McEwan, Ian (Russell) 1948-

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McEWAN, Ian (Russell) 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born June 21, 1948, in Aldershot, England; son of David (an army officer) and Rose Lilian Violet (Moore) McEwan; married Penny Allen, 1982 (divorced, 1995); married Annalena McAfee, 1997; children: two sons, two stepdaughters. Education: University of Sussex, B.A. (honors), 1970; University of East Anglia, M.A., 1971. Hobbies and other interests: Hiking, tennis.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Jonathan Cape, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Rd., London SW1V 2SA, England.

CAREER:

Writer, 1970—.

MEMBER:

Royal Society of Literature (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Somerset Maugham Award, 1976, for First Love, Last Rites; shortlisted for Booker Prize, 1981, for The Comfort of Strangers, and 2001, for Atonement; Primio Letterario Prato, 1982; London Evening Standard award for best screenplay, 1983, for The Ploughman's Lunch; Whitbread Award, 1987, for The Child in Time; honorary doctorates from University of Sussex, 1989, and University of East Anglia, 1993; Booker Prize, 1998, for Amsterdam; shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award, 1999, for Enduring Love; Shakespeare Medal, 1999; People's Booker Prize, 2001, Whitbread Novel Award shortlist, and W. H. Smith literary prize, both 2002, and Santiago Prize for European Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and Los Angeles Times Book Award in fiction category, all 2003, all for Atonement.

WRITINGS:

SHORT STORIES

First Love, Last Rites (contains "Last Day of Summer" and "Conversations with a Cupboardman"), Random House (New York, NY), 1975.

In between the Sheets, and Other Stories, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1978.

The Short Stories, J. Cape (London, England), 1995.

NOVELS

The Cement Garden, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1978.

The Comfort of Strangers, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1981.

The Child in Time, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1987.

The Innocent, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1990.

Black Dogs, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1992.

Enduring Love, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

Amsterdam, J. Cape (London, England), 1997, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

Atonement, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2002.

FOR CHILDREN

Rose Blanche, J. Cape (London, England), 1985.

The Daydreamer, illustrated by Anthony Browne, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

SCREENPLAYS

The Ploughman's Lunch (Greenpoint/Samuel Goldwyn, 1983), Methuen (London, England), 1985.

(With Mike Newell) Sour Sweet (adapted from Timothy Mo's novel; British Screen/Film Four/Zenith, 1989), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1988.

The Innocent (adapted from McEwan's novel), Lakeheart/Miramax/Sievernich, 1993.

The Good Son, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1993.

OTHER

Conversations with a Cupboardman (radio play; based on a story by McEwan), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1975.

The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (contains Jack Flea's Celebration [BBC-TV, 1976], Solid Geometry, and The Imitation Game [BBCTV, 1980]), J. Cape (London, England), 1981.

Or Shall We Die: An Oratorio (produced at Royal Festival Hall, 1983; produced at Carnegie Hall, 1985), score by Michael Berkeley, J. Cape (London, England), 1983.

Last Day of Summer (adapted from McEwan's short story), 1984.

Strangers (play; adapted from McEwan's novel The Comfort of Strangers), produced in London, England, 1989.

A Move Abroad (includes Or Shall We Die? and The Ploughman's Lunch), Pan (London, England), 1989.

Contributor to periodicals and literary journals, including Guardian, New American Review, New Review, Radio Times, Sunday Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, Transatlantic Review, and Tri-Quarterly.

ADAPTATIONS:

The Comfort of Strangers was adapted for film by Harold Pinter and directed by Paul Schrader, 1991; The Cement Garden was adapted for film by writer-director Andrew Birkin, 1993; Enduring Love was adapted for film by Joe Pennel and directed by Roger Michel, 2004; Atonement was adapted as an audiobook, Publishing Mills, 2002, and as a film by Christopher Hampton and directed by Sir Richard Eyre, c. 2005.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Another novel.

SIDELIGHTS:

British author Ian McEwan is considered by some critics to be the most famous protege of novelist Malcolm Bradbury, a noted professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Within McEwan's fictional worlds—particularly in his early novels—flourishes a haunting perversity: Childhood collides with adult violence, and power manifests itself in aberrant sexuality and political authoritarianism. The element of horror in his works is quickly recognized by the reader; it is the stuff of newspaper headlines, and it pervades human society. McEwan explores such modern horror in a style described by George Stade, writing in the New York Times Book Review, as "self-effacing rather than gaudy prose, as cold and transparent as a pane of ice, noticeable only in that things on the other side of it are clearer and brighter than they should be, a touch sinister in their dazzle." Paul Di Filippo, writing in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, likewise acknowledged McEwan's "tight prose," and called the novelist "a mask-wearing shaman guiding his readers on the blackest of night-sea journeys."

