The Long and the Short of it
Anna Goodall considers Ian McEwan’s brilliant early work
Ian McEwan has become one of the most successful and consistently popular British novelists of his time. Admired by both the literary press and the book-buying public, he has written a string of well-received novels, most recently Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005) and his latest, On Chesil Beach (2007). And yet, I don’t think McEwan is really a novelist by nature, and his novels, although accomplished, do not have the potential to be considered truly great.
Despite his structural and conceptual brilliance, forensic attention to detail, and both a well-honed and instinctive linguistic gift, he has a cold eye. And once you get to about page 200 in the full-length novels, there’s not an awful lot of flesh left on what was once a gripping conceptual bone. Great novels need great (and flawed) characters, but McEwan’s people are only there to serve his purpose; you never grow to care about them (primarily because he doesn’t). So, tell me … is it just me, or does anyone else get a drop-the-bomb-feeling as they near the close of a McEwan novel?
However, the short story – a form so problematic for most – is where McEwan becomes truly great, and is the medium in which he deserves to be celebrated. His two collections – First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between The Sheets (1978) – and one exquisite novella, The Cement Garden (1978) are devastating and original. Darkly youthful and sardonically funny, his ideas, as always, are
brilliant, and his precise use of language allows him to ruthlessly pursue them to maximum effect.
These are tales of sexual awakening and desire, isolation and loss, and the backdrop to them all is a subverted yet claustrophobically prosaic suburban environment, an ordinary but warped domestic, where the idea of self becomes blurred and uncertain, and, at times, is completely destroyed. Isolated within these barren settings, the characters’ enclosed, sometimes paranoid or disturbed experiences are utterly convincing. Paul Bailey, reviewing In Between the Sheets in the Observer, put it rather well: ‘They are about the recognisable world of private fantasy and nightmare [that] we are all involved in.’ Bailey’s quote precisely underlines an important quality in the works: that the characters live in a reality that is both removed from, and related to, a life we recognise and are part of. They disturb because they engage with our own desires and ideas a little too well.
The Cement Garden draws together many of the themes that dominate McEwan’s short stories: children existing or trying to exist in an adult world that is itself revealed to be deeply unstable; the drearily claustrophobic domestic; and, within that environment, the struggle to hold on to identity. The novella is a modern fairytale, and like many classics in that genre it is the story of parental abandonment and, ultimately, survival.
Four siblings are left alone in the family house after the death of both parents. It stands eerily dislocated from the world in an urban wasteland, surrounded only by burnt-out prefabs and demolished flats. ‘Our house had once stood in a street full of houses. Now it stood on empty land … The other houses were knocked down for a motorway that was never built. … No one ever came to visit us.’ As so often in McEwan, sex and sexual awakening is the trigger for events spinning out of control. Our teenage narrator Jack reaches puberty – he orgasms properly for the first time – at quite literally the same moment that his father dies, collapsing from a heart attack face down in the wet cement he has been laying. Yes, partly a sick and very typical McEwan joke, but also a symbol of Jack’s premature emergence into the adult world.
The death of his bullying and obsessive father is something of a relief. Jack tells us: ‘I did not have a thought in my head as I picked up the plank and carefully smoothed away his impression in the soft, fresh concrete.’ However, when their mother dies some months later, the children tell no one, hoping to avoid being taken into care, and instead bury her in a trunk using the cement their father bought for the garden. As the cracks start to appear in her makeshift coffin, so their lives spiral completely out of control. The absence of parental figures is equated with freedom, and destructive power. Jack smashes up some of the cement garden that his father painstakingly built (‘Before his first heart attack he had intended to build a high wall round his special world.’) and the surrounding burnt-out homes which stand as a desolate reminder of former domestic structures: ‘Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do […] But in this burnt out place there was no order, everything had gone’. His actions are a rejection of the seemingly futile order that has held their isolated family together. But in reality all the children can do is to try and rebuild what they know, and what they have irretrievably lost.
