Ian McEwan, still not off the hook
After Ian McEwan was (sort of) accused of plagiarism, all kinds of big name authors came to his defence. But not everyone has been convinced by the razzmatazz lineup of defenders, which includes Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and Martin Amis.
Jack Shafer at Slate, for one, remains completely unswayed. “As a long-time magazine and newspaper editor,” he writes, “I’d have no trouble firing McEwan for writing as he did if he worked for me.”
Shafer argues that McEwan’s defenders, who claim that every novelist worth his weight in newsprint undertakes research in the same manner as McEwan, are merely making an empty gesture. “If McEwan really did nothing out of the ordinary, the authors campaigning for him would do him a great service to note the passages in their own books that rooked from historical sources in a similar manner. Don’t hold your breath.”
After a brief interlude in which he admits that the charge of “Plagiarist!” never really seems to cause the accused the harm it should, Shafer engages in a passage comparison, examining two remarkably similar sentences, one from Ludmilla Andrews’ memoir, the other from McEwan’s Atonement.
His unimpressed conclusion: “I detect no mash-up here, no adding of value, and no ‘creative use,’ to quote Pynchon’s generous letter of support. McEwan helps himself to Andrews’ words as if they first appeared on the planet in one of his rough drafts. To protest, as he does, that her memoir served as ‘research’ is a lie. McEwan rewrote Andrews’ vivid copy and called it his own. The laugh of larceny is that the Booker Prize-winner didn’t even improve it.”
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