Somerset Maugham’s, or Graham Greene’s-that produces a fiction so competently told that it also feels artificial.

It should be said, in his favor, that most contemporary novelists feel artificial because they are not competent enough to tell a convincing or interesting story it is a peculiar excess of proficiency and talent, like McEwan’s-or like Robert Stone’s, W.

In other words, McEwan’s fiction has sometimes felt artificial. In his world what is most important is our secrets, not our mysteries. McEwan’s fictions have been prodigies: they do everything but move us. In his careful, excessively managed universes, in which everything is made to fit together, the reader is offered many of the true pleasures of fiction, but sometimes starved of the truest difficulties. More often than not, one emerges from his stories as if from a vault, happy to breathe a more accidental air. McEwan’s work is very controlled, but its reality is somewhat stifled. These talents, which are enabled by a penetrating intelligence and a prose style far richer and more flexible than most contemporary writers dream of, have made McEwan an anomalous figure in Britain: perhaps the only truly literary best-selling novelist in that country. He is a master of the undetonated bomb and the slow-acting detail: the fizzing fact that slowly dissolves throughout a novel and perturbs everything in its wake, the apparently buried secret that will not stay dead and must have its vampiric midnight. Ian McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive-where storytelling means kinesis, momentum, prowl, suspense, charge.

Ian mc ewan atonement