John Sutherland: The McEwan problem

If literature had its gold medals, Ian McEwan would be on the podium at Parnassus, festooned with them – he's the Mark Spitz of novelists. His latest novel, On Chesil Beach, has been in the best-seller list since publication: jostling shoulders with Danielle Steel.

For the past week, every newspaper, billboard and empty space in the country has been plastered with advertisements for the movie Atonement "based on the best-selling novel by Ian McEwan". Closely based, apparently. McEwan's been advising during production, and is reported as approving Christopher Hampton's script.

If the early reviews are anything to go by McEwan should shake the mothballs out of his tux. He'll be a guest of honour at the Oscars next April. He'll also need that monkey suit this October at the Guildhall. If you go into William Hill to lay a couple of quid on this year's Man Booker, the shortest odds are for On Chesil Beach. A dead cert, the bookies think.

This is the year of McEwan. Bestseller, box-office triumph, Booker favourite. It should make us proud. It doesn't. For mysterious reasons, it makes us uneasy.

The British do some things supremely well. Novels – the writing and making of them – is one such thing. If we did cars as well, we'd be Japan. If we did sport as well, we'd be the old communist German Democratic Republic with its drugs and all. If we did three-course meals as well, we'd be France.

The long and short of it is, we're world-beaters when it comes to fiction. And McEwan is the best novelist we've got. Or have had for decades.

It creates the inevitable anxious backwash. That chronic British uncertainty. If he's that successful, there must be a catch. The higher McEwan rides, the more insistent the doubt. It's not that he's not good: it's that he's not that good. Or is he?

Our McEwan problem, so to call it, can be broken down into 10 specific issues.

Objection one

"His reputation is clique-driven." The current Private Eye has a spoof about those newspaper features in which the great and the good inform us what book they'll be reading on the beach this summer. Craig Raine is depicted as shamelessly puffing his pal Ian. Raine got prominent mention in McEwan's Saturday, and returned the compliment later the same year in the TLS Christmas books round-up with the angry comment: "Ian McEwan's Saturday should have won this year's Booker Prize. It was harmed by two things. Envy and envy", (as the chair of the committee that year, I think Raine rather overstates – but let that pass).

The allegation that McEwan has been puffed up outrageously by a crew of London-based cronies was scathingly asserted a few months earlier in The New York Review of Books by John Banville (who, ironically, did win the Man Booker).

An alternative version is that it's not London cronies, but the UEA mafia which has overblown the McEwan cause. He served his apprenticeship in the country's most prestigious creative writing school – founded in the 1960s by Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. The course has trained an impressive stable of distinguished writers of whom McEwan and Rose Tremain are among the most distinguished. But most of the hundreds of less distinguished UEA graduates are not, in later professional life, creative writers. They are in publishing, in journalism, in the broadcasting world. They have cultural power, and – it is alleged – a Masonic loyalty to McEwan as one of their own. It's nonsense, I think, but one hears it time and again.

Objection two

"A novelist can't be consistently great and a consistent best-seller." The two are chalk and cheese. Doubtless Shakespeare encountered the same prejudice when, night after night, it was standing room only at the Globe.

Dickens certainly did: "All very well, but damned low," grumbled Fitzjames Stephen. By which he meant that the author of Oliver Twist might sell more, but he wasn't in the same class as, say, Bulwer-Lytton. Posterity thinks otherwise.

When we look round the carriage in the Tube, and see people reading Atonement or Enduring Love our opinion of those passengers doesn't go up. Our opinion of the novel goes down. Call it the Oyster-card effect. It's hit McEwan hard.

Objection three

"Writers really shouldn't be given too much money." It's bad for them. Makes them fat and lazy. Like working dogs, they should be kept just this side of starvation, straining hungrily at the leash.

We're happy for soft-faced chief executives to rake in multimillion-pound bonuses and tell us (as one did the other day on the Today programme) that we should be humbly grateful to them as "wealth creators". But if an author earns some real wealth (and very few do) we shake our heads. "There's another one sold out," we think.

Martin Amis's reputation has never recovered from his agent securing him a multi-book deal for £500,000. At the rate Amis writes it would, over the years, bring him in less than the dentist who was doing his teeth at the time. But it was too much for a mere novelist.

McEwan did himself damage (among the knowing literary classes) by featuring in the text, and on the dust jacket, of Saturday the handsome mansion he now owns in North London. Who did he think he was? Jeffrey Archer? Alright for a wretched hack to own Grantchester – but a good novelist? Come off it. Their natural habitat is the garret. Keeps the buggers on their toes.

