“Set against arid landscapes of urban desiccation, and beneath a persistent fog of moral rot, his narrators (mostly teenage males) whiled away their time in feverish fantasy and morbid self-exploration.”
“…there was a moral pressure behind his sentences, a sense of his turning his radar outward to probe mental states other than his own.”
“Many novelists can write about obsession — it goes with the territory, so to speak, chiming with the tunnel vision required to
write in the first place — but only the best writers can step to one side and see what obsession looks like from the outside, in all its instantly sobering foolishness.”
“This is McEwan’s specialty: scenes of vertiginous escalation, in which events skid out of control, first gradually and then wildly, to a point that leaves his shell-shocked protagonists anxiously replaying those events in their heads to divine the wrong turn. It is never at the point they think, but invariably the one several steps back in the chain, or the very chaining of events itself, that is at fault. McEwan is, in other words, a world-class expert on human violence — its rules, roots and reverberations — and in his more recent work he has set his diagnostic skills to work on larger confrontations.”
“…to deal with the war head-on risks having your novel taken aesthetic hostage.”
”…show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive”
“Moral ambiguity and doubt are thereby enhanced – rather than resolved – by clarity of presentation.”
“The technique is not stream of consciousness so much as ‘a slow drift of association’, ‘the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen’.”
