Ian McEwan

surprising.
the reviewas are poitive, and it got the highest rate for a McEwan book on Goodreads.com

It tries to do 2 very different things - spy novel and affectionate send-up of 1970s literary London - and fails at the first while not making much of the second. How someone who wrote 'The Innocent' could write such flaccid espionage stuff is quite surprising.

Just finished Sweet Tooth, couldn't quite believe the ending even though SIGNPOSTING, bc he's kind of revisiting old ground, right?

it's pretty weak--worst mcewan in a while

What's worse is, he KNOWS the era/scene he's sort of satirising intimately, but doesn't do anywhere near as much with it as he could have

Poor guy, getting taken down.

for his plotting i hope

Where?

Christopher Priest took him down a while ago on his blog, but surely that is not what is being referred to.

Two year old Chris Priest blog post for reference: http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/journal/2438/let-the-notebook-be-the-judge/

Priest just today was demonstrating the feebleness of the latest Mieville

I found SWEET TOOTH quite gripping!

McEwan has gone very HIGH CONCEPT, hasn't he? I mean especially with this latest NUTSHELL.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/30/nutshell-ian-mcewan-review-hamlet-foetus

Has he written anything good in the last decade?

On Chesil Beach was good, i thought. And i enjoyed Solar, while not being blind to its flaws.

OCB is my favorite, and I gave every novel a shot from Amsterdam onward and the '80s fiction too. I don't mind the contrivances so much as how the effort expended on their behalf contort the characters.

Anyone read "Machines Like Me"? I have the impression it could be interesting.

I read the short story it developed from, which was incredibly bad.

mcewan got slammed by the spec fiction community for thinking he was doing something new when the book's sf elements were actually a rewrite of frankenstein.

who cares about the sf community, i never really understood what was so interesting about science fiction. i think ian mcewan does write about something which is already there, artificial intelligence and sex robots exist. he just thinks a couple of years into the future. in the passage that i heard i had the feeling he managed quite well to put himself into the position of the machine, to think like a machine. this is a theme which will become incredibly important in the very near future. if you think about it, the smartphone is already the best friend of millions of people today.

As I said, read the short story. He does not successfully put himself into the position of anything other than a late middle-aged man who incorrectly thinks he's doing something new, and who is doing it very badly.

That's sort of what bugged me bout the end of Atonement, too. It's just the driest possible version of cheesy Twilight Zone/Philip K Dick twist ending, posing as [something something] postmodernism

He becomes a Companion of Honour.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/16/martin-amis-ian-mcewan-and-anna-wintour-honoured-in-kings-birthday-list