Ian McEwan sounds like a nice man
Stop reading if you’ve heard this before. In 1999 I sent myself to Melbourne to watch the Australian Open and discovered that the city was teeming with independent bookstores. New books, used books, out-of-print books, old periodicals. Shops were closed on Sundays—shopkeepers allowed to have lives, what a strange concept—but there was this cafe that had a library.
While having a latte, I picked up Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. Never read him before. Tranquil beginning. A man and a woman are having a picnic in an open field. There’s champagne. He’s going to propose to her. Then there’s a shout and suddenly the man is running. Four other men join him from other parts of the field. They’re running towards a big hot air balloon. In its basket is a boy, wailing. A man is clinging to the basket by a rope. A great gust of wind picks up the balloon. The men grab the lines to keep balloon and boy from floating away. The wind lifts them all up.
Two lattes later, I was an Ian McEwan fan. I had to go back to the hotel and pack, so I tried to buy the book but it wasn’t for sale. It wasn’t till I landed in Singapore airport the next day that I was able to buy some Ian McEwan books. (Enduring Love was the most thrilling part of the trip. The top seeds fell in the first week of the Open and the big story was Enqvist making it to the final. Kafelnikov won. Swedes dressed as Vikings roamed the bars and broke bottles on their heads. I saw Seles beat Graf easily. Hingis the winner said Mauresmo “played like a man”.)
Personally I classify McEwan’s books into Nasty and Nice. Nasty—terrible things happen, no one is saved, nearly everyone’s a shit. Nice—terrible things happen, but if people aren’t saved exactly, there’s an attempt at redemption and sympathy for the characters.
Nasty: First Love, Last Rites, In Between The Sheets, Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Amsterdam, Black Dogs, The Innocent
Nice: Enduring Love, Saturday, Atonement, On Chesil Beach, The Child In Time
Nasty or nice, all his books are leavened with dread.
There’s a movie version of Enduring Love directed by Roger Michell and starring Daniel Craig, Samantha Morton, Rhys Ifans. Craig gets the character but is too sculpted to be a teacher. The balloon sequence is done well; the stalking of Craig by Ifans is occasionally risible. Ifans might’ve been more menacing if I hadn’t just seen him as the daffy roommate in Notting Hill, also by Michell.
Daniel Zalewski profiles Ian McEwan in the New Yorker. For someone who specializes in dread and unease, he sounds like a nice man. Thanks to Budj for the link.
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March 10th, 2009 at 02:28
The only book I had of him is “Atonement”, which I bought in 2002. I had never heard of him also. And I have to admit, I only bought the book because of a faded sepia picture of a sad-looking girl sitting barefoot on a step of probably the outside of her house. Of course I also read the back of the book, which made the picture in the front cover even more interesting.
One should never really buy a book because of its covers. I was lucky it was Ian McEwan. Sadly, back in 2002 there was only National Bookstore where I grew up. And they wrapped their books in plastic acetate.
March 10th, 2009 at 14:50
I remember reading the balloon scene in Enduring Love and thought it was gracefully written, like he poured every ounce that he had in creating a memorable beginning for the novel.
I’ve read quite a few of his books, and will continue to do so, but I personally think that sometimes he can be a bit like a genre novelist (you know, full of suspenseful moments and the requisite twist at the end), just with an amazing vocabulary. Still, I always have a blast after finishing a McEwan novel, so I guess that’s what matters.
Funny that you grouped his books into Nasty and Nice, because his Nice novels (except for The Child in Time) were written during the later part of his career. So I guess age and experience have made him more of an optimistic man, huh…