The bluntest Ian McEwan review, ever.

Years and years ago my sister bought me Enduring Love and Atonement for Christmas. I tried Enduring Love and quickly wrote McEwan off as melodramatic. Since then I've eschewed his work.

Until a friend recommended Saturday to me recently, which I read and enjoyed. And since Saturday, I've read On Chesil Beach.

What both books do is take a very elongated look at something rather short. Saturday is set over one day, On Chesil Beach, a novella, is set over one evening. But both narratives then sandwich in so much detail and history which, whilst being an expert, almost forensic rendering of character, seem to make the pace and impetus of the book pool and eddy.

McEwan prides himself, I think, on rendering detail onto slim narratives. So that when reading a character of his walking down the street, I find myself wondering if McEwan will describe the day the lampposts were put in, too. What the workmen installing them ate for lunch, and how their marriages were going. When really, I want to know what is at the end of the street.

McEwan has no end of detail to slap onto his characters. So much so, that we aren't left really to invoke any of our imagination. (My belief is that you engage and move a reader most when you harness their own imagination – give them the saliency, and let them populate it with their own experience).

Luckily his prose is slick; his atmospherics effective (even if the sense of promise fails to surface); and his inexhaustible rendering is generally interesting (if irrelevant -- certainly credible). But true to the promise of bluntness, here is a summary of what this reader least admires in McEwan's style.

1)   His handling of emotion is robotic. 'He writes like a scientist', someone said to me. I say he writes emotion the way I would describe being on the moon. I can give you the weightlessness, the dust, the light, the footprints, the view of Earth. But something hollow will resonate from the way I describe it. McEwan writes from his head. Rarely is his heart, and therefore mine, invoked. Nor my gut.

2)   His plotting and narrative is lacking. In Saturday we are waiting for the ramifications of an altercation the well-to-do neurologist has had with a thug. We know the thug is going to show up at the family home. We know the family in immense detail (most of it historic to the current narrative). But when this thug device shows up, it is disappointing. McEwan's books remind me of a long, long drum roll, the drummer holding a hundred sticks, but no cymbal crash. With Saturday and the lauded On Chesil Beach, I found myself disappointed at or discrediting the ending, and given a sense that there was a hard sell all the way through, but no delivery. He promises you things, but only so that he can give you the bits he wants to give. Bits that are often ancillary to story.

3)   Ian McEwan writes in a style I call storytelling (I know, I know). It is where the writing often tells you what is happening, even gives detail, but due to the style and the choice of detail, you remain, almost always, at a step removed. Again, there is this cold, forensic feeling to the writing. He rarely writes a SCENE--something immersive. Always he is interspersing the narration between reader and action. Always he is choreographing you, so that you never get involved. It is to be spoon-fed rather than to eat with your hands.

What McEwan has done for me though, is to mark a moment in time when I can read again. I'm not sure what's happened, but I can read novels now. For a while I was too critical of them to read. But, perhaps because McEwan does write very well; is such an intelligent, observant and diligent writer, or perhaps because my book is out now, I can read again. And what a great thing that is.