Debra Murphy on the fiction of Ian McEwan
October 10, 2009 by Debra Murphy
Filed under Anti-Catholic, Literary Fiction, Writing, Lit Crit & Biography
Debra Murphy, CatholicFiction.net editor, has written an article on the fiction of English novelist Ian McEwan. First published last winter in Second Spring Journal, Debra’s article, “A Christian looks at the fiction of Ian McEwan”, is now available online at CatholicExchange.
Here’s how the article begins:
Two things need to be gotten out of the way before anyone attempts to address the fiction of English novelist Ian McEwan in a disapproving vein: First, he is one of the most acclaimed writers of our time; Second, unless your name happens to be, oh, John Updike, it is almost certain that McEwan is a better writer than you are.
In other words, one had best proceed with some humility, and I do. Rightly regarded as one of the finest stylists in the English language—McEwan’s prose is as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, or a time bomb?his Booker Prize win in 1998, though for one of his fluffier little books, Amsterdam, was nonetheless not entirely misplaced. Sentence for sentence, it simply doesn’t get much better.
For the rest of the article, click here.
Thank you for this article. I have only read Atonement and although I enjoyed the beautiful prose was deeply disappointed with the book, which seemed to me to be a series of disjointed scenes featuring characters in some way. The ending made me as enraged as Ms. Murphy’s son. I am not surprised that McEwan is an atheist, since the gratuitous ending exploited his characters so that McEwan, the real author, can boldly say: “See, I can be God to my characters. I am a god when I write.” So the book left me with feelings of hostility.
Not so the movie. For me, the movie pulled everything together–including the mother’s migraines, since they were one of the reasons for the adult neglect of Briony that left her imagination to go unchecked and made her desperate for attention and control. I also thought the music in the movie created a new them in the book as horror of the war visited on the lives of real human beings. Celia and Robby are most vulnerable to it, having been stripped of their stations in life, family, love, and hopes by Briony’s misdoings. To me the movie is an elegy, as the music for the Dunkirk beach scene, for the terrible costs of the war, the price so many paid for the war, a sacrifice that should still our heart in reverence for their memory. None of this, however did I find in McIwan’s book. The movie also starkly exposes McEwan’s literary and personal conceit in the explanation for the change in the ending of the novel–to “give them what they so had deserved” Briony “chooses” to allow the lovers to live–rather than “actually die” within months of each other. Since for McEwan there is no life after death, he feels the need to celebrate that as an author he can dictate the point of death of someone to his own wishes, and this is all right, he thinks, since he, or she, is doing this in “atonement.” What a perverted joke. McEwan exhibits the atheistic hubris that, as far as I can see, led to the slaughter he condemns in his book, Atonement.