{"id":23697,"date":"2025-09-15T12:10:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T12:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/23697\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T12:10:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T12:10:17","slug":"from-shocking-short-stories-to-a-talking-foetus-ian-mcewans-10-best-books-ranked-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/23697\/","title":{"rendered":"From shocking short stories to a talking foetus: Ian McEwan\u2019s 10 best books \u2013 ranked! | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two old friends, composer Clive\u00a0Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, meet at the funeral of charismatic Molly Lane, a former lover of both men (along with many other successful men of the time). This sharp 90s satire \u2013 the Conservatives have been in power for 17 years \u2013 has the misfortune of being McEwan\u2019s only novel to win the Booker prize in his 50-year career, despite being widely considered one of his slightest. But it fizzes along like the champagne that is\u00a0part of the euthanasia pact hatched by the two men in a plot that even the\u00a0author conceded was \u201crather improbable<\/a>\u201d. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani was right when she concluded that it was testament to the author\u2019s skill<\/a> that he had managed \u201cto\u00a0toss off a minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb\u201d to win the gong he had so long deserved.<\/p>\n

A pickled penis, cat-roasting, incest, cross-dressing and child abuse are just some of the unsettling fare served up in McEwan\u2019s first short story collection, published when he was just 27. The literary world was shocked and enthralled. \u201cEven the positive reviews were scandalised,\u201d McEwan wrote later<\/a>. \u201cWhat monster had come among us?\u201d The monster was here to stay.<\/p>\n

Everyone remembers the first time they read The Cement Garden<\/a>. \u201cI did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way,\u201d begins the chillingly impassive voice of the teenage narrator Jack. Four children bury their dead mother in the cellar and the oldest siblings end up having sex. McEwan\u2019s first novel is as hard and smooth as the concrete in which both parents fetch up, and it left a dark imprint on the psyche of a generation of teenagers. He didn\u2019t earn his nickname Ian Macabre for nothing.<\/p>\n

Bernard and June Tremaine, married but unable to live together, represent \u201cthe twin poles\u201d of rationalism and spiritualism at the heart of this novel of ideas. Set against the fall of the Berlin Wall, McEwan\u2019s fifth novel is considered a \u201cneglected gem\u201d<\/a> by critics. It is also, apparently, one of the author\u2019s favourites. The eponymous slavering black dogs may be metaphors for man\u2019s capacity for evil, but in the novel\u2019s climax they are terrifyingly real. \u201cThey will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time\u201d: the final line seems depressingly prophetic today.<\/p>\n

For those early McEwan devotees bemoaning that he had gone over to the light side, Saturday was the point of no return. Set on 15 February 2003, when 2 million people took to the streets of London to protest against the invasion of Iraq, the novel follows a day in the \u2013 very comfortable \u2013 life of\u00a0neurosurgeon Henry Perowne: early-morning lovemaking with his wife; a game of squash; a visit to his elderly mother; and a lovingly prepared bouillabaisse for supper. John Banville declared it a \u201cdismayingly bad book<\/a>\u201d, and the ending might be preposterous (Matthew Arnold saves the day!), but\u00a0the novel hums with the same technical mastery and polish as the silver Mercedes in which Perowne drives around Fitzrovia. The prince of\u00a0darkness ascended to \u201cEngland\u2019s national author<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

McEwan\u2019s 14th novel is a rewriting of Hamlet told by a foetus in utero \u2013 but don\u2019t let that put you off. Reflections on mortality, the climate emergency and neuroscience are all squeezed into 200 pages. \u201cNot everyone knows what it is to have your father\u2019s rival\u2019s penis inches from your nose,\u201d gives a whole new perspective on the Oedipal undertones of Shakespeare\u2019s original. McEwan once compared comic novels<\/a> to being pinned down and tickled. Here he is on ticklish form: funny, weird and deadly serious.<\/p>\n

The balloon accident at the beginning of Enduring Love cemented McEwan\u2019s reputation as the master of\u00a0the gripping opening set piece. A\u00a0picnic on a sunny afternoon. A nice bottle of wine. A cry for help. Five men hold on to the ropes of a hot-air balloon to try to\u00a0save a 10-year-old boy\u00a0in the\u00a0basket. One by one they let\u00a0go. \u201cHanging\u00a0a few feet above the\u00a0Chilterns\u00a0escarpment, our\u00a0crew enacted\u00a0morality\u2019s ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me.\u201d The reader remains suspended in a state of high anxiety until the last page of this story of a stalker\u2019s obsession. \u201cI wanted to write a book in praise of rationality<\/a>, which gets a poor showing in literature,\u201d McEwan told Radio 4\u2019s Bookclub.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible,\u201d begins this slim, elegant novel. It is 1962, the year before \u201csexual intercourse began\u201d, as Philip Larkin has it, but begin it must for the newlywed art graduate Edward Mayhew and violinist Florence Ponting. It doesn\u2019t go well. Each misinterprets the other\u2019s moves in a\u00a0way that would be comic were it not so\u00a0sad. McEwan dismantles this nascent marriage with the same forensic attention he once dismembered a\u00a0corpse in The Innocent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Spanning a 70-year stretch from the postwar period to the present day,\u00a0Lessons is McEwan\u2019s longest and\u00a0also most autobiographical work, \u201ca novel of the backwards look<\/a>\u201d, as\u00a0the\u00a0author put it. The novel interweaves the story\u00a0of Roland Baines from his army childhood in Libya to boarding school in Suffolk (both also apply to the author), unsatisfactory jobs, love affairs and marriages, with\u00a0global events from the Suez and\u00a0Cuban\u00a0crises\u00a0up to Brexit and the pandemic. The unsettling opening section about\u00a0an intense affair between 14-year-old Roland and a\u00a0young piano teacher is vintage McEwan. Lessons charts a generation\u2019s\u00a0decline from youthful optimism to political disillusionment and despair. A friend of McEwan\u2019s wrote to say it\u00a0had the feel of a\u00a0last novel. Fortunately, they were wrong: a\u00a0new book, What We Can\u00a0Know<\/a>, set\u00a0in\u00a0a future UK partly submerged by\u00a0rising tides, will be published this\u00a0month.<\/p>\n

A 1930s country-house romance, a\u00a0bravura account of the British retreat\u00a0from Dunkirk in 1940 and a\u00a0metafictional coda that made some\u00a0readers want to start the novel from the beginning and others hurl it\u00a0at\u00a0the\u00a0wall \u2013 this is McEwan at the\u00a0height\u00a0of his powers and determined\u00a0to show what he could do\u00a0with them. All his favourite themes\u00a0are here: loss of innocence, morality, the possibility of absolution and the workings of fiction itself. His old friend Martin Amis described the first 200 pages of\u00a0Atonement as McEwan\u2019s greatest achievement<\/a>. John Updike called it \u201ca\u00a0beautiful and majestic fictional panorama<\/a>\u201d. It might not have\u00a0won the\u00a0Booker, but its success (and the starry film adaptation<\/a>) made McEwan a household name. Nearly 25\u00a0years after it was published, Atonement remains one of the finest\u00a0novels of this\u00a0century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two old friends, composer Clive\u00a0Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, meet at the funeral of charismatic Molly Lane,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-23697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}