This chapter situates Ian McEwan in the history of the novel of ideas, arguing that he reclaims this contested aesthetic space, producing rich and satisfying works. In doing so he pushes the boundaries of literary realism, producing a new kind of hybrid: ideational realism. The essay focuses on four novels – The Child in Time (1987), Enduring Love (1997), Saturday (2005) and Machines Like Me (2019) – a quartet of novels that illustrates the development of ideational realism throughout McEwan’s career. In these novels influential contemporary thinking is pressure-tested in the creative realm: we are invited to question the implications of science as we witness the parameters of the social novel being stretched, adjusted, and re-established. Thus, these novels represent a limited form of experimentalism, in which the significance of scientific ideas is tested, as the social relevance of realist fiction is consolidated.

Remarkably, literature was the field where Darwinian thinking was immediately and warmly received. Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, at once published articles that gave detailed, sympathetic accounts of the theory of the Origin, and these were followed by writers using Darwinian themes in their fiction and poetry, Dickens himself using sexual selection to structure a key relationship in Our Mutual Friend. This continues to the present, when leading novelists like Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson use very different reactions to Darwin to mold their narratives.

This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

This chapter provides an overview of the novel of ideas that contrasts the form with Henry James’s modernist conception of the art novel. Ian McEwan writes exemplary novels of ideas insofar as his works incorporate political, philosophical and above all scientific ideas even as they develop formal, stylistic and aesthetic complexity. After discussing Or Shall We Die? and The Ploughman’s Lunch, the chapter examines four novels: Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Saturday and particularly The Child in Time. McEwan’s novels of ideas consistently explore and demonstrate unexpected capabilities of the genre. They unfold the drama and texture of their ideational content, from the level of plot device and set piece down to that of lexical units. Ideas animate but never overwhelm aesthetics. McEwan’s novels of ideas explore the capacities and capabilities of scientific inquiry and literary representation even as they ultimately reveal the limits of both.

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.

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.