One aspect of McEwan’s celebrated status as a stylist is his distinctive contribution to the novella, a genre that arguably reached its pinnacle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Novellas like Amsterdam (1998), with its focused critique of the left-leaning elite who did well in the Thatcher era, and On Chesil Beach (2007), with its (apparently) precise anatomy of sexual mores, reveal how McEwan uses the novella as an incisive instrument of cultural analysis. Embracing, as well, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), this chapter considers what it means to be an accomplished contemporary novella writer by making the case that, throughout his career, McEwan has continued to work with great skill in an overlooked literary form, once thought to be the most sophisticated mode of shorter fiction.

This chapter suggests that Ian McEwan’s vexed relationship with British modernism can be resolved by understanding modernism as an aesthetic and political resource that his novels adapt to new conditions of life in the twenty-first century. Looking at several of the novels with the obvious connections to modernist literature – Atonement, Saturday, Solar and The Children Act – this chapter explores the ways McEwan engages with and updates three key modernist ideals: the aesthetics of transgression and rupture; the view of human nature; and modernism’s claims for the relevance of the literary. Common to each of these ‘updates’ is a shedding of the grandiose claims of modernism in favour of more modest and minor concepts of literary value better attuned to the indirect and limited ways that literature operates today.

This chapter explores Ian McEwan’s stature as a contemporary British moral novelist by focusing on acute ethical dilemmas in five of his best-known works from the past thirty years: The Child in Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Atonement and Saturday. Beginning with the dramatic episode of a tragic balloon accident in Enduring Love, the chapter analyzes discrete scenes of intense ethical conflict in each text, in which characters are torn between altruism and self-interest. These scenes are interpreted in the context of McEwan’s distinctly self-conscious aesthetic, which makes use of complex and highly ironic relationships between the narrator and the reader. By examining ethical representations in light of McEwan’s sophisticated narrative technique, the chapter argues that McEwan has helped to revive the moral novel for a new generation and has taken his place in the lineage of great moral writers in Britain reaching back to Daniel Defoe.

McEwan’s novels can be understood as stepping stones in a prolonged enquiry into the narrative formation of masculinities. From his earliest stories through to Nutshell the performance of male roles and the unreliability of gender demarcations are the subject of a metafictional process. Instabilities of genre echo and play out instabilities of gender. Joining in arguments which propose the constructed nature of gender, McEwan de-centres and re-maps conventional narratives of male development and triumph, overtly in The Child in Time, persistently, if less obviously, elsewhere. Recognized tropes of male progression towards mastery (competition, ordeal, violent confrontation) are tested against the promise and potential calamities of forms of play involving regression, or dressing up. Representation, relentlessly pursuing its subjects, merges into its sinister other – harassment and stalking. So narrative shades into forms of obsession, and such obsessions point back to the formation of damaged male subjectivities and yearning for patriarchal power.

Ian McEwan claimed in 1978 that the ‘artifice of fiction can be taken for granted’, implying that the avant-garde experimentalism of the postwar era had run its course and that, going forward, writers ought not to fall into the trap of producing ‘self-enclosed “fictions”’ about the nature of fictionality. This chapter examines the ways in which this early stance changed quite considerably over time, as McEwan evolved into a socially engaged novelist of ideas who also uses fiction to deliberate in explicitly self-conscious terms on the history and ethical valences of literary form. Realism and innovation have never been opposed in his work, just as his fiction has inhabited only to refurbish numerous genre models – among them, espionage, the psychological thriller, period romance and topical satire. Lodestones for this chapter will include The Child in Time, Atonement, Saturday and Nutshell.

Ian McEwan’s post-realism is part of a marked aesthetic shift that began in the last decades of the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first. His novels, with their attention to close description and dependence on context as well as a qualified sense that language can capture inner and outer worlds, are part of a turn to the kinds of realism characteristic of the long nineteenth century. The essay argues the turn is transformative rather than nostalgic because, like so many of his contemporaries, McEwan responds to contemporary socio-political crises by means of postmodern strategies that include parody, irony, hybridity and metafiction. Three mid-career novels that loosely share the geopolitical context of World War II and the Cold War illustrate the argument: The Innocent, Black Dogs and Atonement. Postmodern technique and novelistic realism together provide a vehicle for McEwan’s long-standing exploration of human violence across both public and private spheres.

