The writer as cold-eyed sociopath

HE WOULD sit in his office, caught up in his macabre obsessions. Sometimes his wife could hardly bear to enter the room, such was the vortex of evil that seemed to emanate from it.

He liked to destroy his victims from a distance, watching with cold, voyeuristic pleasure as he did so. Now, aided by forces created by his wealth and power, he was in pursuit of the wife and her child. When the two of them caught sight of his brooding presence in a small village in France, they bolted for their car, shaking with fear.

Whom do we have here? Hannibal Lecter? Some new ogre from the dark imaginings of Val McDermid or Ruth Rendell? A cold-eyed sociopath to be played on late-night TV by Tom Bell or Keith Allen?

Well, no. It is poor old Ian McEwan, a quiet and studious novelist, as described in The Mail on Sunday's characteristically lurid and unbalanced account of his recent domestic misfortunes.

Were it not for the fact that McEwan is a well-known literary novelist, the story of the end of his marriage to Penny Allen, and the dispute over their two teenage boys, would be regarded as no more than a miserable private tragedy.

In 1994, after a relationship that had lasted 20 years, Penny Allen asked Ian McEwan for a divorce. There were wrangles over custody and access. When Allen recently decided to move to France to set up a meditation centre, a court gave McEwan custody of the children. Refusing to accept this decision, she took the boys to France this summer and, with her new partner, went into hiding, emerging occasionally to talk to the press, maligning McEwan and revealing, rather touchingly, that she was going to appeal to Jack Straw to intervene.

At some point, the older son returned to his father of his own accord. Last week, McEwan took his case to a court in France.

On the one hand, we have a parent who flouts the law, hides away with her children and makes intemperate public statements about her ex-husband; on the other, a parent who insists that this is a family matter that should be resolved in a quiet legal manner.

Under normal circumstances, a middle-brow tabloid might be expected to be speaking up for the rule of law and the rights of the children in such a case. Instead, it is Ian McEwan who is accused of manipulating the media, of having - somewhat implausibly - a fast, glittering media lifestyle, and of putting his own interests before those of his family, while his wife is given the chance to present her story, suitably goosed up by the pen of a tabloid journalist.

It is not difficult to see why the story is being treated in this way. The cold, emotionally dysfunctional writer, good at words on the page but bad at life, is a much-loved cliche. Non-writers find odd reassurance in the crazed serial infidelity of Boswell, the various sexual insecurities of Henry James, Kafka and DH Lawrence, the story that, on her wedding night, Strindberg's second wife Frida Uhl was awoken by his attempts to strangle her (he explained that he had been dreaming of his first wife).

It is true that modern American novelists have done little for writers' marital reputations. William Burroughs shot his wife through the head, while Norman Mailer famously stabbed one of the six Mrs Mailers there have been so far. According to the actress Claire Bloom, Philip Roth marked their separation by sending her a large bill to cover the many hours he had spent reading film scripts on her behalf during their years together.

In fact, while most writers' marriages are unlikely to be quoted in the Relate Guide to Married Bliss, there is little evidence that they are any worse at managing their relationships than composers or artists - or indeed, plumbers, solicitors or weather forecasters.

So why do failures in a writer's private life give journalists such pleasure? A clue is to be found in The Mail on Sunday's coverage of the McEwan debacle.

"He is a fiction writer," his ex-wife is reported as saying. "It is his gift to be able to devise complex plots with twists. He knows the plot. None of us will get it until the end. It is scary. He loves to destroy from a distance, set something up then watch it collapse."

Of course. This is the kind of nonsense we last heard during the unpleasant coverage of Martin Amis's marital difficulties. No one seriously believes that PD James dreams of serial killing, or that Dick Francis fantasises about crushing the limbs of jockeys, but when it comes to the writers of literary fiction an old, demonising prejudice emerges. Perhaps it is all down to the very English fear of the power of the imagination.