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Tag Archives: Ian McEwan

Openings

22 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Adam Mars-Jones, Christopher Priest, Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leonard Woolf, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Philip Norman, Rose Tremain, Virginia Woolf, William Boyd

The first of the Book Marketing Council’s “Best Young British Novelists” promotions in 1983 came at an odd time. The British publishing industry was struggling, mostly due to outdated methods, and a quick and dirty fix was needed. Hence the promotion. And it worked. Well, it did for me at least. Christopher Priest was the only one of the featured writers whose work I was already familiar with (by this time I’d read Philip Norman’s book on The Beatles, Shout!, but I’m not sure I associated the Philip Norman featured in the promotion with the author of that book), but I read the associated issue of Granta cover to cover (one of the few times I can say that of the magazine) and discovered a good handful of writers whose work interested me. For a while after that I would religiously buy each new book by Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adam Mars-Jones, Ian McEwan, and Graham Swift. I’ve read, with pleasure, the occasional novel by Rose Tremain and Lisa St Aubin de Teran, without consistently following their work, and though I’ve tried the occasional book by Martin Amis I’ve never really got on with his writing. Over the years, I stopped following most of these writers (Ishiguro I dropped quite quickly, then picked up again later and do now follow him). So today only Boyd and Swift are writers whose new work I religiously buy and read.

Which brings me to the latest William Boyd novel, Trio. What I like about Boyd is his storytelling, which is why it is no surprise that along the way he has written a couple of very effective spy stories. He does come up with some quite arresting metaphors and descriptive passages, but in the main his prose can be a little pedestrian. But his control of pace, revelation, drama, is powerful enough to keep you reading even if the writing might limp a little. Even so, I was a little startled by how flat the opening of this novel seemed:

Elfrida Wing stirred, grunted and shifted sleepily in her bed as the summer’s angled morning sun brightened the room, printing a skewed rectangle of lemony-gold light onto the olive-green-flecked wallpaper close by her pillow.

Yeah, that reads like someone trying too hard, like a writing-class exercise in stuffing as many descriptive words as possible into a single sentence. Then you turn the page to the start of chapter two (the chapters are short in this novel, mostly only two or three pages, which is one reason that the lumbering, over-emphatic description feels too much), and you read: “Talbot Kydd woke abruptly from his dream.” Then another couple of pages and another chapter begins: “Anny Viklund woke up and, as she did every morning as consciousness slowly returned, she wondered if this day was going to be the day that she died.”

Three successive chapters beginning in exactly the same way: the full name of the character followed by a description of them waking up. It is laboured, repetitive, and it is hardly the most inspired or inspiring way to introduce the three central characters who make up the Trio of the title. I’ve come to expect fancier footwork than this from Boyd, even at his most pedestrian.

We are well over half way through the novel before it begins to dawn on us what Boyd is doing here. Elfrida is an alcoholic one-time novelist who hasn’t written anything other than fanciful titles for never-to-be-written books in over ten years. At the height of her fame, and to her perennial disgust, she was always called the new Virginia Woolf. It doesn’t help that she can’t stand Woolf’s work, which may be one of the reasons why she stopped writing. But now, between drinks of vodka from the countless old Sarson’s Malt Vinegar bottles she has stashed around the house, she gets an idea for a new novel, one that will lay the old ghost while getting her back into print: She will write a novel about the last day of Virginia Woolf.

Inevitably, she gets no further than the first paragraph, which she rewrites over and over again. A typical example reads:

Virginia Woolf was sleeping. On the wall by her bed a pale parallelogram of lemony early-morning sunlight crept towards her face. When the sunlight hit her eyes, she grunted and turned over, but consciousness had indisputably dawned in her brain and was urging her awake.

The openings of the first three chapters are all variations on the opening of the Virginia Woolf novel. Elfrida herself grunts and shifts with the lemony light. Talbot’s dream figures in several of the putative openings, and his own story that follows will take the form of an awakening to a clearer understanding of what is going on around him (he is a film producer out of step with the modern world of the late-1960s, coming to terms with his own homosexuality, and also coming to recognise that his trusted partner is defrauding him). And Elfrida’s various opening paragraphs always end with Woolf recognising that “this was going to be the last day of her life”, echoing Anny’s own premonition. Anny is a young American film star brought to Britain to add cachet to the film Talbot is currently producing, but she also brings with her a host of troubles, mostly initiated by her former husband who is now a wanted terrorist, and the more she tries to run away from things the fewer places she has to turn, until the story does indeed end in her death.

So we have it: the three interweaving stories that make up this trio are all variations on the last day of Virginia Woolf. Elfrida herself is, of course, the most Woolf-like. At one point, frustrated that no publisher wants the novel she is planning (1968, when most of the novel takes place, was the nadir of interest in the Bloomsbury crowd) and beginning to suffer from DTs, and therefore in a mental state closely resembling that of Virginia Woolf in March 1941,she buys a secondhand fur coat, stuffs stones into the pocket, and plans to march into the Ouse near Woolf’s home at Rodmell. A farcical intervention stops this happening, and she ends up drying out in a religious establishment outside Taunton.

If Elfrida offers the closest parallel to Woolf, Talbot and Anny are the more engaging characters. This is because Elfrida has been defeated, knows it, and is complicit in her own downfall. Talbot and Anny are both bemused by events but are still trying to keep ahead of the game. Talbot succeeds, Anny doesn’t, perhaps ending as Woolf herself did (thought there is an unresolved mystery here), but at least there is more sense of them playing an active part in their own lives.

Thinking of Elfrida, I wonder how Boyd pitched this novel to his publisher. Things have moved on since 1968, the Bloomsberries are fashionable again, so to that extent he had an easier job. But still: “It’s a novel about the last day of Virginia Woolf, only it is set in 1968 and Woolf never appears.” Actually, Leonard Woolf is seen at a distance once, still living at Monk’s House and irrascibly chasing away would-be sightseers. In the end it’s a clever book, but perhaps more clever than good, a satisfying intellectual confection rather than something more engaging.

Oblong

01 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews

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Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, William Boyd

the dreams of bethany mellmothWilliam Boyd, of course, would never think of giving one of his books such a dull title. Would he? But several times during the course of his new collection of short stories, The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth, one or other of his characters will have written a novel, or a film script, or some such endeavour, called Oblong. It is clearly a joke, but not a very funny one.

The real joke is that Oblong would probably have been an appropriate title for the collection. It would, at least, suggest something of the continuity between the stories that he seems to be striving towards but signally fails to achieve.

These are, after all, virtually without exception, stories about novelists, film makers, art dealers, or would be members of such professions. Boyd has, himself, of course, experience in all three areas, so there is an insider feel to much of what we get here. But insider feel alone is not enough.

I hold Boyd in high esteem, he has remained one of the most consistent and reliable of the novelists of that generation. While some of his contemporaries, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, have become dull or irrelevant or self-satisfied, his work has tended to remain fresh, engaging, and well worth reading. Some of his novels (I would pick The New Confessions, The Blue Afternoon, Any Human Heart, and Sweet Caress) are, I think, particularly good. What makes them good is that Boyd is interested in story; there is always a strong plot thread running through his work which keeps us interested in the drama of what we are being told. Which may be why he is also so effective as a screenwriter and even as a director. The cross-over effect is obvious in his fiction not in the usual way, the jump cuts and dialogue that can make so many recent novels read more like film scripts, but in the way he focuses, the way small things acquire significance.

Unfortunately, he has never carried those talents into his short fiction (there is one exception in this collection, but it is an odd exception and I will come to that later). This is the third or fourth of his five short story collections that I have read (if I read On the Yankee Station it was so long ago that I have forgotten all details, hence the hesitation; the collection, The Dream Lover, I know about only because it is listed with his other works in this volume, I don’t recall ever even seeing a copy). And I think the fact that I persist is a perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience: I always expect better of Boyd, I am always disappointed.

Boyd simply seems to have forgotten the importance of story in stories. Instead he indulges in some overly familiar formal literary experimentation. One story of a relationship is told backwards from break-up to first meeting, adding nothing to the countless times we have seen exactly the same thing before. There’s a story told in diary entries, in which each of the diarists witness the same event, interpret it differently, and never fully understand what actually happened. Another story is told entirely through unsent letters. Actually this one is curious, an opportunity missed. Epistolary fiction is, of course, just about as old as English Literature, so the fact that the letters are unsent seems like a novelty, giving vent to rage and frustration. However, so much of the short fiction here is built around that good old typically English emotional experience, embarrassment; so if the letters had been sent the story could have acquired another emotional level as the author then rowed frantically back on his accusations and self-justifications. Maybe not; my thoughts turned this way only because I found the unsent letters themselves so unsatisfactory as a story.

When he is not playing with form, Boyd’s stories tend to be concatenations of vignettes that are vaguely linked without ever really seeming to form a whole. The prime example here is the longest piece in the book, the novella, “The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth”, which describes a series of brief encounters over two years in the life of a young woman. Bethany drifts from boyfriend to boyfriend, doomed to be disappointed by each one in turn and head back home to mother. She drifts from dead-end job to dead-end job, usually acquired through her mother who seems to be extraordinarily rich and well connected (this is not unusual, most of the stories are about rich and well-connected people, or people who move freely in such circles; it is an achingly middle class book). She drifts from artistic aspiration to artistic aspiration: at various times she is going to be an author, an actress, a photographer, a singer, without ever making much effort to pursue these aspirations. And at the end she drifts away from the story, and we re left to wonder what that was all about.

Occasionally, Boyd seems to respond to some atavistic memory that there is supposed to be story in here somewhere. Thus in “Humiliation” a novelist gets revenge on the critic who savaged his latest book by feeding the critic a tainted oyster, which somehow feels more petty than dramatic.

In all of this, Boyd remains a fine writer. On a sentence-by-sentence level the work is engaging; the problem is that the sentences don’t seem to add up to anything. But there is, as I said, an exception: the very last piece in the book, a novelette called “The Vanishing Game: An Adventure …”, which, after what had gone before, I fell upon with cries of joy (so one does vaguely wonder whether the contrast makes it seem more, but I dismiss such thoughts as irrelevant). The story begins, oddly enough, with a quotation from Isaac Asimov; I wouldn’t have Boyd pegged as an Asimov fan, and there is certainly nothing science fictional in this or anything else he has written.

This is, in all honesty, a piece of nonsense that never quite makes sense, but it is also a story of constant action and intrigue somewhat in the manner of The Thirty-Nine Steps. The narrator is a second rate actor who makes a living appearing in cheap action films where he is usually the one who gets bumped off. He has been burgled, his car has been damaged, and his latest audition has turned into a fiasco. Then he is offered £1,000 in cash to drive a car up to a remote village in Scotland. He is happy to accept the offer, but ten suspicious things start to happen. He spots the same hitchhiker at different points along the journey; he realizes he is being followed by a mysterious black car; and so on. Then, when he gets to the place where he is supposed to make his delivery, he finds the woman who hired him apparently dead, though her body has disappeared by the time he gets the police to the spot. What follows is a fast-paced adventure set in a bleak Scottish moor. What makes the story is that the way he responds to each new threat, and the complicated plans he puts into effect to solve the puzzle are all derived from the cheap thrillers he has appeared in. The effect is both ludicrous and gripping, in fact the whole thing would make a good comedy drama for TV; indeed, I wonder if it wasn’t originally pitched as such. It is not as subtly done as the spy novels he has written, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms, and the resolution doesn’t quite work, yet the story stands head and shoulders above everything else in this collection precisely because it is a story.