McEwan has a rare ability, through a combination of deliberately plain delivery and a razor-sharp use of language (every single word counts, has been carefully chosen) to make you utterly believe in the fragments he creates on the page. The Cement Garden is so effective as a story because it harnesses the thoughts of someone who is essentially still a child, that bland matter-of-fact relaying of events through which we can see suffering. On one occasion Jack walks into the kitchen to find the table set for the first time in a long time: ‘There was a chair for each plate. I thought, as if we were real people.’ Or his reflection that, ‘When we were not actually down there with the trunk it was as if we were asleep.’
When the story climaxes in the consummation of the desire that has rippled between Jack and his ‘exceptionally beautiful’ older sister Julie we are not surprised. From the early game they played, examining their younger sister Sue as a tool to express their own feelings for each other, to the descriptions of Julie, which are the most lyrical moments in the text – ‘Julie had a high ridge of cheekbone beneath her eyes that gave her the look of some rare wild animal. In the electric light her eyes were black and big … I longed to examine my older sister but the game did not allow for that’ – we are utterly convinced that their incestuous recreation of the nuclear family is inevitable, right almost, rather than simply shocking.
Playing roles, and the confusion of those roles with identities, is a constant theme in the early works. As Jack looks at his younger brother, Tom, who has taken to dressing up as a girl and acting as a baby, he muses: ‘How easy it was to be someone else … I was looking at another person, someone who could expect a life quite different from Tom’s. I was excited and scared.’
In ‘Disguises’, the very last story in First Love, Last Rites, a young boy, Henry, goes to live with his aunt after his mother’s death and is forced to play a role in what appears to be her psychological breakdown. His Aunt Mina was an actress, and every night she dresses up in a new outfit. Not to be left out, an outfit is laid out for Henry on his bed, which he has to wear for his dinner. When a girl’s dress, and a long blonde wig, are waiting for him after school he starts to clarify his own uneasiness and the disturbance that he has always sensed beneath her theatrical peculiarities. And again, his own sexual awakening – falling in love with the new girl at school – seems to jar with the strange order laid out for him by the adult world; again the roles are confused: ‘Mina sketched out her day’s impressions and confidences, more wife in these than aunt.’ Mina’s performances and the dinner ritual, again in a gloomily archaic, if more ordered home setting are, ‘All so very strange, somehow to Henry ordinary.’
Unlike Jack, Henry, a thoroughly sensible little boy (indeed he has to be for the story to be so effective), manages to hold on to his sense of self, and understands, even if he cannot clarify what he is experiencing, that these bizarre rituals do not define him. He can even see enough to know that they do not entirely define Mina, and remains sympathetic to her. ‘[H]e told himself – it’s for her, it’s nothing to do with anything, it’s for her, it’s nothing to do with me.’ And after one unequivocally abusive ‘role-playing’ game he is sick on her, staggering to his feet to blurrily insist, ‘I’m Henry’.
Taking games too far is also explored in ‘Dead as They Come’ from In Between the Sheets, which is possibly the funniest and most dramatic short from the two collections. McEwan is able to lend both a cruelly sardonic eye and a sense of the absolute veracity to the events described by the first-person narrator. (And in general, in this second collection, McEwan is more assured and brutally observant.) This tale concerns a wildly successful middle-aged businessman who is utterly detached from his emotional reality. Unable to stomach any more
relationships with real women, he falls in love with a mannequin. What is frighteningly funny is how he completely convinces himself that she is real – a fact which makes the story’s violent ending all the more grimly compelling.
And it is in the details he leaves out that we are most disturbed. She is called Helen, but we don’t know when he named her … to admit that, would be to admit his fantasy. He recounts, in his pompous, narcissistic voice, the relationship he perceives with the doll from its nascent hopeful beginnings, to the bitter end:
Would she look at me? Would she remember me from one time to another? Was there a future for us together […] What did all my millions mean now, what now of my wisdom matured by the ravages of three marriages? I loved her […] I wished to possess her. And to possess her it seemed I would have to buy her.
