![]() Even so, the pallid qualifiers and disposable adverbs (a "gently rocking" sheet of water, the "coyly drooping" head of a nettle) come as a surprise. Unlike Martin Amis, say, or Salman Rushdie, McEwan is an invisible rather than a flamboyant stylist. One longs for a cinematic clarity and concentration of dialogue and action, but such interludes dissolve before our - and the participants' - eyes. Instead of the expected sharpness of focus, the first 70 or so pages are a lengthy summary of shifting impressions. The opening is almost perversely ungripping. McEwan is, in other words, a thoroughly traditional original.Ītonement does not feel, at first, like a book by McEwan. This is why the themes of the novels (with the exception of the enjoyably forgettable Amsterdam ) linger and resonate beyond the impeccable neatness of their arrangement. Moral ambiguity and doubt are thereby enhanced - rather than resolved - by clarity of presentation. ![]() Needless to say, the more disturbing or skewed that reality (in the early stories and novels, most obviously), the more finely McEwan attunes his readers to it. ![]() The novels' psychological acuity derives, always, from their fidelity to a precisely delineated reality. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |