Ian McEwan

If I were to write a straight-up review of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach that expressed my honest reaction to the book, I actually couldn't improve on Steven Augustine's review:

Ian McEwan is the gothic poet of British class anxiety. Over an arc of novels including The Innocent, Black Dog, Enduring Love, and Atonement, McEwan has polished a talent for giving his readers nasty and sometimes bloody surprises when the classes interact on too intimate a level. His most recent, On Chesil Beach, however, is both a perfect specimen of McEwan’s hardening suavity as a prose stylist and the latest example of an ongoing renunciation of his greater gift. As Saturday did before it, this novella-length book promises much, initially, but ends up being deeply unsatisfying before its conclusion. A necessary catharsis has been frustrated for the sake of a decorous treatise on the grim predestinies of class.

I would only add that I also found Atonement "deeply unsatisfying" by its conclusion and that Enduring Love was the last Ian McEwan novel I both enjoyed and could identify as an "Ian McEwan novel" as I had previously known them. The Cement Garden, The Child in Time, The Comfort of Strangers, and the stories in First Love, Last Rites were all chilling tales of innocence lost or corrupted. I remember the grotesqueries of First Love as especially disturbing when I initiallly read the book (my first McEwan) twenty-five years ago.
But Amsterdam, Atonement, Saturday, and now On Chesil Beach, all attempts (in my opinion) to broaden his appeal, to bring a little "warmth" to his work in response to criticism of the "forensic" iciness of his early books, only leave me out in the aesthetic cold. I'll take disturbing over "decorous" every time.

But I then think of John Updike's first rule of reviewing, which I paraphrased here as : "Judge [the book] according to standards appropriate to the sort of thing it is, not to the sort of thing you'd like it to be." McEwan has gone from writing gothic-tinged fables of disintegration to writing conventional psychological realism presented as slices-of-life. I like the first; I don't like the second. If McEwan has now become a more or less recognizable kind of hyper-realist (with now and then a sharp plot twist introduced to keep things moving), shouldn't this now be the standard by which he is judged? Ought not the question be whether his fiction is effective in its hyper-realism or not?

Perhaps. But there still ought to be room for saying that McEwan's early work was arresting and rather daring, completely unlike most British "literary fiction" that preceded it, and that his later work is predictable and often tedious, a pale imitation of the British modernists it seems to take as inspiration. And that the cutting precision of his early style has now become the limp, undistinguished prose of a writer cashing in on his newfound popularity and exploiting his previously-established critical reputation. And that the general aimlessness of On Chesil Beach in particular as anything other than a "treatise on the grim predestinies of class" in pre-60s England makes one wince at the thought of reading the next McEwan opus.

Thus not only do I think that McEwan's early, more innovative fiction is better than his later, more orthodox fiction, but I also don't find that these later books succeed on what could be identified as their own terms. Indeed, since I could not finish Saturday, I can only conclude that this book failed the most basic test any work of fiction shoud pass, that of maintaining my attention at all. I did manage to finish Amsterdam and Atonement, but it is nevertheless a telling measure of its lack of any distinguishing qualites that I now remember nothing at all about the former, and that, although I do remember most of the latter, this is largely because I was so struck by the thoroughgoing banality of its extended denouement.

On Chesil Beach does seem to return McEwan to the fabular form taken by his best work, but its narrative has none of the enlivening angularity of The Comfort of Strangers or Black Dog. It unfolds in a leisurely, unimaginatve (first let's introduce the characters, then let's go back and see how they got here), frequently eye-glazing pace, and takes us nowhere surprising. Indeed, it seems almost designed to reinforce the most banal stereotypes of both class and gender in pre-"Swinging London" Great Britain. Its own post-dramatic denoument, taken together with the sexual histrionics of its core narrative, serves to complete an allegorical tale that reveals mid-century English men and women to be, well, class conscious and sexually repressed. I don't think I ever realized that! The male protagonist's later, rueful conclusion that "Love and patience--if only he had had them both at once--would surely have seen them through" is insipid in the extreme.

Thematically, the only mildly interesting idea the novel communicates is the suggestion that, had the frigid female protagonist come of age during the sexually liberating period just a few years off, she might have been able to express her lack of sexual desire more freely, without so much of the accompanying guilt she does in fact feel. This is a provocatively contrarian notion, but it is mostly just a passing fancy, not a motif wound into the narrative and pursued with the steely-eyed vigor one finds in McEwan's fiction of the 80s and 90s. It's one of the various bits of allegorical meaning strewn about the text, and the reader, for all the energy and aesthetic ingenuity with which it's offered, can simply take it or leave it.

But I suppose readers unfamiliar with McEwan's early work, or who found it too disquieting or idiosyncratic, might read On Chesil Beach and find it a compelling enough portrait of an historical era, a relatively quick read with enough McEwanesque touches of trauma and unease to distinguish it from most other routine works of literary fiction. (And it is about sex, after all.) But my own formative reading experiences of Ian McEwan's fiction led me to expect much, much more (and something much different) from what we're getting at this later stage of his career. Perhaps others (including those print reviewers who gave On Chesil Beach such ecstatic praise) will continue to be satisfied with the tamer McEwan, but I'd still suggest they read First Love, Last Rites to understand what's missing.

