Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (156 page)

‘You’ve wet inside me,’ and she began to cry. Hardly noticing, I got up and started to get dressed. This may have been one of the most desolate couplings known to copulating mankind, involving lies, deceit, humiliation, incest, my partner falling asleep, my gnat’s orgasm and the sobbing which now filled the bedroom, but I was pleased with it.

McEwan is at pains (and one believes him) to record that his own childhood, though at times straitened, was straight. His fiction signally wasn’t. These early stories revel in rape, paedophilia, castration, bestiality and perversion – the sheets were very twisted. But all the reviewers lined up to agree, that whatever their disgust, a major new talent had arrived. He was, in literary terms, a made man. He followed up with two short novels (he habitually writes shorter than his peers),
The Cement Garden
(1978) and
The Comfort of Strangers
. The first is routinely compared to
Lord of the Flies
. Four suddenly orphaned children decide to live in a juvenile commune, without informing the adult world of their parents’ death. Bad things ensue (McEwan, following his own 1960s brush with it, has little time for the hippy life: it comes under his satirical lash again in
Enduring Love
).
The Comfort of Strangers
, set in an unnamed Venice (to avoid evocation of Thomas Mann, one suspects) is a study in decadent sexual sadism. An initially rather boring, and terminally bored, English tourist couple discover, to their alarm, the masochist within themselves.

Looking back, McEwan sees a break at the mid-1980s point in his career, away from ‘formally simple and linear short fiction, claustrophobic, desocialised, sexually strange, dark’. There followed a string of substantial and more ambitious works.
The Child in Time
(1987) opens with one of McEwan’s ‘powerful moments’. A man is walking through rush-hour London, by Millbank. He sees everything around him with crystal clarity – not because he is an artist but because he is looking for his (now) five-year-old daughter, abducted from a supermarket, two years previously.
The Innocent
(1990) contains another hammeringly powerful set-piece, the description of the dismemberment of the corpse of the hero’s lover’s earlier lover for packing up in a suitcase and clandestine disposal.
Black Dogs
(1992) offers elegant play with time schemes – the hounds of the title, as the last section of the narrative reveals – are emblematic of a Nazi evil that will never die.
Enduring Love
(1997) opens with a delicately poised mind-game: a helium balloon flies off its anchorage in the Chilterns; a child is marooned in its basket. A miscellaneous crew of men, who happen to be near by, grab the tie ropes. But their attempt to help sets up an ethical dilemma. If they hang on, they discover, they will all be pulled away to their death or injury. But who will break ranks and let go first, who will hold on, whatever the consequence? What binds us together in society, the novel implies, is love. But love, like everything else, has its breaking strain. It endures only so long.

The fine ‘set-pieces’ highlight one of the cruxes of McEwan’s fictional method. Is his long fiction merely the setting for inset short stories? Any such suspicion was put to rest by
Amsterdam
, the novel which won the 1998 Booker Prize. The plot centres on a suicide compact between two friends – one of whose mutual friends has died prematurely and degradingly. They agree to take the other to the Dutch city, where euthanasia is legal, should the trip prove necessary. They ‘fall out and lure each other to Amsterdam simultaneously for mutual murder’, as McEwan summarises the plot. He describes the novel as ‘comedy’. In fact,
Amsterdam
takes in large questions – about art (should one sacrifice everything for it) and about modern journalism (one of the pact-makers is the editor of a newspaper very like the
Guardian
). The shortest novel ever to win Britain’s premier fiction prize,
Amsterdam
is constructed with a watchmaker’s art.

