The Booker Prize-winning novelist is an explorer at heart.
September has seen the publication of "Lessons" by the Booker Prize-winning writer Ian McEwan. In an interview with the New Yorker, McEwan explained that he wrote "Lessons," with its narrative sweep across the decades since World War II, in the retrospective mood that took hold of so many of us during the pandemic. His remarks prompted me to look back over the decades I have been a McEwan reader. They don't amount to a time span quite as extensive as that covered by the new book, but I have been reading his work for more than 30 years.
I remember a gathering, circa 1990, at the home of a college friend. He showed us an early edition of McEwan's first book, "First Love, Last Rites." The author photo was a rare picture of a bearded McEwan. Someone said, "He looks like an explorer." Someone else replied, "He is an explorer."
The dozen or so books McEwan has published since 1990 have only deepened the truth of that insight. He has continued to explore fearlessly, challenging himself time and again on both the aesthetic and intellectual front.
Of particular note is his imaginative, informed engagement with science. The neurosurgery in "Saturday" (2005) makes vivid "the difficult gift of consciousness," as does the exploration of artificial intelligence in "Machines Like Me" (2019).
"Solar" (2010), an alarming tale about climate change, also dared to be comic. Why a comedy about an existential threat? The clue comes in a cameo appearance by McEwan, renamed Meredith, also the name of an earlier English novelist. Malcolm Bradbury, one of McEwan's mentors at the University of East Anglia in the early 1970s, put great stock in a quote from E.M. Forster's "A Room With a View": "George Meredith's right — the cause of Comedy and the cause of Truth are really the same."
McEwan once said that he admires the skepticism that informs the work of Czech novelist Milan Kundera. A nimble brand of skepticism has advanced his own search for knowledge. I have not liked everything McEwan has said or written, but I do admire the way he has maintained his commitment to the novel as a "form of enquiry." The novel's embrace of many ideas, many voices has helped McEwan do his best thinking. Indeed, in books like "Saturday" and "The Children Act" (2014), he has wrestled with devilishly difficult moral dilemmas.
Part of this project of knowledge involves McEwan deploying unusual points of view, from the fetal narrator of "Nutshell" (2016) to the titular insect in "The Cockroach" (2019). That novella also features "reverse flow economics," an ingenious satire on Brexit. McEwan's powers of invention — rooted in or haunted by history — have not flagged. Nor has the quality of his crisp prose, such as this description, from "The Child in Time" (1987), of a stone flying from a slingshot, "for an instant a precise black shape against the red sky."
What has changed, since the 1970s, is the emotional intelligence of McEwan's fiction. It has increased. Since his early, deliberately shocking stories, McEwan's sensibility has gone from punk to parental. In the astonishing title story of "First Love, Last Rites," horror gives way to tenderness. But by the time we get to "Atonement" (2001), McEwan's most commercially and critically successful book, those emotions are inseparable. When I reviewed that novel, I concluded: "He is at one with his talent."
Twenty years later, Ian McEwan is still cultivating that talent, still exploring. I hope that he gets to deliver plenty more of his distinctive Lessons.
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Robert Cremins teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.