The collection of stories McEwan wrote at age twenty-two for his master's thesis was published in 1975 as First Love, Last Rites. The grotesque characters that inhabit these stories include an incestuous brother and sister, a gentleman who lives in a cupboard, a child-slayer, and a man who keeps the penis of a nineteenth-century criminal preserved in a jar. The stories include "Cocker at the Theatre," in which excessively exuberant stage actors indulge in actual sex during a performance; "Butterflies," wherein a sex criminal recalls his exploits; "Homemade," in which a young man explains the sexual relations he has shared with his sister; and the title story, in which two young lovers destroy a rodent.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Robert Towers praised First Love, Last Rites as "possibly the most brilliantly perverse and sinister batch of short stories to come out of England since Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set." Towers described McEwan's England as a "flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect sickening detail." John Fletcher, meanwhile, wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Such writing would be merely sensational if it were not, like Kafka's, so pointed, so accurate, so incapable indeed of being appalled. In contemporary writing one has to turn to French literature to encounter a similar contrast between the elegance of the language and the disturbing quality of the material; in writing in English McEwan is wholly unique. No one else combines in quite the same way exactness of notation with a comedy so black that many readers may fail to see the funny side at all."

McEwan's first novel, The Cement Garden, has been likened to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, in which lost schoolboys degenerate into violent cannibals. The Cement Garden depicts four children's regression into a feral state with "suspense and chilling impact but without the philosophy lesson," as William McPherson noted in the Washington Post Book World. McEwan's children have been raised in an environment providing isolation similar to that in Golding's novel: a Victorian house standing alone amid the abandoned ruins of a postwar housing subdivision. After their parents die in quick succession, the children cover up the deaths—even hiding one corpse—while the eldest siblings unsuccessfully attempt to assume parental roles. The children eventually lapse into filth and apathy while the house decays until an outsider discovers the orphans' secret and summons the police to the scene.

Towers described The Cement Garden as "a shocking book, morbid, full of repellent imagery—and irresistibly readable, … the work of a writer in full control of his materials," and called McEwan's approach "magic realism—a transfiguration of the ordinary that has a far stronger retinal and visceral impact than the flabby surrealism of so many 'experimental' novels. The settings and events reinforce one another symbolically, but the symbolism never seems contrived or obtrusive." Fletcher praised the author's "quiet, precise, and sensuous touch" but added that "it is difficult to see how McEwan can develop much further this line in grotesque horror and black comedy, with a strong admixture of eroticism and perversion."

McEwan's second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, appears, at least initially, to be another consideration of characteristically unsettling characters and activities. The predictably peculiar tales include "Reflections of a Kept Ape," in which a romantic ape laments the end of his affair with a woman writer; "Dead As They Come," wherein a man becomes obsessed with a department store mannequin; "In Between the Sheets," in which a father fantasizes sexual relations with his young daughter; and "Pornography," wherein a misogynistic pornography seller is targeted for revenge by two of his female victims.

Despite the seemingly grotesque nature of its contents, In Between the Sheets has been perceived by several critics as evidence of McEwan's more restrained approach to his subject matter. V. S. Pritchett noted in the New York Review of Books that "McEwan is experimenting more," but added that the collection contains "two encouraging breaks with 'mean' writing." Reviewing In Between the Sheets in the Washington Post Book World, Terrence Winch maintained that McEwan's prose "is as clear as a windowpane" and called the author "a gifted story-teller and possibly the best British writer to appear in a decade or more."

In contrast to the eccentric characters of McEwan's earliest works, the prominent figures in his 1981 novel, The Comfort of Strangers, are a well-groomed, respectable couple on holiday in Venice. But the author gradually draws these unsuspecting characters into a web of horror that climaxes in sadomasochistic murder. Although continuing his praise for McEwan's gifts as a storyteller, John Leonard found the novel's plot contrived and unbelievable, writing in the New York Times that The Comfort of Strangers, although penned "by a writer of enormous talent, is definitely diseased." Stephen Koch also faulted the plot while praising McEwan's craftsmanship. "McEwan proceeds through most of this sickly tale with subtlety and promise," Koch stated in the Washington Post Book World. "The difficulty is that all this skill is directed toward a climax which, even though it is duly horrific, is sapped by a certain thinness and plain banality at its core. After an impressive send-up, the sadomasochistic fantasy animating The Comfort of Strangers is revealed as … a sadomasochistic fantasy. And not much more." But Koch went on to praise the novel, adding: "In all his recent fiction, McEwan seems to be reaching toward some new imaginative accommodation to the sexual questions of innocence and adulthood, role and need that have defined, with such special intensity, his generation.… I honor him for his effort."

