Dan
This opens like a parody of the North London literary set as a group of people with (largely) over inflated opinions of their own worth gather for a dinner party where a new poem will be read aloud for the fiords and only time. Knowing that the framing narrative is set a hundred years in the future, on the other side of a rupture in society, this scene being set in 2019 and the poem being in the form of a corona (GEDDIT?) feels a bit like McEwan nudging us and shouting “Do you see what I did there? Do you?”. Allied with the general smugness of the dinner party, I wasn’t looking forward to the rest of this. But the book flips several times throughout its length, and it becomes something much better than these unpromising beginnings. Ultimately, it is about history, memory and truth - it’s hard not to see this as the 77 year-old McEwan grappling with the idea of his own legacy and how accurately posterity might treat him. In the end, it’s a compulsive and thought provoking book that keeps you turning the pages even as you pause to think about what you’ve just read.
This opens like a parody of the North London literary set as a group of people with (largely) over inflated opinions of their own worth gather for a dinner party where a new poem will be read aloud for the fiords and only time. Knowing that the framing narrative is set a hundred years in the future, on the other side of a rupture in society, this scene being set in 2019 and the poem being in the form of a corona (GEDDIT?) feels a bit like McEwan nudging us and shouting “Do you see what I did there? Do you?”. Allied with the general smugness of the dinner party, I wasn’t looking forward to the rest of this. But the book flips several times throughout its length, and it becomes something much better than these unpromising beginnings. Ultimately, it is about history, memory and truth - it’s hard not to see this as the 77 year-old McEwan grappling with the idea of his own legacy and how accurately posterity might treat him. In the end, it’s a compulsive and thought provoking book that keeps you turning the pages even as you pause to think about what you’ve just read.