to write about the kind of people I’d gone to Afghanistan with [in 1972]. So I wrote in a woman, or a girl, in that world, a kind of hippy girl. The narrator is rather a nasty person, cold, sexless, self-obsessed and yet the girl he has married, whatever her warmth and obvious sexuality, is sadly self-deceiving. The story is really about the kind of confusions I felt about where I stood. I was coming down from being someone who’d spent long months in that girl’s world and yet I had some wistful nostalgia for it too.

Did you have any view of the ‘kind of story’ you wanted to write, in the way that poets often have very defined ideas about the kind of poem that’s ‘needed’ at a given time?

No, I don’t think I ever had any really clear concept of what I was up to. I think I had an idea that each story I wrote was a kind of pastiche of a certain style and even if after a page or two into the story I began to take it seriously, its origins were always slightly parodic.

Of what, what sort of thing?

Either a particular writer or a particular style. ‘Homemade’ when I started it was, I thought, an elaborate send-up of Henry Miller [1891–1980]. But then I got into it and felt that this was at least going to be an amusing story. But still by the time I finished it I still felt it was about the absurdities of adolescent male dignity.

The narrator in ‘Homemade’ is looking back on his first sexual experience. How old is he now, at the time of telling the story?

Well, I suppose he’s meant to be a sort of Henry Miller-ish age, a wizened sixty. It’s really about sexual aggrandisement. I mean, I had noticed that people, men especially, when they recount episodes of sexual failure, are frequently indulging in a kind of self-regard – in other words, so successful they can afford to admit failure. And I wanted to write a story about total sexual failure. I know it’s fairly common for writers to write ‘my first fuck’ stories but I wanted to write a first fuck story where the actual fuck would be abysmally useless and yet its narrator would foolishly still derive huge satisfaction from it. The bleak satisfaction being simply that he’d got his cock into a cunt and come.

The narrator, though, has in the fullness of time become a rather poised, knowing man of the world.

Yes, that poise is integral to the self-regard I mentioned. I suppose the tone came mostly from Miller and a little bit from [Norman] Mailer [born 1923], both of whom I enjoyed but thought were totally bogus, and I wanted to send them up.

What other stories started as pastiche?

Well, I very much admired The Collector [1963, by John Fowles, born 1926]. I still do, I think it’s Fowles’s best book. In ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’ I wanted to do the kind of voice of the man in The Collector : that kind of wheedling, self-pitying lower middle-class voice. That was the starting point for the story. What tended to come out in the end was some mixture of what I’d read and my own experience. It was just that at that stage I was a bit of a counter-pointer and material from my own life didn’t suggest itself immediately. Pastiche seemed a short cut, the line of least resistance.

(Ian Hamilton, ‘Points of Departure’, 1978)⁶

The writers that McEwan mentions here – Miller, Mailer, Fowles – might suggest two qualities of the early stories, each of which is discussed in one of the two extracts that follow. On the one hand, these are writers deeply concerned with masculinity and sexuality; authors who have been considered at times ‘masculinist’ or ‘macho’ in their stances. McEwan’s debt to them is therefore interesting in his own presentation of male rites of passage, but also in the degree to which his pastiches differ from the source material. Kiernan Ryan, in his book on McEwan, discusses the presentation in First Love, Last Rites of the fragility of masculine identity in the pre-teenage years:

The passing childhood of ‘Last Day of Summer’ […] is suffused with an eerie sadness and overshadowed by the deaths with which the narrative concludes. The opening sentence immerses us at once in the mentality of the juvenile narrator: ‘I am twelve and lying near-naked on my belly out on the back lawn in the sun when for the first time I hear her laugh’ (p. 41). The sustained present tense simulates the artless idiom of the boy, creating a poignant tension between the limits of his language and the momentous events whose implications he intuitively apprehends […] ‘Last Day of Summer’ draws its power from leaving its narrative unplaced and replete with unforced significance. […]

