We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s far-reaching look at postwar British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasn’t an issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t come up.” So when the fatwa was decreed, “it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.” A beautifully written novella but hollow in the centre, and leaving me dissatisfied at the end. It essentially revolves around a biography that the “author” Jeremy wants to write about his in-laws, June and Bernard. (To understand why they are so important to Jeremy, you need to read the introduction which is actually part of the novella itself and not, as I first thought, an autobiographical note on the real author’s life. Nice one, Ian). Jeremy describes his own childhood, contrasting it with that of his wife, and tells of trips to the care home to talk to his mother-in-law, recounting snippets of her life. As the book progressed, I became increasingly annoyed about this big secret and heavy-handed metaphor that would, presumably, be revealed at the end, thinking it would probably be an anticlimax. And it was. Born in 1919 in New York, the novelist and short-story writer J. D. Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother. He was conscripted into the United States army in 1942, where he served for four years. During that time, he met Ernest Hemingway, with whom he began to correspond. Salinger’s most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), was published a few years after his return to the US, but brought him more attention than he desired. Salinger gradually became more reclusive, and is often described as having struggled with spiritual beliefs and personal relationships. Salinger died in 2010.

Much of the described relationship between June and Bernard is negative and painful. Are there any positive aspects of their relationship? The encounter reeks of schoolboy fantasies: an insatiable older woman who offers carnal instruction, then repairs to the kitchen to prepare a Sunday roast. But this discomfort is McEwan’s point. Roland will forever struggle to give his encounter with Miss Cornell moral shape, to pin down “the nature of the harm”. He will mistrust his memory, his intentions, his desires. “You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for what you’ve had here,” Miss Cornell warns him. “That’s a prediction, not a curse.” It is both. He was greatly saddened by what he describes as “the assault on Updike’s reputation”; for him, the Rabbit tetralogy is the great American novel. Saul Bellow, another hero, has suffered a similar fate for the same reasons, he says. “Those problematic men who wrote about sex – Roth, Updike, Bellow and many others.” It sounded crude, quite obscene, on her lips.” What purpose do you think the descriptions of sex hold in the novel?Very disappointing, and yet not a dreadful book either (I've read five other McEwan's, all 4* or 5*).

A perfect case of bending the facts to the idea.” How often do you interrogate your own beliefs? What is important to you when forming them? Roland’s peripatetic adult life unfolds alongside his childhood. It is 1986 and Roland is in his mid-30s. There’s a hosepipe ban and ominous news of a radiation cloud from Chernobyl. Roland’s wife, Alissa, has suddenly deserted him and their seven-month-old son to return to her native Germany to fulfil her ambition to become “the greatest novelist of her generation”. There’s no messing around, there’s no third cup of coffee. Do an hour, then empty the dishwasher As the monument to the defeat and division of Nazi Germany topples, a terrible question emerges: what if the event that seemed to mark the victory of reason and democracy turns out to hatch something completely other? In many places, the question is still alive. This story was not, McEwan makes clear, drawn from his own life, but from an abandoned earlier novel, part of which became On Chesil Beach, also set in 1962. Having taken on the biggest contemporary issues – the climate emergency as comedy in Solar (2010), artificial intelligence in Machines Like Me (2019) – it was only a matter of time before McEwan turned his dark-seeking antenna to the subject of historical child abuse. He admires Zoë Heller’s 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, about a relationship between a teacher and one of her pupils. But the decision to have a female abuser was not simply McEwanesque contrarianism. “I wanted to write it from the point of view of the victim, to show the consequences for the rest of the life,” he says. “But I didn’t want to appropriate a woman’s experiences.”The Revd Mark Oakley is the Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Wakefield Cathedral. Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. For Bernard, the rational scientific humanist who left the Communist Party after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and became a Labour MP, it is human beings who inscribe on reality whatever intelligibility it yields; we make things the way they are, and we can change them for better or worse by changing the way we think and behave as individuals and communities. Ciò nonostante resteranno insieme per generare una figlia, Jenny, e crescerla per un periodo. Poi, si lasceranno.

There is a tedious discourse between two characters regarding religion versus atheism, without offering any new angle or solution, of course. Ian McEwan’dan çok sayıda kitap okudum, hepsinin ortak yönünün, teması insana dair olan erdem, mutluluk, ahlak vb kavramlarda kendi zihninde beraklaştıramadığı konuları okuyucularına kurgulayarak sunmak olarak tanımlayabilirim. Konusunu anlatmıyacağım, arka kapak tanıtım yazısında güzel özetlenmiş.But it’s the female characters – from joyful children to art monsters – who give this novel its heft and verve (and perhaps its title). Next to them, McEwan’s everyman feels a little gormless and grey. There’s Miss Cornell, of course, with her piano lessons and her terrifying thrall; and Roland’s timorous mother, whose cast-iron silences hide a story of wartime shame. There’s Roland’s best friend, who teaches him how to die; and his mother-in-law, who – for the briefest of moments – lives the life she wanted. And then there is Alissa, Roland’s first wife, who chooses her writerly ambitions over motherhood, and leaves him in embittered awe. McEwan, un poco en modo Zadie Smith, elige hacernos escuchar las dos perspectivas (la de la que cambió y la del que cree que ese cambio fue una locura) en las voces de un matrimonio separado. Y logra hacerlo calmada y objetivamente. Gran mérito. Entiendo que este libro es una invitación a reflexionar sobre las ideologías y creencias humanas, los motivos por los cuales nos aferramos a ellas y las defendemos, cómo nos transforman y definen. Y, sobre todo los motivos por los cuales, un buen día, las abandonamos. Este libro habla sobre ese momento de revelación en que un ser humano se cuestiona las convicciones que lo definían y transformaban, a las que defendía y a las cuales se aferraba, para dar lugar a algo nuevo y distinto, aunque no necesariamente más acertado que lo anterior. O podría ser que sí. Tal vez. Quién sabe. Perhaps related to that, Jeremy is very conscious of one generation repeating the faults of a previous one, though he sometimes uses that as a convenient excuse. For example, almost losing touch with a young relative because "I could not bear to undergo another parting from X. The thought that I was inflicting on her the very loss I had suffered myself intensified my loneliness".

Jeremy lost his parents in a car accident (my least favourite fictional trope – far too convenient a way of setting a character off on their own!) when he was eight years old, and is self-aware enough to realize that he has been seeking for parental figures ever after. He becomes deeply immersed in the story of his wife’s parents, Bernard and June, even embarking on writing a memoir based on what June, from her nursing home bed, tells him of their early life (Part One).When I read the blurb, I worried I’d read this before and forgotten it: all it mentions is a young couple setting off on honeymoon and having an encounter with evil. Isn’t that the plot of The Comfort of Strangers? I thought. In fact, this only happens to have the vacation detail in common, and has a very different setup and theme overall. I was also stunned and delighted at the idea of "The Socialist Cycling Club of Amersham". It's a very hilly area with a notable shortage of socialists! An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. For his part, Bernard harbors a secret resentment of June as well. He thinks that her work translating documents for the Communist Party is useless, and only notices her because he is attracted to her. They both feel like they do all the work in the relationship and are essentially supporting the other partner. When both of them are members of the Communist Party, they agree on everything, and their fundamentally different ways of looking at the world do not come into conflict until later on. When I read something that has a preface, maybe written by the author, like Stephen King does on a lot of his books, maybe by a critic, it's even worse. I don't mean to say I don't pay attention, it's just I don't get into it. I read it cooly, calmly, without any emotion for the story whatsoever.