The Fun Stuff by James Wood

Author:James Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CONTAINMENT: TRAUMA AND MANIPULATION IN IAN MCEWAN

In different ways, most of Ian McEwan’s novels and stories are about trauma and contingency, and he is now best known as the great contemporary stager of traumatic contingency as it strikes ordinary lives—in The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed forever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist, and rationalist, drifted away from his wife, June (and vice versa), because of what he deemed her fanciful, emotional, overdetermined reading of the trauma that was meted out to her in 1946 by the black dogs of the title. In The Innocent, set in Berlin in the mid-1950s, Leonard Marnham, a telephone communications specialist, is having a passionate affair with Maria Eckdorf, a German. But their relationship cannot survive the traumatic experience of their murder of Maria’s ex-husband, and the subsequent dismemberment of his body in her apartment. The central protagonists of Atonement have their lives ruined by the traumatic wrongful arrest of Robbie on charges of rape, while the young just-married couple in On Chesil Beach do not survive the trauma of their honeymoon night. (It is further intimated that Florence has been traumatized by sexual abuse at the hands of her father.) And then there is Baxter, contingency personified, who enters Henry Perowne’s life in Saturday through that most random of urban events, the car accident.

Trauma, in McEwan’s work, inaugurates a loss of innocence. After the mother’s death, the childhood garden is cemented over, in his first novel, and the children, now orphaned, set about creating their own, corrupted version of childhood. The narrator of Enduring Love returns to the field where John Logan fell from the balloon and thinks: “I could not quite imagine a route back into that innocence.” John Logan’s fall is also the narrator’s fall from innocence. A strongly Rousseauian narrative marks McEwan’s work: the haven of pastoralism is appealed to as the escape from corruption. In The Child in Time, Stephen Lewis is a children’s writer, but by accident. He originally wrote his first novel—about a summer holiday he spent when he was eleven—as an adult book. But his publisher, Charles Drake, insists that it is a children’s book, that children will read it and understand that childhood is finite—“that it won’t last, it can’t last, that sooner or later they’re finished, done for, that their childhood is not forever.” Charles Drake subsequently has a kind of nervous breakdown. He and his wife, a physicist working on notions of time, give up the corruptions of London and retire to the countryside, where Charles starts dressing up and playacting as a little boy out of Richmal Crompton, complete with shorts, catapults, and a tree house.

In Enduring Love, five men are attempting to stop a hot-air balloon, whose basket contains a small boy, from rising.

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