"The Child In Time" by Ian McEwan (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

Having said that, McEwan isn't too rubbish, just a bit crap. It depends on whether you like litarature that makes you feel uncomfortable (which I do when I'm feeling grumpily masochistic) and that displays absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever (which is a masseev dud as far as I'm concerned).

Ecch just read Iain Banks instead.

I'm not sure I'm remembering this book entirely accurately, but as I recall it's fairly boring, then Ian Gillan starts screaming annoyingly.

I think the "humorlessness" attack is a fair one (but it is about a man who loses his four year old daughter to a kidnapper and watches his marriage and life dissolve so you can't expect it to have Sergio Argones cartoons in the margin) - but the "satire" of midlevel gov't papershuffling does slow things down a bit.

the part where he loses his daughter -just the scene in the supermarket - I thought was incredibly well done though. The worst feeling when a personal catastrophe strikes is feeling the rest of the world moving on around you, and I think he conveys that feeling of being shut out by grief pretty well.

But otherwise a good read!!!!!!!!!!

Read some Freud: sucking on the bottle when he's watching TV etc, classic oral fixation stuff. If that's what you mean by psychological.

Just read (and loved) Atonement, but having finished I realised that the novel had a great deal to do with 'writing and the unconscious', and even whilst reading it I had noticed a very strong connection with Freud's writing. Parapraxes, suggestions and masked sensuality all figure largely in the novel. In fact, the greatest psychological stunts are pulled on the reader themselves; invited to write the story before it is completed, they do so in more or less the manner McEwan had planned. I could say more, mostly about how one of the characters was pitched perfectly to snare my unconscious (the moments of truth being an unwitting parapraxis I wish I had committed and an unfulfilled stage of life), but also about Freudian imagery in another character's illegal lusting, but I must interrupt my analytical progress with the simple heartfelt statement that the book moved me more than most others. Plus, the final couple of pages bring the very nature of fiction itself into debate (and, conversely, upon reflection soften the very blow they inflict).

I'd reservations about Atonement at first because the meta-games bothered me and I intensely disliked Amsterdam. Having plowed through almost all his other novels (he can "do" eroticism better than most), I've warmed considerably to it.

he can "do" eroticism better than most

i mean, that love-scene is OMG, and i was already reading the novel 'as' the involved male character (deliberately constructed to ensnare my sort of reader, an ideal, if you will, of a certain human type, made perfect by his glorious outpouring and propicious error, an error any young, literate male worth his salt would have dreamed of making).

I also think you can detect quite easily the fraudulence (within the narrator's reality) of that 'everything's alright again' scene, which alleviates tension only to be crushed (alongside the 'atonement') at the last. As I say, though, that crushing, that unreliability of fiction, absolves itself from its body-blow to our sympathetic consciousness.

*propitious

OH FUCK

i found out today that Atonement is being HOLLYWOODISED and is in fact coming out IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS

worse, KEIRA KNIGHTLEY IS PLAYING THE FEMALE LOVE-INTEREST

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH THIS HAS ALREADY RUINED THE MOVIE FOR ME; in the book she's meant to be a pretty but not obviously 'stunning' (and fairly intelligent) English graduate ffs. KEIRA KNIGHTLEY CANNOT AND WILL NOT PULL THAT OFF. she can't even fucking pull off an airheaded bimbo!

as for the book's nuances, the unreliable narrator, the building tension, the use of unconscious persuasion, THIS WILL ALL GET NEGLECTED. the war-scenes will be done as action-movie rather than quasi-psychotic, selfish, mechanical trudge to the goal of freedom, and the 'old lady' bit will be like Titanic II. she'll probably even die at the end for crying out loud.

i'm going to watch this, and then i'm going to write a damning, damning review. ooh, i'm gonna hate it.

as long as they wring as much pathos as possible from the 'man leads children back to safety, gets bundled in police car' scene, however, i'll cut them a teensy bit of slack

still thoroughly unanticipating. this will be a travesty. blurb from the times: "...the rivalry between Bryony and Cecilia, who are both in love with the same man..."