Most hilarious are the scenes where he reads exactly what he wants into her lifeless face:
With Helen I could converse ideally, I could talk to her. She sat quite still, her eyes fixed at a point several inches in front of her plate, and listened. I told her many things I had never spoken out loud before […] Before we knew it five hours had passed and we had drunk four bottles of wine and half a bottle of port.
At the story’s core (and at the heart of almost all McEwan stories) is a sense of extreme isolation and loneliness, which facilitates a subtle but complete removal from the world. Even though we see the narrator as a brute, an egotist of the highest order, we can also see that his actions stem from an inability to communicate with the world at large, and an underlying recognition of the meaninglessness of all the symbols and attributes of success that he has accumulated (a point underlined by his manic destruction of his house at the story’s close). And just as Jack descends into a grotesque state of uncleanliness as a physical expression of his distress (he cannot separate the new smell of his teenage body odour from the stink of his mother’s rotting concrete-bound corpse), so our wealthy hero, once he is in the throes of jealousy (suspecting that Helen is having an affair with his chauffeur), starts to lose the physical edges that define him: ‘Essentially I was a disintegrating man, I was coming apart […] My mouth filled with cankers and my breath had about it the stench of a decaying carcass. […] I nurtured a vicious boil on my anus. I was losing.’
In his fable-like tales, McEwan’s grip on the truth of his characters’ experience never wavers, which allows him to cover audacious topics as if quotidian: the man who lives in a cupboard because he wants to be a baby, the boy who plays mummies and daddies with his sister just to lose his virginity, the amusing first-person narrative of an ape rejected by his former human lover and the man who finds a neatly geometric solution to his failing marriage. And his ability to describe is always pure and brilliant. Take this passage introducing the character of a choreographer in the satirical very short story, ‘Cocker at the Theatre’: ‘Out of the dark came the choreographer. She had a stylish trenchcoat on, tied in the middle with a wide belt. She had a small waist and sticky-bun hairdo. She walked like a pair of scissors.’ That’s the only description we get, and for the purposes of the story, it’s all we need. He has wonderful judgement on how much to explain, tell and reveal within a story, and it is by no means everything.
The two-part story ‘Two Fragments: March 199–’ from In Between The Sheets is perhaps the most reflective work from the two collections. It is a vision of the future that is uncannily realistic, but it’s also a tender-hearted tale of a father and daughter surviving together in a future world where resources are fast running out. Water is fought over in the streets, and great tarpaulins laid out when it rains, travel is only on foot, and the child, Marie, has never seen the sea. The protagonist, another Henry, works in The Ministry – ‘an old dream of horizontal lines converging on the thrusting steel and glass perpendicular’ – and the passage at his desk where he is described writing endless letters that have lost all meaning to him, trapped in a bureaucratic system, brings to mind 1984. And like Orwell, McEwan, although writing the story in 1978, has drawn a world that still works as a compelling vision of the future. Nothing is explained or debated, the story simply reports two days in the life of this man, tiny unremarkable details painting a vivid picture of an altered world:
It took an hour to walk to work. They stopped once, halfway across Chelsea Bridge. Marie climbed from her pushchair and Henry held her up so she could look down at the river. It was a daily ritual. […] Thousands walked in the same direction each morning. Henry rarely recognised a friend but if he did they walked together in silence.
In these shorter works McEwan brings everything into focus, a delicious, cold, enticing clarity that grips you firmly and pursues its vision until the very last word. To my mind, the novels just cannot compete. I read a review in the Independent of his latest, On Chesil Beach and it made me laugh: ‘When Edward finds a stray pubic hair as he attempts to get Florence aroused, you see McEwan at his forensic best: that lone pubic hair contains more foreboding than any other pubic hair in history.’ I can well believe it. It sounds like a classic McEwan opener, but I don’t quite have the heart to try it. I recommend returning, instead, to his shorter works (as I have done, again and again) and seeing this master of short fiction at work in his true, harsh element.