Comments

[Nigel Beale]

Thanks for your McEwan post Dan. I've been musing about him lately...comparing him to Amis and Barnes. Here's a brief blurb on Amsterdam:

" Amsterdam is the only McEwen novel I’ve read so far... I found it a pleasant enough read. Worth the time. But only just. Although attention has clearly been paid to sentence and story, the book is a disappointment. It lacks meat, ambition; in total, a good, fun opening chapter, some clever dialogue, character description, and musings on friendship, mortality and morality, and an abrupt, hollow ending. Serious themes humorously dealt with throughout, falling sharply into incongruent farce that does the book a disservice. Huckleberry Finn suffers similarly.

Ironically, by imposing symmetrical structure on the novel McEwan undermines efforts to sketch ‘the perfect arc,’ truncating what could have been a much better, more significant read. Amsterdam represents the modest achievement of a modest objective. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge intentionally light fare with heavy standards. Better to blame the Booker for my bloated, unmet expectations.

Christopher Hitchens calls Saturday McEwan’s ‘most successful and daring novel.’ Atonement was voted number three (tied with Burgess’s Earthly Powers) on the Observer’s top 25 novels in the last 25 years. Number one on that list is J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. So, respecting the judgment of Hitch and the Observer’s panel of literary experts, I’ll read more, I won’t weigh McEwan’s worth on one book alone, I’ll report back. "

Judging from your post, if I don't want to waste time, I'm better off going back to his early stuff...

Must say that based on what I've read so far I think Amis much the better writer.

[Steven Augustine]

Oh dear. Did I write "Adam Greenspan"? Well, you know what I meant (I always think of "Adam Smith")....

[Steven Augustine]

"Saturday" always struck me as an extremely schematic exercise that may well have scored a technical achievement in the metaphor department (surgery as redemptive military incursion and so forth) but at a serious cost to the integrity of the narrative.

Baxter's actions, during the (anti)climax, become less natural the more McEwan requires of him to fit the intended schematic...the treacly family life (the author's failed experiment in writing interestingly about happiness) was bad enough...but the confrontation and aftermath are both ridiculous, and destroyed my willingness to suspend my growing disbelief. (Having said that, I suppose it can't hurt to keep a few poems lying about in case of a break-in...)

When the characters are bent so far to fit a rigid schematic, the work actually strikes me as "cold". And to what end? Clever as McEwan's metaphor-coding was in "Saturday", what did he end up saying about "The War" that we haven't already decided (or read in vigorous commentary, Left and Right) ourselves? Is McEwan somehow cleverer than Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky or Adam Greenspan on the topic? No. At best he's constructed a well-done-but-ill-conceived apologia for an ill-conceived military venture that looks less well-conceived every day.

I somehow doubt the book will age well.

[Rohan Maitzen]

I didn't like On Chesil Beach much either, but I found Saturday wholly engrossing. I went so far, in fact, as to assign it in one of my classes, and my appreciation for the integration of form and ideas in it grew as I worked on it more closely. It seems to me very much in the tradition of the 'condition of England' novel, which is appropriate given its framing allusions to 'Dover Beach.' Though overall I suppose 'realism' is the right way to categorize its genre, it has many 'fabular' elements, from the first encounter with Baxter that generates the plot (not, itself, all that realistic) to the elaborate working out of the squash game and then through to the wholly implausible climax--the implausibility of which, I thought, rather than ruining an attempt at straight realism, prompts us to re-think our realist assumptions about what has happened before in terms of the novel's exploration of scientific or rational vs. poetic/literary ways of understanding the world, etc. I found the early McEwan I read (not much, because I didn't like it) alienating, as it seemed to put a kind of intellectualized technical perfection above what (in slopppy shorthand) I'd call 'heart.' I guess my taste is just middlebrow!

[Jason Hyun]

I just reread your review of Haruf's PLAINSONG. Good reasoning there. Thank you. It's funny. Now, pulling it out of the new books shelf of my apartment, home from work sick, after I read the opening chapter ("Guthrie") again and remembering the book's design and I feel that the folksay narration and the structure makes the novel something else besides realism. But, perhaps that is the point: realist novels that are in some way innovative challenge the genre's predictability.

This is a question for me...

Again, thank you.

[Edward Yang]

Holy shazbot! You read First Love, Last Rites when it came out 25 years ago? I never would have guess you were that old. You're voice sounds like it's fresh out of grad school.

[Dan Green]

I just recently posted a discussion of Kent Haruf's Plainsong, a realist novel I did indeed think succeeded on its own terms. Check it out.

[Jason Hyun]

Dan:

Besides Stephen Dixon (who is a realist), is there a psychological or otherwise realist fiction writer who you think DOES succeed on his or her own terms even if you disagree with the aesthetic?

~Jason

[Steven Augustine]

Dan, thanks indeed for the generous attention. But if I agree with your overall post (and I do), it's not out of gratitude, it's because one of my favorite writers seems to have died a while back, yet books in his name keep popping up...to great acclaim!

"But there still ought to be room for saying that McEwan's early work was arresting and rather daring, completely unlike most British "literary fiction" that preceded it, and that his later work is predictable and often tedious, a pale imitation of the British modernists it seems to take as inspiration."

When I first read McEwan (The Innocent), I was amazed to find what felt like Updike's technical precision wedded to something like Paul Bowles's talent for cold horror. "Atonement" is just an Anthony Minghella film in comparison.

There's always hope that McEwan will tire of his new role as Articulator of the Middlebrow Heart and that his late phase will bring us spectacular work. Another nasty divorce should do the trick.