Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“THE CHILDREN ACT” by Ian McEwan (first published in 2014)

            Twice before on this blog, I’ve dealt with novels by the British novelist Ian McEwan

(see the posts on On Chesil Beach and Sweet Tooth) and I have vented my opinions of his work. To save myself some time, here is what I said in one of my earlier reviews: 

“I admit to having a limited and bumpy relationship with McEwan’s novels. I enjoyed Enduring Love, despite its pervasive sardonic tone; found On Chesil Beach an interesting, if limited, reflection on defunct sexual mores; and believe Amsterdam to be the slightest, and probably least worthy, novel ever to have won the Booker. (Gossip says it won as compensation to McEwan for not winning with better novels in previous years). I admit to not having read Atonement, which some people rate McEwan’s best. (I read the “Dunkirk” section when it was extracted in Granta, but apart from that only saw the movie version.)”

As you can see, I’m not a great McEwan fan, but being a fair-minded person, I recently decided to read another of his novels just to check if I’d misjudged him. So I plucked The Children Act out of the local library. (Yes, I’m aware that in 2017 it was made into a movie starring Emma Thompson – at least seven of McEwan’s novels have been filmed - but I missed that one).

Despite all protests to the contrary, The Children Act is very much a “problem” or

“thesis” novel. A High Court judge has to decide a case of life-and-death and we are meant to ask if her judgement is right, or whether she has been too influenced by personal feelings. Because the case she judges involves religious beliefs, we are also asked to decide whether religious beliefs should have any weight in a court of law. These clearly are Big Issues, and while I think novels can legitimately deal with Big Issues, I also suspect that such novels are often praised by journalist-reviewers who think that Big Issues of themselves make for a Serious and Important Novel. And – to rush to my judgement before I lay out my evidence – I find The Children Act a schematic performance with unbelievable straw-man characters and a very skewed argument.

The “Children Act” of the title is the act which [in Britain and elsewhere] rules that 18 is the age when legal adulthood begins, and therefore that legal decisions concerning young people under 18 have to be made, or endorsed, by their parents or guardians. So here is High Court Judge Fiona Maye, nearly 60 years old, addressed by her colleagues as “My Lady”, who specialises in the Children’s Division and spends much of her time ruling on messy custody battles between fractious divorcing parents. But sometimes she has to rule in medical matters concerning children. Before her court come two Jehovah’s Witnesses, Kevin and Naomi Henry. They are clearly good parents, they are sincere, strong in their religious faith which, by their own testimony, has straightened out their previously messy lives, and they love their 17-year-old son Adam. But Adam is very sick with leukemia and needs a blood transfusion; and Jehovah’s Witnesses believe blood transfusions are contrary to Biblical teaching. Adam’s parents – and apparently Adam himself - refuse the blood transfusion which the medical profession says he should have. So here are lawyers for the medical profession and lawyers for Adam’s parents arguing the case in Fiona Maye’s court.

Up to a point, McEwan deals even-handedly with the case. Obviously the lawyers for the medical profession are rational and clearly-spoken people. But Adam’s parents are not presented as fanatics or fools and their lawyer makes many plausible points against blood transfusion.

Even so, the argument becomes very skewed once High Court Judge Fiona Maye decides to visit Adam personally in hospital, to see whether he has really rejected treatment of his own free will, or whether he has been unduly influenced by his parents. Adam, it turns out, is sure of his faith and really does believe blood transfusion is wrong. But he is also an alert, perceptive, sensitive young man who writes poetry and aspires to play the violin. Indeed (and at this point I thought “Bollocks!”) he plays his violin for the visiting High Court Judge and she sings along to “Down By the Salley Gardens”. And quite clearly the 60-year-old judge gets a kind of sentimental crush on the 17-year-old boy.

