Ian McEwan: stealing pebbles, writing letters, and writing short
This week in Ian McEwan news:
The Guardian reports that, after admitting to having “borrowed” some pebbles from the very beach that gives his new novel, On Chesil Beach, its name, McEwan was told to return them or face a £2,000 fine.
Also in The Guardian, McEwan responds to a mostly favourable review that made the craven error of confusing characters’ political beliefs with the author’s own. Given McEwan’s reputation for occasionally using characters as mouthpieces for his own opinions, this feels a little disingenuous, but he does end with a point worth repeating: “your not ‘liking’ the characters is not the same as your not liking the book; you don’t have to think the central character is nice; the views of the characters don’t have to be yours, and are not necessarily those of the author; a novel is not always all about you.”
Elsewhere, British bookies at William Hill are holding off on posting McEwan’s Booker-odds until they can figure out if the new book is even eligible for the prize, since it’s arguably not a novel but a novella, something expressly outside the mandate of the Man-Booker.
On the critical side, the Toronto Star’s Phil Marchand has no doubt as to what the book is: ” Marchand likes the book a lot, and for its very brevity – perhaps not surprising for a weekly book critic.
In The Globe and Mail, novelist Michael Redhill also likes the new book – which he comes right out and calls a “novel” in his first sentence. “In On Chesil Beach,” Redhill writes, “McEwan shows his usual restraint, rendering large emotional moments with a fine brush, and small moments with a single hair.” (Which makes us wonder: what does McEwan use for medium-sized moments?)
In The Montreal Gazette, Ian McGillis splits the novel-novella difference by writing that “On Chesil Beach is a short novel, hardly more than a long short story in word-count terms, but every sentence serves a purpose and the prose is diamond-hard.”
Ian has every right to make his point to Natasha Walter about not identifying a novel’s character’s beliefs with the authors because she did do that.
Personally I was confused by what she said since I know Ian rather well from long before “First Love, Last Rites”, but from after CND days, and I was very surprised to see him pictured by the review as such a peace-activist sceptic.
At the time I read her review my reaction was - “Oh well, that’s definitely a side of Ian that I was never aware of”. It didn’t shake my fondness for him or cause me to tear my hair out in clumps.
But just as Ian in his writing builds situations and characters with a very fine, delicate and precise brush I can well understand his concern to keep his public persona clear and clean and therefore desire to clarify this issue.
I’m glad that you aired it and that it came to my attention.
Incidentally i don’t think that he would be embarrassed if I mention one of my fondest Ian memories: I visited him at his home in Stockwell shortly after the US publication of John Irving’s “The World According to Garp”. He had been sent a review copy and proceded to read aloud to me the most horrific passage in the book [at least for a male]. One delightful moment out of many.