This chapter explores the depiction of science and climate crisis in The Child in Time and Solar, with particular emphasis on the relationship between science and art. It shows how the novels depict art and science in conversation, resisting resolution in favour of one or the other. Central to this depiction is the relationship between science and gender in The Child in Time and the much critiqued representation of climate crisis science in Solar. The chapter reads the two novels in relation to each other and places them in the larger framework of McEwan’s interviews and writings on science, art and climate crisis.

McEwan’s first three books, the short story collections First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), and a first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), made him notorious as the author of fictions preoccupied with violence and deviant sexuality. A second longer work, The Comfort of Strangers (1981), similarly features murder and sadomasochistic sex, and all of these works display a closed-in quality that the author later professed to find puzzling. This chapter considers the critical impact of this work, but also its relation to 1970s Britain, its context of production. The work’s focus on adolescent stasis and its several references to the early postwar years reference the political stalemates of the era and the demise of the collective mindset of the early postwar period. These contexts, it is argued, provide an under-recognized frame of reference for the early fiction, in particular its backward-looking helplessness and quotidian ennui.

This chapter offers a detailed reading of McEwan’s 2012 novel Sweet Tooth as a highly self-conscious and allusive literary spy thriller of the Cold War era, one which invites a renewed attention to the Cold War themes, ideas and literary strategies which have been important in his work since the late 1970s in which the novel is set. These flourished especially in the two novels written around the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Innocent and Black Dogs which also receive extended treatment here. In McEwan’s reworking of the Cold War spy thriller as postmodern literary fiction we find, it is argued, a recurrent fascination with misunderstandings and readjustments in emotional and political relations between the sexes as an analogy for Cold War politics and vice versa. Added to this McEwan increasingly packs his fictions with informed literary debate that constitute a profound exploration of literary genres and of the complex relationship between author and reader.

Throughout his writing career, McEwan’s most common representation of childhood is arguably one of threatened vulnerability. Actual children frequently feature in McEwan’s novels as potential victims or endangered innocents, while the concept of childhood in his work features innocence and absence as recurring touchstones. Consequently, this chapter will outline how the depiction of childhood and the treatment of children appears to serve across McEwan’s fiction as a barometer for social care in its broadest sense: from the concern with child neglect and abuse in the early stories of the 1970s, through the loss of children and the pointed childlessness of adult protagonists in the middle works of the 1980s and 1990s, to the centrality once more of vulnerable children in recent novels that touch on the role of the state in the twenty-first century.

The interplay of the personal and the social is discussed with regard to McEwan’s output as a whole, but with particular reference to some of its more marginal texts, such as Amsterdam. Much of McEwan’s writing has rightly been seen as focused on public issues. For example, Amsterdam is a social satire; the oratorio text Or Shall We Die? aims to influence public debate about nuclear weapons. However, McEwan is also a chronicler of the personal and physical. For example, The Ploughman’s Lunch is about personal corruption as well as national mendacity. Indeed, throughout McEwan’s work, the personal and the public interweave. Interpersonal relations are also central to McEwan’s work. A typology of such relations is suggested based on closeness and disjunction, concealment and intrusion. Examples are drawn from a wide range of McEwan’s work. The motif of transvestism is given prominence.

Ian Russell McEwan (1948– ) holds a pre-eminent place in late twentieth-century and contemporary British fiction. His standing as one of the most significant British writers since the 1970s is well established, and the interest in his work extends beyond Britain, especially to the United States and Europe, where he is widely read (and studied): his works have received both popular and critical acclaim, and he is, apart from Salman Rushdie (1947– ), perhaps the most truly international author among his peers, the novelists of his generation, born in the 1940s: Martin Amis (1949– ), Julian Barnes (1946– ), Graham Swift (1949– ). The larger underlying claim, which this Companion explores in its different facets, is that McEwan is at the forefront of a group of novelists who reinvigorated the ethical function of the novel, in ways that embody a deep response to the historical pressures of the time. Indeed, from the perspective of literary history, McEwan occupies a central role in a new wave of British novelists whose mature writing began to emerge in the Thatcher era, all of whom found different ways to address the moral problems that presented themselves in Britain from the late 1970s through to the 1990s, a period characterized broadly by the growth of self-interest, the expansion of corporate power and the collapse of the Welfare State.