Ian McEwan - Profile

The U.K.'s Telegraph profiles Ian McEwan, author of the great novel Atonement, amongst many others.

From the piece...

Although as yet largely unknown to the public, he was acclaimed as a literary wunderkind by critics, he and Martin Amis being dubbed the most important young British novelists at work. As the poet James Fenton remembers: “If you were young, reading a book, in love with a girl and unhappy about it, you were probably reading an Ian McEwan story.”

It was while taking Malcolm Bradbury’s soon-to-be-famous creative writing course at the University of East Anglia – he was the first and for some time the only student – that McEwan was inspired by the work of Philip Roth and William Burroughs to introduce what he calls “a kind of garishness” to the “poky and grey” world of English fiction, dominated in the Seventies by middle-aged, middle-class novelists such as Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson.

The nature of his frustration with the old guard is perhaps reflected in his early story “Psychopolis”, in which an amateur flautist struggles with a piece of Bach: “[the] music was inane in its rationality, paltry in its over-determination… This genteel escapism, crossword with its answers written in, I could play no more of it.”

As the years have passed, however, the importance of “rationality” has become one of McEwan’s key themes; he is so fervent a cheerleader for rationalism that he makes Richard Dawkins look agnostic in comparison.