Besides winning the Booker Prize, Ian McEwan was recommended to me by two people with degrees in psychology. Like many authors, McEwan began his publishing career with short stories.
First Love, Last Rites was published in 1975. It was here that the author who would go on to stun us with
Amsterdam, Atonement and Saturday began to play with the themes that he would use so often later on. Murder, incest, pederasty and other sexual deviance are the building blocks of these stories. In Solid Geometry the narrator expresses his boredom with his wife and marriage. He is more interested in matters of the psyche. So when his wife's nagging him for attention, affection and conjugal bliss becomes too much for him, he prepares an intriguing way to find peace and quiet. In Homemade we meet a 14 year old boy who has been taught the facts of life by an older, less successful friend. Then, rather than spending a small some of money for a private peep show, he agrees to play "House" with his 10 year old sister. The most powerful of the stories was Butterflies. A lonely single man of unknown age is preparing to visit the bereaved parents of a girl who was fished out of the canal after he reported the incident to the police. As he walks towards the house, he recalls how she followed him just a few days before. Tailed would be a better word. When he realized he couldn't shake her he began to lure her on. He promised that she would see Butterflies of all colors near the canal. She had been warned not to go to the canal, but had she not been warned to avoid strange men?
the Voyeur by Robbe-Grillet, a novel that left me totally bewildered; as I read this story I felt that the author was finally showing me how it had happened in that work>. McEwan creates an atmosphere of foreboding in just a few pages, over and over. For comic relief he included Cocker at the Theatre, a rehearsal of group sex where one couple crosses the line between acting and the real thing. A wonderful collection of stories that prepares the reader for McEwan's later masterpieces.
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