Ian McEwan

That's sort of the point.

I remember being really gripped by the opening of Enduring Love, but thought the rest of the book had a hard time living up to it.

There's already a McEwan thread, but I've rattled on about Atonement too much before to start again. Unless a certain poster wants me to paste the juicy bits from our subsequent (highly rewarding) email correspondence about the novel's reader-psychology aspects here?

Total whore.

I searched and only found a "Child in Time" ILE thread.

Definitively middlebrow.

A panderer.

Shocking waste of talent.

A Child in Time and Black Dogs are the best of the early books. Lots of the pre-Atonement ones are marred by plot contrivances and outrageous coincidences.

he's really good at capturing the nuances of middle-aged/senescent het coupling.

Black Dogs was good. What's the one about the brother and the sister, The Cement Garden? That one was short and menacing.

Atonement is tremendously artful; Saturday I think has power though some intelligent people detest it. The Child In Time is pretty all over the place.

Atonement, Saturday, The Cement Garden, On Chesil Beach--fantastic.

Amsterdam--OK but not brilliant.

After the fantastic opening section Atonement makes me see why some people dislike McEwan so much. It captures the character of the protaganist so perfectly, then chooses to throw that away. The Cement Garden and Black Dogs are the ones I really enjoyed - they're concise and atmospheric. Some of the short stories are pretty nice too. I guess I'd probably get on well with the new one, but the idea behind it doesn't appeal to me much at all.

the child in time

I've seen McEwan criticised as a neo-con. Does anyone know what this is based on? Has he published any controversial journalism or anything? If it's only because of Saturday, it's a bit unfair. Whatever the book's defects as a novel, I think it's a pretty good exploration of what is obviously a complicated political issue.

He wrote a fair few articles in the Guardian--search the archives at http://books.guardian.co.uk/ and you should turn it up. From memory it wasn't neo-con stuff, just the work of someone trying to get to grips with it all (much as in 'Saturday'). I may be misremembering, of course.

<>SPOILERS<>
I just read On Chesil Beach. I did enjoy it, except the ending. Was there some allusion to sexual abuse by Florence's father? The wikipedia entry for the book seems to think so.

OCB is much better than Solar.

I seem to have liked Solar more than most folk did. Not his best, perhaps, but a very enjoyable read.

Oh, it's quite enjoyable, but not very good ultimately. That Alaskan interlude was a distraction – symptomatic of the stop-start narrative.

Saturday differs from his other books in the sense that there's a more subtle use of shock effects he used in earlier books. The tension is built really slow, where in other books it's so explicitly described it becomes a sort of trick (at least to me). On Chesil Beach is good too, but not as good as Saturday.

What I liked about Solar is that McEwan's own personality comes though in a way that it doesn't in (for example) the more fastidious, controlled, COB. And I found myself really warming to him. He has an acutely sensitive bullshit detector, but it hasn't turned him misanthropic and he doesn't place it in the service of any partisan loopiness. He's thoroughly sane and strives hard for objectivity without being coldly detached - in fact he has unusual empathy for a writer with such a fundamentally rational temperament. (This obviously jarred with some critics who seem to want characters with social views they don't like painted with fewer redeeming features and then beaten hard and beaten long.)

I'm not claiming this obviates the failures of structure and tone. I'd agree McEwan hasn't the lightness of touch (as yet, anyway) to bring off this kind of elaborately plotted comedy and intermittent farce. But maybe we nitpick too much about that sort of thing. I was entertained, I was made to think a bit more about some important stuff, I liked the author more by the end of the book than I did at the start. That's more than I've got out of dozens of "better" novels.

EvR there's some discussion of Saturday elsewhere on the site if you're interested in hunting it down.

"I found myself really warming to him" & "coldly detached" are v. funny puns considering the scientific theme of Solar. well done.

No pun intended, honestly.

Ha, rereading that I'd just like to clarify that when I say "maybe we nitpick" I say "we" because I know I'm guilty of this kind of literary nitpicking myself. I hate the increasingly common use of "we" to mean something like "other people less clever than me". As in "we stupidly believe we can print money without any effect on inflation".

I watched the film adaptation of Enduring Love for the first time in a while last night. I studied the book for AS Level English Lit and developed a bit of soft spot for it. So, exam question stylee; consider the role that food plays in the film. There's the picnic at the beginning, the meal at Bill Nighy's house while Joe recounts the balloon incident, Jed piling his plate and sucking on a watermelon after the scene at the swimming pool, Joe eating lunch with a colleague and then spotting Jed spying on him, Joe's birthday meal, and the picnic at the end. Obviously the picnic at the beginning is central to the plot, and I can't remember if there's that much mention of food in the rest of the novel to be honest, but it struck me as a conscious effort from the filmakers to cram in as many opportunities for the characters to eat as possible. Unless I'm overanalysing this and the characters were just hungry!

so, Sweet Tooth?
anyone?

A biiiiig disappointment, sadly. His worst since Amsterdam.

Wow, worse than Saturday? Really?

It took a lot to knock Solar off the worst list.

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