His reputation went ‘nova’ – another way of saying he became very big in America – with
Atonement
(2001). The plot pivots on a wickedly perceptive child who grows up and becomes a prize-winning novelist – this McEwan sees the destiny of James’s Maisie had the other novelist followed it through. McEwan’s own father was recently dead and
Atonement
reconstructs the Dunkirk evacuation in which David McEwan was swept up. As Ian recalls:

Many ex-servicemen have found it difficult or impossible to talk about their experiences of war. My father never had any such problems. He never tired of telling me, a bored adolescent, and later, an attentive middle-aged son, how his legs were shot up by a machine gun mounted on a German tank; how he teamed up with a fellow who had been wounded in both arms, and how between them they had managed the controls of a motorbike to drive to the beaches of Dunkirk and eventual evacuation.

The story was profoundly uninteresting to the young McEwan, but fascinating as he himself entered late middle age.

Age is relevant elsewhere. One of the questions frequently posed by those who have followed his fiction is ‘Do you prefer the early or the late?’ His later work has evolved in various ways. It has become less jaggedly disturbing, whilst dealing with the same central issues. In
On Chesil Beach
(2007), the lives of a honeymooning couple are deformed by their 1960s unfamiliarity with the mechanics of sex. ‘Do not begin your marriage with a rape,’ warned Balzac. Don’t begin it with a sperm-showering fumble, advises McEwan. Along with the softening of edge is an enlargement of scope: in
Saturday
(2005) he takes on the Iraq War; in
Solar
(2010), global warming.

Reviewing McEwan’s life so far, a number of distinctive features emerge. One is the fluidity with which his fiction slips into celluloid. His hit rate, in big-screen
adaptation, is rivalled only by Stephen King’s. In a 1999 lawsuit brought by his former wife, an estimate of annual earnings of £500,000 were alleged. If true (it seems, on the face of it, untrue), much of that income must have come from film rights. He has turned his own hand to screenplays – notably, with Richard Eyre and
The Ploughman’s Lunch
(1985), a scathingly satirical ‘Condition of England’ film.

Another salient feature in his career is the way in which, despite what looks like a constitutional desire for privacy, headlines seem to seek him out. In the late 1990s, the press made much of a dispute between him and his divorced wife, Penny Allen (the dedicatee of his early work) over the custody of their now teenage children. The couple had married in 1982 and separated in1995. She had carried their children off to France, in defiance of an English court order. The row gave rise to surreal ruses, which would have seemed far-fetched in a novel (Ms Allen’s new partner renaming himself, for example, ‘Ian Russell McEwan’). McEwan maintained silence, other than to express grateful acknowledgement that his legal rights were finally observed. It must, one assumes, have been distraction verging, at its worst, on downright torment. In 1997 he married again, to Annalena McAfee, then literary editor of the
Guardian
, and the couple had moved from Oxford to Fitzrovia, North Soho, the closely charted setting of
Saturday
. Location has always been worth noting in McEwan’s fiction. One of his sons studying science at nearby UCL seems, plausibly, to have revived the novelist’s own fascination with the discipline in his later career – making him a favourite guest lecturer at such front-line institutions as MIT and Caltech.

In 2007 McEwan was less painfully in the headlines when the existence of a hitherto unknown brother was revealed. This elder son of his mother, then Rose Wort, had been ‘given away as an illegitimate child at a railway station in 1942’. She had become adulterously pregnant by another soldier (Ian’s father David, it transpired) while her first husband was serving abroad. He was subsequently killed in the Normandy landings, and Rose married Ian’s father, David, in 1947. It was wartime and such things happened. The child was adopted by a childless couple and Ian was kept in the dark for sixty years, as was his brother. It all came to light as Rose McEwan was dying of vascular dementia. The two brothers – one a bricklayer, the other Britain’s most applauded novelist – hit it off, McEwan records. Another headline squall was whipped up in 2006 when Julia Langdon, in the
Daily Mail
, pointed out resemblances between passages in
Atonement
and Lucilla Andrews’s memoir,
No Time For Romance
(a work cited by McEwan in his acknowledgements). He felt obliged to take over the front page of the
Guardian
to proclaim ‘I am not a Plagiarist’, which served to make it gossip for the whole world. A band of distinguished fellow novelists, including the notoriously secretive Thomas Pynchon, sprang to his defence. Not that he is incapable of defending himself.