The focus of McEwan's fiction underwent a shift after the birth of his own children. As he told Amanda Smith in an interview for Publishers Weekly: "It was both inevitable and desirable that my own range or preoccupation should change and that my emotional range should increase. Having children has been a major experience in my life.…It's extended me emotionally, personally, in ways that could never be guessed at. It's inevitable that that change would be reflected in my writing."

McEwan's 1987 novel, The Child in Time, confronts a fear universally felt by parents: that a child might become separated from them and be harmed. In the novel a three-year-old girl is abducted from her father while the two are shopping at the grocery store. Despite a massive search, the child is never found and her parents' relationship disintegrates due to guilt, anger, and each parent's isolating grief. The mother retreats to a country house; the father is left to find solace in television, alcohol, and his friendship with a man who, ironically, soon divests himself of adult responsibility and retreats to a childlike state of madness. McEwan's plot is threaded through with political hazards: the threat of nuclear war combines with economic collapse to propel the political state towards authoritarianism.

Some critics felt that the complexity of its subject-matter makes The Child in Time uneven. "What McEwan clearly has in mind is to document the … timelessness of childhood, to show how the child is never fully dead within us," commented Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World. But, Yardley added, "theme and story never quite connect." Michiko Kakutani agreed in the New York Times, noting that "if these motifs were successfully woven together, they might have reinforced McEwan's reverent vision of childhood, endowed it with some sort of symphonic resonance. As it is, they feel like afterthoughts grafted onto [the] story and not fully assimilated into the text." However, R. Z. Sheppard praised The Child in Time in Time, writing that "McEwan bridges the chasm between private anguish and public policy with a death-defying story, inventive, eventful and affirmative without being sentimental."

McEwan explores the espionage of a past epoch in his fourth novel, The Innocent, which critics have compared to the work of such masters of the spy genre as John le Carre and Graham Greene. Set in Berlin during the cold-war 1950s, the book concerns an actual joint effort by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British MI6 to hear Soviet phone conversations by tunneling underground and tapping into East German phone cables. McEwan uses metaphor and symbolism to transform the historic account into a lesson on the dangers of ignoring the Socratic counsel "Know thyself."

In The Innocent McEwan sets up the stereotypic rigid Englishman, the brash American, and a sensual German seductress, then proceeds to penetrate their surfaces, flesh them out, and reveal their individuality. A reserved English telephone technician spying on Soviets in cold-war Berlin eventually finds himself out-matched by an American CIA operative. Moreover, the affair he has been conducting with a German woman compels the British agent to murder the woman's husband; the corpse is hacked into pieces and stored in two suitcases.

Comparing The Innocent to The Child in Time, New York Times critic Kakutani deemed the later work "bone tight: every detail of every event works as a time bomb, waiting to go off, while every image seems to pay off in terms of plot, atmosphere or theme." Richard Eder, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, commended the entertaining quality of McEwan's novel but noted that the ending is jarred loose from the work by an interlude of violence Eder dubbed "all but unbearable to read." The Innocent "evokes a dark moral world in a highly entertaining fashion," wrote Eder. "Unlike Greene's entertainments, however, McEwan's leaves not even the trace of a feeling behind it." Higgins disagreed. "The reader's reward for all this ambiguity and gore is a book about a spy-tunnel that is not about a tunnel at all," noted the critic, "but about people whom you recognize; you see them every day.… This is the function of good novels: They enable us to snoop, undetected, unobserved, into the details of other people's lives."

Black Dogs, published in 1992, is a novel narrated by a man endeavoring to collect the pieces of his family's history and compose a memoir. The black dogs of the book's title refer to a vision that haunts one of the narrator's relatives; they also serve to represent the evil that lurks within every man. "The book richly suggests our human potentialities for mere waste as well as sheer evil, and for a sort of imperilled happiness," noted Caroline Moore in the Spectator; "the dogs, which disappear into the foothills of Europe like 'black stains in a grey dawn,' could take any form to reappear." As one of the novel's characters explains: "When the conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself."

The metaphoric canines in Black Dogs clearly echo themes more subtly expressed in McEwan's previous fiction. As M. John Harrison noted in the Times Literary Supplement, "McEwan's retreat from the cement garden of his earlier books has been exemplary … [Black Dogs is] an undisguised novel of ideas which is also Ian McEwan's best work."