I don’t say that, in his methodical and thesis-minded planning of the novel, McEwan hasn’t prepared us for this. Even before the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ case comes up, we know that Fiona Maye is emotionally vulnerable. She has long lamented the fact that she has no children, and to make matters worse her marriage to Jack, an historian and academic, may be on the rocks. You see, Jack has suggested that he be allowed to go off and have an affair with a much younger woman, pleading for “open marriage”, and Fiona has been appalled and has kicked Jack out and is reassessing her sterile life… and now she meets this sympathetic boy. So here is that thing about whether she is letting her emotions cloud her judgement. She goes back to court and decides that Adam should be given the blood transfusion… but has she been swayed in this by her own feelings for the boy, her own desire for him to live because he fills an emotional void in her life?

I confess that at this point in the novel I was almost laughing. McEwan’s strategies are so obvious. Pause for a moment, dear reader, and consider this scenario. What if the youth Fiona Maye meets were an uncouth, foul-mouthed, pimply-face yobbo rather than a civilised, poetry-writing, violin-playing paragon?  Would his life be any less important? The type of situation Ian McEwan sets up is very much akin to those old anti-lynching movies Hollywood used to make, where the lynch victim always just happened to be innocent of any crime. A real anti-lynching film would have told us that lynching was wrong even if the victim were guilty as hell, because in and of itself lynching, which ignores due process of law, is always wrong. McEwan skews his whole case as soon as Adam (what an obviously resonant name!) personally enters the novel. Okay, McEwan has to have somebody with whom the judge can become emotionally involved. But it still manoeuvres readers into thinking what a pity it would be if this particular young man - such a nice violin-playing, poetry-reading chap - were to die; whereas a more credible morality would say what a pity it would be if any youth should die in these circumstances.

Where the novel goes from this point reaches further and further into the realm of implausibility… so I won’t bother synopsising it. I began to wonder if the word “Act” in the title was meant to be a verb as much as a noun, not only because the legally-defined child (Adam) acts, but because the actions and thoughts of Fiona Maye are those of a child – extremely self-centred. The youth gets a crush on her and he (unbelievably for one debilitated by a serious disease) stalks her around England. She impulsively reciprocates his feelings for one brief moment, then regrets it. What an immature twit. It ends in tears. The characterisation of Fiona Maye is artificial at best.

Additional, thesis-related thoughts occur to me. Aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses fairly easy targets for a secularist novelist like McEwan? The JWs’ rejection of blood transfusion has been dealt with in novels and movies before, in loaded form where rejection of such medical treatment is seen as self-evidently foolish. (By coincidence I recently watched on Youtube the ancient British film Life for Ruth, made in 1962, which argues the case in just these terms.) I am sure that 99% of readers (including me) would already be inclined to reject JW beliefs on this particular matter, before they had even read the first page of The Children Act. McEwan might have found it harder to argue his case against religious beliefs if he were dealing with a more mainstream, and more sophisticated, religious group than with this small sect. In the cases which Fiona Maye remembers, McEwan takes passing digs at other religious groups anyway -  quarrelsome conservative Jews in a custody battle; a Catholic bishop opposed to separating conjoined twins because one of them will certainly die. Really, in McEwan’s novels, religion is already a priori condemned and dosesn’t stand a chance.

I have often said negative things about reviewers who praise or condemn novels solely in terms of the issues and ideas they deal with, rather than also considering how the novel is written. Style and substance are always intertwined. I don’t want to be a hypocrite in this matter, as you will have noted that I am here criticising McEwan in terms of his (very loaded) ideas. But of style, let me say simply that every calculation McEwan makes to build up his thesis is plain to see. With just a little gussying-up, his characters are really ideas representing positions he either accepts or rejects. You can, as the cliché says, see the joins.

While I have not seen the film that was made from this novel, I was amused to read one lukewarm review of it in the NZ Listener. The reviewer complained of the film’s melodramatic moments, saying that in the film “subtle tragedy gives way to melodrama” and that the film (scripted by McEwan himself) betrayed the novel. Sorry my friend, but the novel itself is already unsubtle melodrama. This was pointed out in another review of the film (in the Guardian) which said that the film merely exposed the inherent flaws in the novel – especially the notion that a cancer-stricken patient, recently at death’s door, would be able to stalk a High Court judge around much of England. Quite.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 “ON CHESIL BEACH” by Ian McEwan (first published 2007)

 

            Am I allowed, if just occasionally, in this “Something Old” spot, to tell you how much I disliked a novel and how I alert you to it solely as a means of deterring you from reading it?

            Of course I’m allowed, because I run this ruddy blog and there’s not an awful lot you can do about it. So there!

I am neither hot nor cold about the English novelist Ian McEwan (born 1948), despite all the acclaim he has received. McEwan has been both commercially and critically successful. Seven of his novels have been filmed. He has been six times nominated for the Booker and four times shortlisted. On this blog, when I was reviewing his weak 2012 effort Sweet Tooth [look it up on the index at right], I suggested that when McEwan won the Booker in 1998, for his lame novella Amsterdam, there was a widespread suspicion that the judges were compensating him for the failure to even nominate his earlier, and much better, Enduring Love (1997).

Despite its consistently sardonic and superior tone, I quite enjoyed Enduring Love, essentially the story of a mentally-deranged man who believes himself to be in love with another man and causes trouble when he is spurned. I couldn’t help being aware, however, of McEwan’s negative and destructive views on love, marriage and domesticity. He is rarely able to write about them without putting the knife in. It is neither right nor seemly to attribute an author’s views to his own domestic circumstances, but McEwan was involved in a very messy and public custody battle when his first marriage broke up, and this may have had at least some influence on the way he depicts the relationships between men and women.

In my review of Sweet Tooth, I referred to On Chesil Beach (shortlisted for the Booker 2007) as “an interesting, if limited, reflection on defunct sexual mores”. I was being far too polite. This short novel is in fact a smug and very self-satisfied piece of work.

Alerting us to the short novel’s main themes in a clumsy and obvious way (but regarded as brilliant compression by McEwan’s devotees) the opening sentence reads: “They were young, educated and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

            In the very early 1960s, an English couple, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, both 22, come to a seaside hotel in Dorset for their honeymoon. He is nervous that he will not perform properly in bed. She is mildly repelled by the whole idea of physical contact. There is a dim, and very faint, suggestion – hinting at catchpenny pop psychology on McEwan’s part - that she has been sexually abused by her father. In great close-up physical detail we get every least physical reaction they have to each other as they eat a meal and prepare to go to the bedroom. We also get long flashbacks to their respective family backgrounds.  He is more lower-middle-class than she is, more of a country boy, with a taste for jazz and brawling, a schoolteacher father and a mentally-damaged mother. She is more wealthy, upper-middle-class, her father prosperous in business, her mother a lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. He has vague ideas of becoming an historian. She is a musician, plays in a string-quartet and hopes to perform at the Wigmore Hall. She is at least relieved that her parents did not condescend to his parents at the morning’s wedding.

            Eventually, after all their mutual anticipation and anxiety, the bedroom scene comes, and it is a complete disaster. Virginal, over-excited, and inexperienced in love-making, he ejaculates prematurely and messily all over her. She is disgusted and runs off down to the pebbly strand of the title. (Ah yes – a pebbly strand. Such a symbolically liminal place.) He later follows her. They argue and she runs off.

Flashforward. The marriage is annulled for non-consummation. Years go by. They never see each other, though he hears of her success as a musician. He goes through various women and an unsuccessful marriage. Occasionally he wonders why they didn’t make a success of it, and regrets the happy marriage and children that could have been. End.

When I checked them out, I found a number of English reviews of this novel immediately plunged in by quoting Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis”, which begins:

“Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.”

