Ian McEwan

This book offers a discussion of seven "canonical" novels by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach), examining the multiple frames of their structure and meanings.

Auteur

Irena Ksiopolska is Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw.

Texte du rabat

This book offers a discussion of seven "canonical" novels by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach), examining the multiple frames of their structure and meanings.

Résumé

This book offers a discussion of seven canonical novels by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach), introducing radical new readings, which are offered not as ultimate and conclusive solutions of the textual puzzles, but as possibilities to engage with the text creatively, to enrich the critical consensus and restore interpretative freedom to the readers.

This project formulates a strategy of inclusive reading an approach to the text that does not seek to reduce it to a single interpretation, and yet is comprehensively informed through the analysis of the primary text, critical discussion, authorial comments and the context of the composition. Each reading demonstrates the metafictional structure of the texts, indicating that McEwan's works may be treated as invitations to roam within their worlds, examining the multiple frames of their structure and the meanings generated thereby. All the chapters attend to submerged, repressed, or deliberately masked voices. The Cement Garden is seen as a multi-layered dream, with a shifting hierarchy of dreamers; The Comfort of Strangers is viewed as an inverted metafiction, with insubstantial characters corrupting more complex heroes; The Child in Time is read as Stephen's book written for his dead daughter; The Innocent as a memory narrative of Leonard who refuses to notice Maria's role as a spy. In Black Dogs the over-exposure of unreliability is studied as a screen for personal trauma; in the analysis of Atonement Briony's claim to authorship is questioned and Cecilia is suggested as an alternative narrative agent.

Finally, examining On Chesil Beach, both characters' voices are reconstructed in search of the superior narrative power, which in the end is seen to be elusive, as the text seeks to undermine the hierarchy of voices.

Contenu

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The author

The text: informed misreadings

The context

Critical approaches

Exemplifying the method: the early short stories

Exhibit 1: "Homemade" - reading silence, reading against irony

Exhibit 2: "Solid Geometry" - a story of deconstruction

Exhibit 3: "Butterflies" - a story of the reader's entrapment

Exhibit 4: "Reflections of a Kept Ape" - metafiction par excellence

I. Inverting Reality in Fiction: The Cement Garden

A dream within a dream

Liminal nightmares

Voices, visions, delusions

II. Inverting Metafiction: The Comfort of Strangers

The oneiric city

Intimate strangers, monstrous doubles

The villains

The victims

The carnivorous city

Inverted metafiction

III. Inverting Time: The Child in Time

Dystopia now

The voice and the eye

The time machine

The clock and The Bell

The forking paths: the conception scene

Frames: the abduction scene

The child in language

The double: Charles Darke's case

Enchanted time: the other girl

IV. Inverting Story: The Innocent

The unwritten novel: first ideas

Narration: the phantom frame

Levels of clearance

The city of spies

Innocence

V. Inverting History: Black Dogs

The words of a dead (wo)man are modified in the guts of the living

The shadow line

"I cannot quite remember"

Postmemory and post-witnesses

VI. Inverting the Authors: Atonement

Postmodernism with a moral

Drafts and versions

The puzzle of the letters, the puzzle of the dates

The hidden "author"

VII. (Mis)Reading against Misreadings: On Chesil Beach

Nostalgic memory

Metamorphoses: music, writing and shared memory - "Theft"

Arrested development

The (m)Elodie of memory

Concluding Thoughts

Enduring Love: writing letters to oneself

Amsterdam: "he alone would make the speech"

Saturday: metafiction as (un)seeing through another's eyes

Solar: unwriting the hero

Sweet Tooth: metafiction as a spy game

The Children Act: unnatural narration

Nutshell: unnatural narrator in a metafictional Hamlet

Machines like Me: sleeping with the enemy

Lessons: auto-bi(bli)ography

References

Index