![]() ![]() These days a new McEwan is a big deal – not for nothing was Private Eye able to satirise those mid-year “What I’m reading on my holidays” newspaper columns by having each high- to low-brow interviewee pick Sweet Tooth: “I haven’t read it yet, but I’m told it’s a masterpiece.” It seems extraordinary now that the author of the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam, and the not-prizewinning-yet-rather-more-deserving Atonement and Enduring Love, should have fallen between the cracks. The real reason for sidelining McEwan was more prosaic: in 1997, The Child in Time was out of print. At the time this somehow added to the faint air of the counter-cultural the author enjoyed (I was an unworldly undergrad, but I still knew McEwan was one of the “bad boys” of contemporary fiction). Our lecturer told us we wouldn’t lose marks if we didn’t read or attend tutorials on The Child in Time, McEwan’s 1987 novel. Back in 1997, when I first read Ian McEwan as part of my first-year English Literature class, something odd had happened. ![]()
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