This is clearly because the historical setting of On Chesil Beach is so very specific – the early 1960s with lots of deliberate period detail. Hanging over much of it is the implicit idea that these two virgins would have benefitted sexually from the permissiveness and openness that was to come later in the 1960s. In other words they were, by McEwan’s implication, victims of the social and sexual constraints of their time. In its mixture of close-ups and long-shots, the novel is stylistically competent. But as to its major themes, I’m not so sure. Frankly, I’m not convinced that the level of sexual ignorance was then as great as McEwan depicts it. McEwan would have been 14 at the time the novel is set. One wonders if this is really the dramatization of every spotty adolescent’s delusion that his parents didn’t know anything about sex. Or is On Chesil Beach in fact the portrait of the repressed habits of a particular English social class?  Or is it simply a tale of two neurotic and atypical individuals – in which case it has little meaning for the rest of us, unless we are to accept McEwan’s caricature of an earlier age?

To McEwan’s credit, there is at least a little ambiguity in the ending. Far from celebrating the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, it seems to suggest that Edward took a wrong path in not persisting with Florence, and that he now regrets it. The moral may simply be that Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting (gosh, how deliberately Victorian those surnames sound) should have talked to each other, and that openness of communication about sexual matters is essential for a happy marriage. But none of this atones for the superior and condescending view that McEwan takes of an earlier age, and the thinness of his conception.

There. You really don’t have to read this one now.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“SWEET TOOTH” by Ian McEwan (Random House / Jonathan Cape, $NZ37:99)

            At the heart of Ian McEwan’s latest novel is a very simple conceit. Serena Frome, a nice young woman fresh from Cambridge, is hired by MI5, Britain’s spy service. This is in the early 1970s, so the Cold War is still on. At first, Serena has little more than what amount to filing duties. Then one of her superiors gives her a more interesting assignment, codenamed “Sweet Tooth”. Claiming to belong to a cover organization that dispenses literary grants, she is to approach a junior academic and writer of short-stories, T.H.(Tom) Haley , and offer him a generous grant to write a novel.

            As MI5 calculate it, it’s possible that Haley, who has penned the odd anti-communist article, can be turned into a major anti-communist literary figure. Like other artistic talents covertly funded by the organization, he could be a counter-balance to all those left-ish literary figures who are too forgiving of the Soviet Union, or who argue that there’s no practical difference between the USSR and the Western Alliance.

            Serena is at first not too enthusiastic about the assignment, which seems small beer compared with the mighty task of outwitting Soviet agents or pursuing counter-terrorism against the Provisional IRA (a big concern of MI5 in the early 1970s). But once she meets Haley, gets to know him, and gets to read his work, she feels differently about him. In fact she falls in love with him.

            And there we have our very simple conceit – the degrees of deception the agent has to maintain in order to carry out her task. It’s a case of love, duty and the strong temptation to blow her own cover.

            A number of reviewers have already complained about the difficulty of trying to examine a novel like this, without giving away the twists and surprises of its plot. Like those reviewers, I respect the convention that one does not give spoilers on a new novel. So I will offer no detailed synopsis beyond this set-up. Suffice it to say that the novel has multiple examples of betrayal and broken confidences, where espionage and personal feelings overlap. We soon learn not to be surprised that people are not always what Serena takes them to be.

            Beyond this appearance-and-reality matter, McEwan has an added agenda. He wants to show his literary cleverness. As is established in the opening pages, Serena is an avid reader of novels. These are repeatedly referenced as she tells her own story in the first person. Sharper readers are supposed to see how her reading not only influences the way she sees the world, but also echoes the facts of her own story.

            Then there is the device of having her read – and give detailed synopses of – Tom Haley’s short stories as she undertakes Operation “Sweet Tooth”. One story is about a man surrendering to a woman’s reckless love after she has mistaken him for somebody else. Another has a man objectifying women to the point of being in love with a mannequin. A third has a wife betraying a husband. Mistaken love, exploitation, betrayal – yes, they are all meant to underscore Serena’s own situation. And some of them are re-hashes of stories McEwan himself wrote in earlier years. In fact, elements of Tom Haley are an autobiographical portrait of McEwan. As a six-time nominee for the Booker Prize, and one-time winner, McEwan also has some fun at the expense of literary awards. He name-checks some of his literary friends.