In McEwan's novel Enduring Love a couple's picnic is disrupted by the sight of a hot-air balloon caught in treacherous winds. Efforts to haul the balloon to safety fail, and the balloon crashes to earth. One of the picnickers involved in the rescue attempt rushes to the balloon only to be stopped by another rescuer and urged to pray. The hero soon finds himself stalked by this religious fellow, who nurtures a bizarre obsession. New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt found Enduring Love "suspenseful" and "thematically rich."

McEwan followed Enduring Love with Amsterdam, for which he secured the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998. Amsterdam is the story of two longtime friends who form a euthanasia pact only to learn that it ultimately holds regrettable consequences. A Kirkus Reviews critic called Amsterdam "a smartly written tale that devolves slowly into tricky and soapy vapors," while in the New York Times Kakutani deemed it the work of "a writer in complete control of his craft, a writer who has managed to toss off this minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb that it has won him the recognition he has so long deserved."

Critical praise was heaped upon McEwan upon publication of his 2002 novel Atonement. The story of a highly imaginative British preteen whose desire to gain dramatic stature within her family results in a false accusation of rape and the destruction of a young man's life, Atonement also provokes the reader into questioning the role of the novelist in creating realistic fiction, and what Commonweal contributor Edward T. Wheeler called "the relationship between artistic imagination and truth of life." In McEwan's novel, a story is told from the point of view of an impressionable young narrator clearly identified as imaginative and inclined to interpret events to suit her penchant for drama; while the story is narrated by that child grown to adulthood, assertions come into question, facts become clouded, and McEwan's final chapters "undermine the fictional reality of the entire novel," according to Antioch Review critic Barbara Beckerman Davis. Davis praised Atonement as "McEwan's most intricate book," while in School Library Journal Susan H. Woodcock praised it as a "thought-provoking novel" with a story that is "compelling, the characters well drawn and engaging, and the outcome … almost always in doubt."

The Daydreamer constituted a change of pace for McEwan. His first work of fiction for younger readers, the 1994 short-story collection describes the adventures of a gifted ten-year-old named Peter Fortune, who balances his mundane suburban existence with a rich fantasy life. With a heightened sense of imagination, Peter is able to vividly experience what it would be like to trade bodies with his dying cat, make his parents disappear, battle a demonic doll, or abandon his little sister on the bus, all through his daydreams. While New York Times Book Review critic David Leavitt noted that McEwan "has an unhappy tendency to talk down to his readers in a way that he could never get away with in an adult novel," the reviewer added that the author "possesses a vivid imagination for the grotesque. Thus he is nowhere more successful in [the book] … than when—like his young hero—he lets that imagination get the better of him." Gregory Feeley agreed, writing in the Washington Post Book World, "The best scenes … combine wit and invention with a sense of the natural order being overturned in a manner that recalls Roald Dahl." Praising McEwan's prose as "vivid and poetic," a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that The Daydreamer "reveals a profound understanding of childhood." Also favorable was an assessment by Merritt Moseley, who in a Dictionary of Literary Biography entry called The Daydreamer a "beautifully written" work.

In addition to his novels, children's books, and short stories, McEwan is the author of several screenplays, including The Innocent, based on his novel, and The Ploughman's Lunch, derived from his own stage production. The Ploughman's Lunch details the behavior of a callously self-serving individual in the equally cold and unfeeling England of the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher presided as prime minister. Writing in the the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Merritt Moseley observed that the film is set in a "coarse, opportunistic, false society" that McEwan indicts for dishonesty. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby praised the film as "immensely intelligent."

McEwan has also written several scripts for television, including Solid Geometry, notorious in his native Britain for having been banned by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1979, at an advanced stage of production, due to its "grotesque and bizarre sexual elements." This play, derived from a story in First Love, Last Rites, concerns an individual who maintains a pickled penis on his desk. Another television play, Jack Flea's Birthday Celebration, features an infantile young man whose mother and girlfriend vie for maternal authority over him. And in The Imitation Game, which was broadcast in 1980, a woman's desire to aid in England's war effort is consistently undermined by the country's male-oriented social order. Moseley, in his Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on McEwan, proclaimed The Imitation Game "a strong play."

Feminist in perspective is Or Shall We Die?, an oratorio for which McEwan provided the words to composer Michael Berkeley's music. Moseley noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that this work "was written at a time of mounting anxiety over the threat of nuclear war," and he acknowledged its notion of "the feminine principle as humanity's potential salvation." Commenting on the violence that some critics perceive as his fictional trademark—and so deem him "Ian Macabre"—McEwan commented to Daniel Johnson in the London Times, "I don't think I am particularly obsessed by violence, but at the same time I am very disturbed by it. I suppose many of the things that disturb me find their way into my fiction." Remarking on his preference for the novel over the screenplay or the short story as a fictional means of expressing his concerns, McEwan explained to Publishers Weekly: "The reason the novel is such a powerful form is that it allows the examination of the private life better than any other art form. Our common sense gives us such a thin wedge of light on the world, and perhaps one task of the writer is to broaden the wedge."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bestsellers 90, Issue 4, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991, pp. 50-52.

