Sam Leith
Family Matters
Ian McEwan is a stranger writer than he sometimes looks. Texturally (well, except maybe in the semi-farcical Solar) he’s a fastidious realist; and yet – as displayed most obviously in Sweet Tooth, Atonement and Saturday – he has a badger-stripe of postmodernism: texts within texts, writerly self-consciousness, reflexive nods to the civilising power of art and all that jazz.
The Children Act, accordingly, opens with a big wink to the reader: ‘London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather.’ As any fule kno, Dickens’s great legal novel, Bleak House, begins: ‘London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.’ If this is to be taken as anything more than an in-joke, it’s as a declaration of intent.
Here is McEwan writing in quasi-Dickensian mode. This is not because his style is Dickensian – McEwan doesn’t go in for the cartoonishly comic minor characters or the line-by-line rhetorical jive of Dickens; he’s low-key and unshowy and precise – but because this is a rather journalistic novel: carefully researched,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Klara and the Sun as a philosophical fairy-tale, for @Lit_Review.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-virtual-friend
I wrote about Kitchenly 434, Alan Warner's unnervingly bizarre & funny tale of 70s Rock shenanigans, in the new issue of @Lit_Review @WhiteRabbitBks https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-butler-saw
Where would you rather be: in an Epicurean garden, in a monastery, or in lockdown? My review of books by John Sellars and Sarah Sands for the @Lit_Review.
@DrJSellars @sarahsands100 @PenguinUKBooks @CityLitWriting @ClassColl #Epicureanism #LiveInSecret
https://literaryreview.co.uk/we-must-cultivate-our-gardens