Ian McEwan’s Centrist Agitprop Novel Is a Creative Failure
British writer Ian McEwan wanted to deliver a literary manifesto for liberal centrism with his new book Lessons. But the result is an aimless, meandering novel that reveals his creative exhaustion and bewilderment at the state of the world.
Novelist Ian McEwan attends the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2019. (David Levenson / Getty Images)
Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most prominent novelists. His latest offering, Lessons, is an attempt to track the life story of its fictional protagonist through the turbulence of postwar British and European history.
The result is a labored exercise in boomer agitprop. Instead of delivering a literary manifesto in defense of liberal democracy, McEwan ends up revealing his own creative exhaustion and sense of bewilderment at the world.
From Baghdad to Brexit
McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam, and the New Yorker anointed him as “England’s national author” in 2009. His early novels were slick, slender texts that shunned the class-ridden tropes of contemporary English fiction in favor of darker, more Freudian motifs — incest in The Cement Garden (1978), murder and sadomasochism in The Comfort of Strangers (1981).
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