Poem on Ian McEwan

                McEWAN   

Of the "golden generation" -- Rushdie, Amis, McEwan --

So loved by the literati, you are the most talented

Though not without serious flaws.

You showed your brilliance at an early age

With electrifying short stories, in two great collections

First Love and Last Rites, published at twenty-five

Followed not long afterwards by In Between the Sheets.

Justly lionised, your hard, cold glance

Immolating precision, and perfect evocation

Of dark atmosphere reached fullest fruition

In the short story format. You showed us you were

A peerless miniaturist. But by a curious irony

Those very same skills also bred

Your greatest imperfections as a novelist

Illustrating that a conversant strength

May also be a weakness. Against the short story

The novel is a wholly different form

Requiring distinctive virtues. Soon

After entering that field, despite technical force

Your vulnerabilities began to show.

After your first novel, The Cement Garden --

Still perhaps your best, not least because

At hardly a hundred pages, it is not much more

Than a short story successfully stretched --

Came The Comfort of Strangers. This time the characters

Lacked any sympathy, were curiously passive.

Your technical panache could not overcome

A failure of life or feeling the narrative.

The same occurred with A Child in Time

Setting a pattern which has been followed

From that time to this. Where the short stories

Are explosive, the novels seem lifeless.

                                  2

Yet if we search for reasons for that failure

They lie not so much in what is attempted -- 

Which is always ambitious --

As what is fulfilled.

Your classic technique is to use hot material --

In the case of The Cement Garden the death of a parent

A corpse rotting in a basement --

Within a cold frame of authorial observation.

Though effective in the short story, it cannot

Carry the full architecture of a novel. Your choice of

sordid or rebarbative subject matter -- incest, murder

Irreparable loss -- bred a suspicion

In some of your readers, that you were a cold fish

A gifted voyeur of human tragedy

Utterly without mercy, precise as a surgeon

Yet lacking that inspiring generosity

Towards your fellow humans which

In works of greater span -- in Dickens or Austen

In Melville or Hawthorne, or moderns such as 

Garcia Marquez, Updike, Roth --

Gives life to characters, inspiring that final awe

Of human life which is central to our experience

Of the finest fiction. But if we search your 

Imaginative origins, should we be surprised?

                              3

You were, from the first, a professional 

Literatus, as ambitious as Amis or Rushdie

Determined upon a life of letters. In your view

The short story, of which you are a master

Is not a sufficiently elevated form. Instead

The novel was the ladder you preferred to climb

To high literary status. On this path you set out

With customary rigour and determination

Towards your Booker and your honorary doctorates.

You were the first student of Malcolm Bradbury

In that hothouse at East Anglia

For future writers. Yet as you ascended

In aspiration, so you fell in achievement. 

It is, as many critics agree

A strange and fascinating conundrum

Not least since, from every other perspective

Your rigour is manifest. If you wished to be

A master writing of the decline of humanity

Flaying our human condition, it happened that

By a strange stroke of irony

Humanity left your literature. From the

Nineteenth century to the current day, a wit

Speaking of the decline of letters, might say

"From The Cherry Orchard to The Cement Garden".

Perhaps -- like Rushdie and Amis --

Each of whom treats their characters as objects

For the sadistic exercise of their own egos

You threw out the baby with the bath-water.

                              4

If, after your initial success with the short story

You entered a kind of middle life

It was not unexpected. You yourself said

After that beginning, you had the right to settle down

Find your feet, adjust to the proper task

Of fulfilling your destiny. Yet another central flaw

Arose. In each of the truly great writers there lurks

A fine philosophical mind

Leaving behind works with a palpable structure

A sense of human engagement, which can be mined

Almost indefinitely, in the manner in which, say,

Shakespeare preceded Freud. By that lofty comparison

Your own work is brittle. In The Innocent

Black Dogs and Enduring Love you continued

To build your fiction on shallow foundations.

The Innocent shed no extra light on the spy story.