GET ONE CLUE FFS, either that or read the fucking novel.

the problem with this is that it was an A-level set text, therefore it'll have received SO MUCH bogus criticism. Yeah, most readers will have reacted in the right emotional ways. This is because McEwan SIGNPOSTS his emotional manipulations; if you've got an ounce of gumption, you'll SEE what he's doing, and try to second-guess it. The book's genius is that ultimately you can't, then at the end you realise what's happened, you go back, and you understand that McEwan has just played a beautiful joke on you.

Also, the Freudian politics of the novel apply FAR MORE to the reader than to the characters. This I regard as another example of McEwan's craftiness. When I worked out precisely HOW I'd been so emotionally duped, HOW he'd gotten me to hate Bryony so much, HOW little emotional currency the 'romance' really ought to have had, the pair having been together half an hour, and thenceforth HOW he'd let us invest so much hope in two non-existent people, I was doubly impressed at what emerged as pretty much a meta-study of the novelistic process.

(the keystone, btw: aside from the convincing, erotically-charged characters, the fact that their sexual act is never consummated until we assume (but never quite SEE) that it happens right near the end. the unfinished coitus hangs in our mind like a bad itch throughout a good half of the book.)

My favourite bits of Atonement (which I still think is a brilliant book) are the bits are the beginning, pre-calamity, where the main character, the little girl, is just thinking, looking at her hand and wondering how she makes it move, stuff like that.

i wdn't second-guess it, lou. i don't really know how they'd pull off the big conceit -- you can't really turn the camera round in the last few reels and go 'lol i was just messin' like in the book... or could you?

i don't get kk haters.

They could zoom out to reveal the editing studio, and then in fast-motion rewind show the entire 'reunion' scene getting deleted, so that it never happened, but it DID happen, because it was in the FILM, but it didn't happen in REALITY. That's how I'd play it. Mess about with cinema. Show the older Bryony in the editing studio, telling them what to cut. Heighten the paradox. Reveal the magic of fiction.

Anyway, like I said, the 'reunion' scene is actually written in such a way that you can almost tell it's 'fake' within the book's context. Everything is so...artificial, so 'typical'. I highly doubt they'll film it like that (although I'll be impressed if they do). A yellow colour-filter to add a certain woozy sheen would be a good start.

in summary: this should have been adapted by charlie kaufman, and filmed by paul greengrass richard linklater.

de palma

Also, despite my initial outpourings, I don't actually think Knightley will be the worst thing about this adaptation. That honour will fall squarely upon the directors (and whoever wrote the screenplay).

Well I shared many of LJ's misgivings, but really really really like what they've done with the ending. The casting, KK and all, works for me, especially Romola Garai.

Do they do something similar to what I said? :D

Kinda - but I won't say more because : a) no spoilers and b) they might have changed it, as it was still in production when I saw it. The latter's v. unlikely though.

daer christopher priest,

you are wrong,

and altho i cannot post on the atonement thread because i haven't seen the movie yet,

i will still point out how totally totally wrong you are,

yours,

jgo

this seems to be more popular than the other Ian McEwan topic, so sure. So. The ending of Amsterdam. Are people with me in thinking it was utterly ridiculous and stupid, to the point that I'm assuming collective brain tumours on the part of McEwan, the Booker Prize panel, and anyone else who didn't think so? Being kinda signposted (but not really very much) and very vaguely built towards (but not nearly enough) doesn't make it less ridiculous, right?

I couldn't be more with you tbh

all his endings are kinda dumm iirc? well maybe not chesil beach.

some are decent (the really early novels plus, yes, chesil beach) some are kind of dumb and some are completely fucking stupid.

The Child In Time itself is one of the better ones

I thought I was basically okay with his endings after not thinking much either way of the end of Enduring Love, liking the end of Chesil Beach, and kind of resenting the end of Atonement for being so cheap but annoyingly effective, but this, eesh. I thought it had already taken a turn for the silly and implausible with SPOILER Clive's spiking of the drink SPOILER, but he sure showed me silly and implausible.