            Read as a sub-Le Carre story, Sweet Tooth has its points. Obviously part of McEwan’s inspiration was the “soft” Cold War, in which both Soviet bloc and Western Alliance secret services tried to influence covertly the literary and intellectual life of the West. The Encounter affair is referenced a number of times – a modest, intelligent, liberal-left but anti-communist magazine, which turned out to have accepted some CIA funding. There is some interest in McEwan’s depiction of MI5 modi operandi and recruitment procedures. In an early passage where Serena is being vetted, she tells us how she gave the recruiters exactly those opinions the service found acceptable:

            “I spoke the language of a Times leader, echoing patrician, thoughtful-sounding opinions that could hardly be opposed. For example, when we arrived at the ‘permissive society’ I cited The Times’s view that the sexual freedom of individuals had to be balanced against the needs of children for security and love. Who could take a stand against that? I was getting into my stride. Then there was my passion for English history. Again [the MI5 recruiter] perked up. What in particular? The Glorious Revolution. Ah now, that was very interesting indeed! And then, later, who was my intellectual hero? I talked of Churchill, not as a politician but as an historian (I summarised the ‘incomparable’ account of Trafalgar), as the Nobel Laureate for Literature and then as the watercolourist….” (Pg.35-36)

            This is almost an anthology of all the Tory prejudices that were then MI5’s intellectual touchstones. At the same time, the early 1970s were a time when the spy service was just beginning to recruit women and people with non-U accents, such as Serena’s sometime friend Shirley. There’s even a passing reference to a “Millie Trimingham” (Pg.39), transparently Stella Rimington who was to become MI5’s director-general in the 1990s.

            Serena narrates all this from the perspective of 40 years later – but here we have a major problem. Men novelists can successfully adopt the voice of a woman; and women novelists can successfully adopt the voice of a man. But I was never wholly convinced of the reality of Serena. She seemed to have been neatly concocted by McEwan to illustrate his intended lecture on the Relationship of Life and Literature. In fact well before midway point I was irritated by the thought that she reminded me of nothing so much as Ian Fleming’s unsuccessful attempt to have a woman narrate his weakest James Bond yarn, The Spy Who Loved Me. (Incidentally, Ian Fleming is specifically referenced late in Sweet Tooth.)

            A reason is ultimately offered for some of the things I complain of here – but that’s one of those things I can’t tell you lest I push the spoiler button.

            I admit to having a limited and bumpy relationship with McEwan’s novels. I enjoyed Enduring Love, despite its pervasive sardonic tone; found On Chesil Beach an interesting, if limited, reflection on defunct sexual mores; and believe Amsterdam to be the slightest, and probably least worthy, novel ever to have won the Booker. (Gossip says it won as compensation to McEwan for not winning with better novels in previous years). I admit to not having read Atonement, which some people rate McEwan’s best. (I read the “Dunkirk” section when it was extracted in Granta, but apart from that only saw the movie version.)

            In the NZ Listener, Guy Somerset wrote a largely negative review of Sweet Tooth, eventually dismissing it as ”a career novelist going through the motions”. [You can access his review on the Listener’s website.] A little harsh, maybe, but I can see Somerset’s point. Sweet Tooth is diverting enough while you are reading it. The author is an erudite, well-read chap who produces a clean and readable prose. But you do not finish it feeling you have been enlightened about the world or given insights that you did not have before. You finish it thinking it was an intellectual game, noting the glib trickiness of its ending and remarking “That was kinda clever”. Then you move on to what you hope will be something more engaged and heartfelt.

Enraging footnote: If you have the intention of reading Sweet Tooth, DO NOT look up the article on it on Wikipedia. Not only does it give away the novel’s ending, but it spoils all its other twists as well. I don’t mind committing those crimes when I am discussing one of my “Something Old” choices that have been in circulation for years, but it is very rough treatment indeed for a novel that is still hot off the press.