In Black Dogs the view that barbarity would rise

Again in Europe, was true, but facile.

Enduring Love, constructed on games theory

Demonstrated little not known before

And less about love. As the most assiduous 

Of our novelists, if you aspire

To classic status, the lessons perhaps

Are there to be read, if not by you.

                              5

Amongst your peers, you are the worker at midnight

Composed, undistracted. You at least may learn

To break free of mere cleverness, superseding

The carapace of cold authority.

If our classic American brethren, Melville and Hawthorne

Stun us with their force, arresting disquisition

Weaving myth and image

Into a complex tapestry of original connection

Even Jane Austen (so the revisionists tell us)

Was a great student of moral philosophy.

In her private revolt against the Gothic novel

She rejected singular extremes of character

in favour of complex balance. Her effort

Beginning with will, becomes entirely natural. By mixing

Degrees of ambivalence, her characters

Achieve subtlety and sympathy --

Where yours, by contrast, have been until now

Mere creatures of your own design

Articulated puppets, lacking all autonomy

Frozen in your brittle industry.

So too your ritual grumbling about Thatcher

Whom the left almost wilfully misunderstood --

A radical decentralist who did more

to deconstruct woman's universal image

As a secondary creature, than nearly all the myrmidons

Of feminism -- seems not only conservative, but dated.

In novels such as The Child in Time

Your espousal of fashionable opinion

Now hangs heavy. Even so, given the nature

Of the London literary world, these were

No impediments to your increasing fame.

In other aspects your career

Took recognisable form. With fine irony

You were given, too late, a Booker

For your lamest work, Amsterdam

Which happened to combine

In almost perfect pattern, your worst features --

Fashionably acerbic, its unsympathetic characters

Were mere objects of your bien-pensant dislikes

Ending in an implausible Gotterdammerung

Which brings us to Atonement. Here, at least

You show the first true signs of a novelist

The first shy love of character, like a delicate hue

A limn of light on a moonflower

No fierce sun of compassion, certainly

But the beginning of a structure

Which threatens at last to reflect your rigour

Establishing a sympathetic relation between

You authorial ambition and your subject --

Not perfect, by any means, or strong enough

To justify a grand announcement

But sufficient to create an initial frame

For an absorbing drama. Perhaps for these reasons

It is your most popular fiction. So you enter

Distinguished middle age, with a promise at least

Of adding something useful to the novel

And onward you move. Saturday is merely another

Signpost along the way, well-written but lacking

In profound structure or sympathy of character.

And Chesil Beach, not much longer than a novella

Is, on one level at least, a typically powerful account

Of lost love. Yet even to your fans it demonstrates again

Your shallowness of intellect. Setting it in 1962

Suggesting that the time was a pivotal period of

Sexual awakening -- while a sly joke in Larkin's poem --

In your work becomes the central structure. Even so

It is hardly the first time you have built a novel

On such profoundly weak foundations.

Perhaps the root cause is a kind of intellectual smugness

Not greatly challenged by being so close

To the metropolitan literary world. You too

Love baubles and honours, though with more innocence

Than Sir Salman. Of you, your publisher was heard to say

When you did not win the Booker for Black Dogs

His function was to offer comfort, holding shaking hands.

Yet unlike Amis or Rushdie, your novels slowly improve

Grow in sincerity, accrete invisible weight. Your final

Oeuvre will be distinguished, not as great perhaps

As Updike, Roth or Ford, as poetic as McCarthy or Proulx

But no doubt sufficient for a small island

Living in America's cultural shadow. Your greatest flaw --

A detachment from your fellow humans, expressed

In lovingly detailed descriptions of human loss

And an almost exquisite physical revulsion --

Continues to haunt you. Even so, in a land

Where corporate literary houses are slaves of fashion

Always searching for the newest pretty face, you at least

Ply your trade with attention

And perhaps, better still, with the growing sense

That your best may be ahead of you. In this

We wish you well, and hope one day you may achieve

That greater work your skill deserves.