‘Last Day of Summer’ is a parable about the cruel cost of turning into a man. Becoming masculine means a murderous denial of the dependency and need for intimacy evoked by the mother and the female body. Learning to fear the feminine and deep-freeze the emotions is a condition of fashioning the kind of adult male identity most cultures promote. But the self forged by this act of repression is fragile, and constantly assailed by insurgent drives to restore the very state masculinity must repudiate. In ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’ we meet the first of McEwan’s many studies in infantile regression, as our interlocutor recounts the events which warped him into a reclusive freak curled up in his womb-like wardrobe. It is the hidden emotional history of many men, grotesquely caricatured as the confession of a madman. Until he is seventeen his widowed mother forces her only child to remain a baby, making him sleep in a crib, tying a bib round his neck, leaving him helpless and retarded: ‘I could hardly move without her, and she loved it, the bitch’ (p. 76) But his mother’s remarriage terminates his childhood overnight and tosses him out into the cold to fend for himself as a man. The upshot is a volatile mixture of loathing for his mother, from whose oppressive nurture he was so cruelly divorced, and a consuming hunger to return to that blissful state of coddled impotence recovered in the cupboard: ‘I don’t want to be free. That’s why I envy these babies I see in the street being bundled and carried about by their mothers. I want to be one of them. Why can’t it be me?’ (p. 87)

The frailty of masculine identity is also the subject of the last story in the collection, ‘Disguises’. Like ‘Homemade’, this story revolves round the sexual abuse of a child, but in this case the victim is a ten-year-old schoolboy called Henry and the predator is his flamboyant aunt Mina – a thespian paedophile with a taste for transvestism. After his mother’s death, Mina becomes what she calls ‘a Real Mother’ (p. 100) to her orphaned nephew, who is at first enchanted by her eccentric theatricality and her fantastic dressing-up games. But their relationship takes a sickening turn when Mina forces him to dress as a sweet little girl in party frock and wig, while she molests him in the uniformed guise of a dashing, drunken officer. As Mina presses the boy’s face ‘against the faintly scented corrugated skin of her limp old dugs’, which ‘appear grey and blue the way he imagined a dead person’s face’ (p. 116), his mind glimpses in the repulsive flesh of his surrogate mother the corpse of the mother he has lost.

Through the love of his schoolfriend Linda, however, Henry learns to translate the oppression of his costume into a source of pleasure and a refuge from guilt. His masculine shell dissolves and he becomes ‘invisible inside this girl’ (p. 114), blissfully released from the burden of identity and hence from the blame that a fixed self incurs: ‘all disguised and no one knows who you are, anyone can do what they want because it doesn’t matter (pp. 117–18). The horror of letting go is coupled with a dionysic delight in the effacement of borders and the violation of deep-seated taboos. The confounding of sexual difference and the suspension of liability are as enticing as they are frightening, and McEwan taps straight into our aptness to be torn by both emotions.

(Kiernan Ryan, Ian McEwan, 1994)⁷

McEwan’s representation of masculinity in ‘Disguises’ arguably parodies its presentation in the first story, ‘Homemade’, with its influences from Mailer and Miller. The concern with masculinity is one notable aspect of McEwan’s literary role models for the stories, but on the other hand a se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on References and Quotations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Fleshly Grail: First Love, Last Rites (1975)
• Chapter Two: Underworld: In Between the Sheets (1978)
• Chapter Three: A Lovely Sleep: The Cement Garden (1978)
• Chapter Four: The Desire to be a Victim: The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• Chapter Five: True Maturity: The Child in Time (1987)
• Chapter Six: No Different From You: The Innocent (1990)
• Chapter Seven: Ça Suffit: Black Dogs (1992)
• Chapter Eight: Rationality Is Its Own Kind of Innocence: Enduring Love (1997)
• Chapter Nine: Their Reasonable Laws: Amsterdam (1998)
• Chapter Ten: Storytelling as Self-justification: Atonement (2001)
• Conclusion: And Now, What Days Are These?: Saturday (2005)
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index