Swift’s Atonement

23 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, Uncategorized

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Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, William Boyd

Of that generation of mainstream writers who were brought to prominence by the first of Granta‘s Best Young Writers promotions, I steadily lost interest in most of them over the years. Amis fils fell away after just a couple of books, I managed four by Pat Barker before losing interest, it was pretty much the same with Julian Barnes, and the last few novels by Ian McEwan were so dull that the most recent has been sitting on my to-be-read pile for a couple of years without me ever feeling like opening it. Only William Boyd and Graham Swift have, for rather different reasons, stayed the course: I enjoy the historical sweep of Boyd’s novels at his best, and the narrow focus of Swift’s at his best. Continue reading →

Reprint: Scientists

02 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Angela Carter, C.P. Snow, Carter Scholz, Charles Dickens, Charles Harness, Clifford D. Simak, Connie Willis, Don DeLillo, Frank Herbert, Gregory Benford, Iain Pears, Ian McEwan, Ian Watson, John Banville, Jonathan Swift, Lucius Shepard, Michael Crichton, Nancy Kress, Pamela Zoline, Piers Anthony, Rafael Carter, Roger Zelazny, Russell McCormmach, Thomas More, William Boyd

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. This one first appeared in Vector 211, May-June 2000.

Continue reading →

Reprint: Swiftly

01 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Adam Roberts, Beatrix Potter, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire

This review of Swiftly by Adam Roberts first appeared in Interzone 216, June 2008. Continue reading →

Reprint: A Beast Licking its Chops

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Ann Leckie, Christopher Priest, Ian McEwan, John Wyndham, Miguel de Cervantes, Simon Ings, Thomas M. Disch

Now that a new Interzone is out, I thought I’d reprint the interview with Simon Ings that appeared in the last issue. This accompanied my review of Wolves which I’ll also be posting here in the next few days. Continue reading →

Reprint: Throwing Away the Orthodoxy

20 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Aldous Huxley, Arthur C Clarke, Bob Shaw, Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Ed Bryant, Eric Frank Russell, Eric Rohmer, Gardner Dozois, George Orwell, George R.R. Martin, Graham Greene, Graham Swift, H.G. Wells, Ian McEwan, J.G. Ballard, Jack Dann, Jerry Pournelle, John Clute, John Fowles, John Jarrold, John Sladek, Kazuo Ishiguro, m john harrison, Martin Amis, Olaf Stapledon, Peter Ackroyd, Philip K. Dick, Rebecca West, Richard Cowper, Roz Kaveney, Thomas Huxley, Thomas M. Disch, William Boyd

I’ve written a lot about Chris Priest over the years, and most of it has ended up in What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction or Call And Response, but there is one major piece that hasn’t been reprinted. It is this interview I did with him in 1999, not long after the publication of The Extremes and The Dream Archipelago. The interview was first published in Vector 206, July-August 1999.

THROWING AWAY THE ORTHODOXY
A conversation about sex, innocence and science fiction

Paul Kincaid:  Let’s start at the end. You have just brought out all the Dream Archipelago stories collected in one volume. Why have you gone back to that?

 Christopher Priest:  Well, there’s a bad reason and a good reason.

Let’s have the bad reason. Continue reading →

Atonement

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Ian McEwan

It’s a while since I read the novel, so I couldn’t swear to it, but my impression is that the film is pretty close to the book. Certainly the basic structure is the same, the majority of book and film is devoted to Briony as a girl during the one fateful day in 1935, the middle section is split between Robbie at Dunkirk and Briony as a nurse, then there is a brief coda with Briony as an old novelist. Some of the detail is different (most noticeably, I don’t think the old Briony section is treated as an interview in the novel), and some things are passed over more briefly in the film (the scene at Lola’s wedding to Paul Marshall is, I am sure, more prominent in the novel). But essentially this is about as true an adaptation as you could hope to find. Continue reading →

A day in the life …

12 Friday Aug 2011

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Ian McEwan

Saturday by Ian McEwan (Cape, 2005)… Continue reading →

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