Salon.com > Atonement

Sneaky author tricks

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:45:00 +0000

"No. And no again. Not that." So says Serena Frome, the narrator of Ian McEwan's 2012 novel, "Sweet Tooth." What she's protesting is a story written by her lover, Tom, in which an author at work on her second novel is scrutinized by a worried companion, a talking ape. "Only on the last page," Serena explains, "did I discover that the story I was reading was actually the one the woman was writing. The ape doesn’t exist, it’s a specter, the creature of her fretful imagination."

Serena, who has been earlier established as a certain type of hungry but unintellectual reader, dismisses this device as a "trick" to be "distrusted." "There was, in my view," she observes, "an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honor. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim."

Ian McEwan, novelist-historian

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:06:00 +0000

EVER SINCE HE EVOLVED out of producing what he describes as ‘staring-at-the-wall’ fiction — those slender stories such as The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers set in no tangible time or place —Ian McEwan has become England’s premier documentarian, the chief recorder of her near past in novelistic form.

Moving seamlessly between time periods, from the Second World War to the liberation of Iraq, McEwan’s attention is drawn not towards the deeds of great men that flavor the works of say Hilary Mantel or Robert Harris. McEwan, while oftentimes anchoring his works in the past, is by no means a historical novelist. Rather, his novels attempt to reflect the Zeitgeist, how the ever-changing political, social, and cultural climate impacted or impacts the lives of ordinary or at times extraordinary people.