Contemporary British Novelistsoffers readers critical introductions to some of the most exciting and challenging writing of recent years. Through detailed analysis of their work, volumes in the series present lucid interpretations of authors who have sought to capture the sensibilities of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Informed, but not dominated, by critical theory,Contemporary British Novelistsexplores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction, and situates key figures within their relevant social, political, artistic and historical contexts.

The title of the series is deliberately provocative, recognising each of the three defining elements as contentious...

Writing about contemporary literature is a hazardous business for a variety of reasons, most of which stem from the speculative nature of this branch of criticism. Without the benefit of hindsight, the critic is drawn to make judgements about the worth of a writer, and to posit ideas about his/her place in literary history. Both elements of this critical process are vulnerable: judgements are often made in the absence of consensus; and the related business of tentatively articulating an emergent literary history might construct, for posterity, an anachronistic understanding of literature’s importance.

In the case of Ian McEwan, his current...

McEwan’s first three books made him notorious, as the author of unpleasant – or challenging – shorter fictions (depending on your point of view), which were preoccupied with violence and deviant sexuality. This ‘literature of shock’ is at its most prominent in his two short story collections,First Love, Last RitesandIn Between the Sheets, as well as in his first novelThe Cement Garden. Various kinds of brutality and dysfunctional behaviour – including incest, murder and paedophilia – feature in these narratives. The visceral element of McEwan’s earliest work (which continues inThe Comfort of Strangersand also...

The Comfort of Strangers, McEwan’s second longer work of fiction, is an enactment of the inner lack that results when individuals adopt value systems or codes by which to live, having paid little heed to their own desires and needs. Simultaneously, it addresses the problematic relationship between values, ideas and literature. The novella is profitably considered alongside the screenplay for the filmThe Imitation Game: together these pieces comprise a significant intellectual phase in McEwan’s work. The screenplay is an explicit attempt to address the impact of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s; but both works point to a cul-de-sac...

The Child in Timemarks a turning point in McEwan’s career: it was his first fiction to be clearly longer than novella length, and his first sustained attempt at a social novel, in which the private and the public are systematically intertwined. It is categorizable as a ‘Condition of England novel’ in some respects, with its projection of a fourth or fifth-term Thatcherite government becoming increasingly authoritarian;¹ yet McEwan produces a unique way of tracing the connections between the personal and the political, most notably through a poetic application of post-Einsteinian physics. This is a crucial moment in his career,...

In the next two novels, the private–public nexus is extended in different ways. Both works engage with international politics, and particularly with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. In this respect,The InnocentandBlack Dogs, taken together, represent a significant phase of political writing. At the same time, there is a retreat from the extraordinarily empathic treatment of the personal inThe Child in Time. This is understandable in the sense that the literary gesture that determines that effect – the timeslip, embedded in the context of the novel – is probably a once-in-a-career invention. There is...

The testing of scientific rationalism, a recurring theme in McEwan’s work, receives its fullest treatment inEnduring Love. The relationship between Joe Rose, a science journalist, and his wife Clarissa, an academic, is threatened by the obsessive and delusional attachment of Jed Parry to Joe. Parry’s condition, diagnosed by Joe and then in Appendix I as ‘de Clérambault’s syndrome’, leads him from stalking to extreme violence. The pun in the title, signalling both the love that lasts and the love that is suffered, encapsulates the human triangle at the story’s centre. Joe’s narrative, at one level, is a test of...

Appraisal ofAmsterdam, McEwan’s Booker Prize-winning novella, has been clouded by its perception as an inferior Booker winner: when an established writer is awarded a literary prize for a book that is not representative of his/her best work, there is the suspicion that the award is made for the author’s accumulated efforts, rather than for the book in question. McEwan had previously been short-listed, in 1981, forThe Comfort of Strangers, and again in 1992, forBlack Dogs. Enduring Love, however, did not make the shortlist in 1997.Amsterdam, produced in quick time for the following year’s Prize, raises the...

Prior toAtonement,The Child in Timewas McEwan’s most ambitious and, in one sense, most satisfying or perfectly formed novel; and his first work to present a positive view of human potential.Atonementis a still more ambitious work, and his greatest achievement to date. It was also very well received by reviewers. In the British press, there was high praise from Hermione Lee, Geoff Dyer, Robert Macfarlane and Frank Kermode who, in an important review, rated it ‘easily his finest’.¹ It is also the author’s most extended deliberation on the form of the novel, and the inherited tradition...

Saturdaygives a fresh perspective on what makes McEwan’s work unnerving or unsettling. There is always the temptation – fraught with risk – to construct a narrative about a writer’s oeuvre, in the light of each fresh addition.Saturday, however, serves to confirm a dynamic that is already clear with the publication of his previous novel,Atonement, a dynamic of giving offence that has changed its hue in an intriguing way. In 1983, McEwan suggested that the ‘unsettling’ nature of his work is not conscious: ‘it is all after the event. It turns out that what I’ve written is unsettling,...

IfSaturdaygrapples with new models of agency and responsibility, it still takes its place in a long-standing tradition in the English novel in which new discoveries in society at large are brought to bear upon experience. Moreover, this is a principle that characterizes all of McEwan’s work.

Judith Seaboyer has argued that as early asThe Comfort of StrangersMcEwan ‘begins a transition towards a traditional realism in which the private sphere is … mirrored in that of the public’, and which is a way of addressing broader social and political issues.’¹ A central aspect of this realism is...