THE ELEGANT EXTREMIST

Ian McEwan is a writer who from the beginning has known how to sweeten his often bitter and shocking stories with polished prose and meticulous plotting

John Self

IMAGINE A PARLOUR GAME WHERE THE AIM IS TO cite two practitioners in one field who are such polar opposites to each other that they make us doubt that it really is one field at all. In cinema, for example, one could offer everything-explodes merchant Michael Bay and nothing-happens master Andrei Tarkovsky. In fiction, one extreme might be Ian McEwan, the young author who shocked literary London with stories about pickled penises and a teenager raping his young sister. And the far side would be occupied by Ian McEwan, darling of the twenty-first century prize lists and bestseller shelves, whose novels have appeared on the Queen Consort’s Reading Room book club, and who once said with a straight face, “It’s an aspect of getting older that I find in my…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2023

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