Lessons

by Ian McEwan

in the mid-seventies, he had formed a poor impression of British writers. It was a defensive posture and dismissive. He saw them on TV arts programmes as well as on stage. He could not take seriously these chaps in ties and suits or tweeds who wore brogues and cardigans when at home all day, who belonged to the Garrick and the Athenaeum, who lived in solid north London villas or Cotswold mansions, who spoke loftily, as one might after a lifetime pontificating from All Souls, Oxford; who had never risked a peep round the doors of perception by taking a drug other than tobacco or alcohol, which they peevishly refused to accept were psychoactive addictive substances; who had, most of them, been to the same two old universities where they all knew each other; who smoked pipes and dreamed of knighthoods. Too many of the women wore pearls and spoke in the snappy tones of a wartime radio announcer. None, men or women, in their writings, so he thought then, ever paused in wonder at the mystery of existence or fear of what must follow. They busied themselves with social surfaces, with sardonic depictions of class difference. In their lightweight tales, the greatest tragedy was a rumbled affair, or a divorce. None but a very few seemed much bothered by poverty, nuclear weapons, the Holocaust or the future of humankind or even the shrinking beauty of the countryside under the onslaught of modern farming.