![]() ![]() ![]() Saturday’s protagonist, Henry Perowne, is a forty-eight-year-old neurosurgeon who lives in a sprawling town house off Tottenham Court Road. ![]() His 2005 novel, Saturday - set on February 15, 2003, the day a million people marched through London in opposition to the impending war in Iraq - is a case in point. Yet McEwan struggles - badly - when he adopts self-consciously topical themes as his primary subject matter. The novel - a rich, anguished tale of guilt and forgiveness - sold more than 2 million copies and became a BAFTA-winning film starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. His early novels were slick, slender texts that shunned the class-ridden tropes of contemporary English fiction in favor of darker, more Freudian motifs - incest in The Cement Garden (1978), murder and sadomasochism in The Comfort of Strangers (1981).Ītonement, published in 2001, was a landmark moment in the rise of McEwan’s public profile. McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam, and the New Yorker anointed him as “ England’s national author” in 2009. Instead of delivering a literary manifesto in defense of liberal democracy, McEwan ends up revealing his own creative exhaustion and sense of bewilderment at the world. The result is a labored exercise in boomer agitprop. His latest offering, Lessons, is an attempt to track the life story of its fictional protagonist through the turbulence of postwar British and European history. ![]() Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most prominent novelists. Review of Lessons: A Novel by Ian McEwan (Knopf, 2022) ![]()
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