IMAGINE A PARLOUR GAME WHERE THE AIM IS TO cite two practitioners in one field who are such polar opposites to each other that they make us doubt that it really is one field at all. In cinema, for example, one could offer everything-explodes merchant Michael Bay and nothing-happens master Andrei Tarkovsky.
In fiction, one extreme might be Ian McEwan, the young author who shocked literary London with stories about pickled penises and a teenager raping his young sister. And the far side would be occupied by Ian McEwan, darling of the twenty-first century prize lists and bestseller shelves, whose novels have appeared on the Queen Consort’s Reading Room book club, and who once said with a straight face, “It’s an aspect of getting older that I find in my social circle a handful of judges.”
How does one become the other? When did Ian McEwan stop being a risk-taker, the of nasty sex (“Ian Macabre”’s nickname for him), and start being the grandfather of the well-plotted English literary novel of ideas? The answer is that he always was both at the same time.
