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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Private faces are wiser and nicer

‘This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine …’ ‘He always had a paperback book, usually history, in his jacket pocket…’ ‘From downstairs, they heard the wireless, the chimes of Big Ben at the start of the ten-o’clock news.’ ‘Harold Macmillan had been addressing a conference in Washington about the arms race …’ ‘Edward and Florence would be voting for the first time in the next General Election and were keen on the idea of a Labour landslide …’ ‘He was hilarious in formal Union debates and a good mimic — he did Macmillan, Gaitskell, Kennedy, Khrushchev in fake Russian, as well as various African leaders, and comedians like Al Read and Tony Hancock …’ ‘The pipe-smokers downstairs in their silver-buttoned blazers … could have no claim on the future.’

That last is surely a mistake — pipe-smoking was an eminently Beatnik habit, not in itself something to be despised in an older generation. One can’t read references to Elizabeth David and mange-tout peas (surely not in 1962 in any case), or leaden explanations from the characters that Macmillan ‘had just sacked a third of his cabinet in “the night of the long knives” ’ without an unpleasant sensation that the author feels he knows much more than his characters what is really important, and in reality knows much less.

The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period. What I find troubling about this novel, and many of McEwan’s books, is that he moves from his narrow but effective competence into areas where his authority looks very shaky indeed. But this one, at least, works well on the basis of its private exchanges alone.

More articles from: Philip Hensher | this section

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