As with most intense relationships I can remember where and when I’ve encountered Ian McEwan’swork. Amsterdam, a park in Bournemouth, summer 2005. The Comfort of Strangers, Mile End, spring 2006. Enduring Love, my parent’s house, Boxing Day 2006. On Chesil Beach, on a plane between Gatwick and Guernsey, spring 2007.
During his career two clichés have been attached to McEwan’s work. First, all his plots turn on one traumatic event that upsets the comfortable, middle class lives of his characters. Secondly, his work is marked by a dark taste for the macabre.
The first cliché seems to miss the point of Ian McEwan. McEwan is a chronicler of middle class life. Almost all of his books focus on middle class, English life. The interest comes from what happensafter that life is disturbed, be it through a missing child, a ballooning accident or a simple miscommunication. While the event which sets the plot in motion is often shockingly memorable, it is the rest of the story that matters: how the characters rationalise and respond to the incident.
The second accusation - that McEwan has a marked taste for the macabre - is perhaps closer to the mark. Certainly McEwan’s early writing is frequently disturbing. Events during The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers are profoundly unsettling. However, during his career McEwan has refined this sense of darkness, using it more sparingly, so that it now serves as an icy rapier to tear through the façade protecting middle class lives.
What makes McEwan’s writing particularly captivating for me is his depiction of place and his sharp character observations. The walk through the country in Amsterdam, or the cooking of dinner inSaturday are so vivid you feel you could have experienced them yourself. The panic when a child is lost in A Child in Time is tangible, while slow collapse of a relationship in On Chesil Beach is agony to read.
McEwan has a deft understanding of English life and that is perhaps why his work tends to fix itself in your mind.