Burnes, Christina, Sex and Sexuality in Ian McEwan's Work, Pauper's Press (Nottingham, England), 1995.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 13, 1980, Volume 66, 1992.

Contemporary Novelists, 5th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, 1983, pp. 495-500; Volume 194: British Novelists since 1960, Second Series, 1998, pp. 207-215.

Haffenden, John, Novelists in Interview, Methuen (London, England), 1985, pp. 526-527.

McEwan, Ian, Black Dogs, J. Cape (London, England), 1992.

Ryan, Kiernan, Ian McEwan, Northcote House (Plymouth, England), 1994.

St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998, pp. 400-402.

Slay, Jack L., Jr., Ian McEwan, Twayne (New York, NY), 1996.

Stevenson, Randall, The British Novel since the Thirties: An Introduction, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1986, pp. 185-193.

Taylor, D. J., A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1989, pp. 55-59.

PERIODICALS

America, April 30, 1994, p. 22.

Antioch Review, winter, 2003, Barbara Beckerman Davis, review of Atonement, p. 179.

Ariel, April, 1995, pp. 7-23.

Atlantic, March, 2002, review of Atonement, pp. 106-109.

Bomb, fall, 1990, pp. 14-16.

Booklist, November 1, 2002, Candace Smith, review of Atonement, p. 513.

Christian Century, May 22, 2002, Gordon Houser, review of Atonement, p. 30.

Commonweal, May 3, 2002, Edward T. Wheeler, review of Atonement, p. 26.

Contemporary Review, June, 1995, pp. 320-323.

Critical Quarterly, summer, 1982, pp. 27-31.

Critique, summer, 1994, pp. 205-218.

Encounter, June, 1975; January, 1979.

English, spring, 1995, pp. 41-55.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 16, 1988; June 2, 1990.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 1998.

Listener, April 12, 1979, pp. 526-527.

London Magazine, August, 1975; February, 1979.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 24, 1990, p. 3.

Monthly Film Bulletin, June, 1983.

Nation, October 31, 1987, p. 491.

National Review, January 18, 1993, p. 57.

New Republic, July 23, 1990, p. 37; March 26, 2002, James Wood, review of Atonement, p. 26.

New Review, autumn, 1978, pp. 9-21.

New Statesman, May 11, 1990, pp. 18-19, 35-36.

Newsweek, June 4, 1990, p. 80; October 11, 1993, p. 59A.

Newsweek International, April 8, 2002, interview with McEwan, p. 94.

New Yorker, January 25, 1993, p. 111.

New York Review of Books, March 8, 1979; January 24, 1980; February 4, 1988, p. 18; January 14, 1993, p. 37; April 11, 2002, John Lanchester, review of Atonement, p. 24.

New York Times, November 21, 1978; August 14, 1979; June 15, 1981; September 26, 1987; May 29, 1990; January 15, 1998; December 1, 1998.

New York Times Book Review, November 26, 1978; August 26, 1979; July 5, 1981; October 11, 1987, p. 9; June 3, 1990, p. 1; November 8, 1992, p. 7; November 13, 1994, p. 54.

Paris Review, summer, 2002, Adam Begley, interview with McEwan, pp. 30-60.

Publishers Weekly, September 11, 1987, pp. 68-69; July 11, 1994, p. 79; September 2, 2002, review of Atonement (audio version), p. 31.

School Library Journal, October, 1994, p. 126; June, 2002, Susan H. Woodcock, review of Atonement, p. 172.

Southern Review, March, 1984, pp. 68-80.

Spectator, June 27, 1992, p. 32.

Time, November 17, 1978; September 21, 1987, p. 76; June 25, 1990, p. 69; November 16, 1992, p. 103; September 27, 1993, p. 84.

Times (London, England), February 16, 1981; October 8, 1981; June 27, 1987; May 8, 1990.

Times Literary Supplement, January 20, 1978; September 19, 1978; October 9, 1981; June 19, 1992.

Times Saturday Review, December 8, 1990, pp. 16-17.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), November 26, 1978; September 30, 1979; July 19, 1981; June 10, 1990, p. 7.

Village Voice, August 28, 1990, p. 102.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1975.