Ian McEwan's works have always shown an interest in the question of
how fiction operates. This interest does not usually manifest on
the formal level. A few of the early stories aside, his fictions
are not formally experimental. McEwan tends to opt for those
reliable patternings of space, time and narrative progression that
enable readers to trust the authorial environment sufficiently to
identify with characters and become invested, to some extent, in
what happens to them. Despite McEwan's commitment, by and large, to
naturalistic means of telling a story, his later novels also
demonstrate a concern with opacity, as characters often pursue
courses of action for reasons that are unclear to them. Equally
often, these actions bear some relation to the intrinsic opacity or
enigma of one's sexual desires, one's relation to one's mortality,
or one's relation to the actions of those human beings who have
gone before one, as this book will show. It is this focus on enigma
in McEwan's work, whether sexual, mortal, or historical, that lends
it to a psychoanalytic reading such as the kind pursued in this
book, because for psychoanalysis there is no such thing as full
access to one's self or to one's feelings or motivations. Given
that one's relation to history is also opaque in the sense that one
grasps fully-or imagines one grasps fully-only those historical
events which predate or otherwise excludes one, this study seeks
historical reasons for why McEwan sometimes blocks readerly
identification with characters in the early fiction. For these
characters are also products of their environments, environments
which the characters' relative opacity and unlikeability seems to
offset and exaggerate or present in a manner showcased for one's
judgment. And in this way the characters' environment is
denaturalized, to say the least. This book reveals how all of these
works explore, to some extent, the human tendency to act and feel,
in particular situations, in profound contradistinction to how one
might prefer to think one would. This failure to coincide with
one's image of how one would have expected, or preferred, to
behave-The Innocent's Leonard Marnham is not the cool, experienced
lover of his imaginings, any more than Solar's Michael Beard is
going to revamp his lifestyle or career-produces instances of
affective or imaginative excess, troubling images or feelings that
can often only be allayed or dealt with by a further failure to
coincide with one's desires. In this book, author Eluned
Summers-Bremner shows that McEwan's interests in opacity not only
become clear in significance and import but that his interests in
human failure to coincide with one's views about the past and hopes
for the future also appear as what they are: an ongoing concern
with how one relates to the complex operation of human history.
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