Cut it out, Ian McEwan: there are plenty of great long novels

The author says only a few 'earn their length' and he reads them itching to edit. But I can think of plenty of terrific giant stories can't you?

Ian McEwan, who has just published a very short new book, The Children Act, has said that "very few really long novels earn their length", and "my fingers are always twitching for a blue pencil". It's the Americans McEwan appears mainly to be blaming for this our friends on the other side of the Atlantic "still pursue the notion of a great American novel and it has to be a real brick of an object", he says so he may well be thinking of Donna Tartt's latest, The Goldfinch, which stretches to a whopping 880 pages in paperback. Or could it be Eleanor Catton, his fellow Booker prize winner, whose The Luminaries weighs in at 848 pages?

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