What is interesting are the reverberations from these public squalls, which over-ingenuity can pick up in the fiction. Abduction in
The Child in Time
, for example, at a period when McEwan was exercised about the custody of his children.
Atonement
’s focus on Dunkirk, wartime love affairs, and the vascular dementia which finally kills Briony can be connected with the life. Intellectual theft is a main plank in
Solar
’s narrative and reviewers pounced on the ‘alleged plagiarism’ brouhaha of a few years earlier. One should not push such things too far, or any distance at all, but keyholes onto the lives of novelists are, sometimes, irresistible, however one hates oneself for peeking through them.

Our only way of experiencing the identity of others.
Richard Hughes on fiction
Osric.
Martin Amis’s nickname for himself

Even as he closed in on his bus-pass years – a date British newspapers gleefully commemorated – Martin Amis (‘young Marty’, in laddish journo-speak) was lumbered, like some wartime evacuee, with a worn-out French label for which,
hélas
, there is no sufficiently classy English equivalent:
enfant terrible
(‘Bad Boy’, as popularised by the German band Cascada, has a very different lexical tang). Precocious (never infantile) is the appropriate term. Everything came early: brilliant first at Oxford; assistant literary editor at the
Times Literary Supplement
at twenty-three; acclaimed first novel at twenty-four; the Somerset Maugham Prize, designated for the young novelist, was his by right at twenty-five. (The Booker, by contrast, has always been beyond his reach: probably he will be too young if he lives to a hundred.)

The
New Statesman
, where he was assistant literary editor, aged twenty-six, ran a competition, inviting readers to come up with something to rival in owlishness the recently published
Jane Austen and the French Revolution
(1979). ‘
Mein Kampf
, by Martin Amis’ won, sardonically. Amis’s first volume of autobiography came out in 2000. It was hard not to recall B. S. Johnson’s ironic: ‘Aren’t you Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?’ At the launch party for
Experience
, Amis’s editor predicted the book would still be read in 200 years’ time. He may be right: it’s very good. But
anyone reading
Experience
would be justified in assuming that the most important fact in Martin Amis’s life is Kingsley Amis. Picking up this cue, the first biography of Martin, in 2003 (again rather premature an event) is entitled:
Father and Son
.

There is, however, another novelist who briefly crosses the young meteor’s path in
Experience
– unmeteorically, it must be said. In 1963, as Martin’s parents’ marriage was breaking up – with traumatic impact, it seems clear, on their fourteen-year-old son – his mother had a nervous breakdown. During this difficult time, Elizabeth Jane Howard (with whom Kingsley was now living), intending kindness, introduced Martin to Alexander Mackendrick, a film director, with titles such as
The Ladykillers
and
Whisky Galore
to his credit. His current project was not an Ealing comedy, but a film version of Richard Hughes’s
A High Wind in Jamaica
(1965). Hughes’s novel had enjoyed a huge success on its publication in 1929 and interest in its adaptation had been reignited by the current success enjoyed by the 1963 film of
Lord of the Flies
, directed by Peter Brook. Both novels are about the monstrosity of children. They were routinely compared by reviewers with long memories when Golding’s novel was published in 1959.

Hughes’s narrative is set in the Victorian era. A violent storm, graphically described, induces a colonial settler, Bas-Thornton, to send his children, three girls and two boys, off to safety in England. En route, their vessel is taken by pirates and they find themselves stowaways. The eerily precocious Emily wins over the pirate captain – seduction of a kind is involved. The children are the ultimate pirates. It is the quality of the writing, Hughes’s supporters argue, which raises his novel notches above Golding’s – that and the strangely powerful detail (the amputation in the early pages of a monkey’s cancerous tail, for example). Above all, Hughes’s revisionary idea of childhood is more powerful. Young humans are, above all, strange. This is how Hughes describes the youngest of the children, Laura:

Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term ‘human’ a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human – they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.