Objection four

"McEwan has got too big for his boots – he needs taking down a peg or two." The committee of the newly launched International Man Booker Prize did Ian McEwan no favour in 2005 by including him in their finalists' list, along with Bellow, Marquez, Grass and Kadare (the eventual winner). McEwan was the youngest of the distinguished crew and the only mid-career novelist.

He was on the list again in 2007 (Chinua Achebe won). Doubtless he'll be there again in 2009, and every year until he's judged, finally, old enough to win: assuming the undertaker doesn't get there first. McEwan does not propose himself for this biennial honour. But it hangs as a "who does he think he is?" albatross round his neck. Unfairly, in my view. He belongs in that company.

Objection five

"McEwan's gone soft." One often hears this allegation nowadays. There is a grain of truth in it. I first came across McEwan's fiction 30 years ago in a literary magazine, The New Review. It was sharp, bitter, Gothic stuff. The early stories are still there on the shelves (see First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets). The Cement Garden, with its laconic opening line: "I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way," did to Edith Nesbit's Railway Children what Golding had done to Coral Island in Lord of the Flies. The early work earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre".

As was widely reported at the time, McEwan's first marriage to Penny Allen went very wrong. The circumstances spiralled out beyond Gothic. I recall seeing the novelist at a literary festival around this period, phoning up his children, as I assumed, every half-hour or so.

It is speculated that the tortured conditions of his personal life at this period – as with Dickens, when his marital life went wrong – were transmuted into powerful fiction.

One doesn't know, and one has no right to know. But it seems (from the dedications of his recent books, for example) that McEwan's second marriage, and his reconstituted family, have made him very happy. It's suggested that it's dropped a lump too much sugar into his fiction.

"Can you imagine," a literary friend asked me, "what the young McEwan would have done with those too-perfect Perowne children?" Good fiction, runs this argument, should be diamond hard, not blancmange.

It's an invalid objection. Over their careers, novelists' textures change (consider, for instance, pre-war and post-war Evelyn Waugh). If the tone of McEwan's fiction has become less macabre over the decades, it is a sign of growth, not decay. And it is interesting, for that reason.

Objection six

"He can't write long narrative – he's a master of the short story." This objection takes two common forms. The first is that McEwan can write scenes (the balloon accident in Enduring Love, for example, or the canine attack in Black Dogs) – but he has difficulty carrying a novel through its whole length.

"Terrific opening, goes nowhere," one reader of On Chesil Beach informed me. I don't agree, but I'm familiar with the line of criticism.

The second form is: "Forget the quality, feel the width." McEwan, it is said, got his first Booker Prize with Amsterdam under somewhat false colours. This book is a supercharged novella, as is his latest contender. It's an odd objection. Who would have objected, for example, to Heart of Darkness winning a major novel prize, were there such a thing in 1902?

But it's not simply avoirdupois – it's the lurking suspicion that McEwan may not have the literary largeness for the mantle of greatness our time has cast on him. It's a feeble cavil, but one hears it. And one will hear it again, if On Chesil Beach wins a second Man Booker for its author. Atonement, the most intricately constructed and lengthiest of McEwan's novels, would have immunised him from this objection, had it won the 2001 prize. A great pity it didn't.

Objection seven

"If a novel's any good, it can't make a good film." It's one of the great mysteries of literature that some novelists adapt well to the screen and others don't. A S Byatt's Possession (which won the Booker in 1990) has a big, juicy narrative that one would have thought couldn't fail. The film was floperoo plus. Michael Ondaatje's fiction would seem too fine drawn for adaptation: but The English Patient is a film classic.

McEwan turns out the best film fodder since Graham Greene. First Love, Last Rites and The Cement Garden have furnished good films. The Comfort of Strangers (with its Harold Pinter screenplay) better than good. Atonement promises to be best yet. There's something in the grain of McEwan narrative which blends with celluloid.

And why didn't Greene win the Nobel Prize he richly deserved? Too popular, too. How shall we say? "Showbiz." Let's give it to Pearl S Buck. She's solid.

Objection eight

"He's a plagiarist." It's a mark of McEwan's stature as a novelist that he can take over the front page of a national newspaper with the headline "I am not a plagiarist". And it's a mark of what he has to put up with that he should be obliged to make such a declaration. The issue has been thrashed out (not, in my view, that there was anything to thrash). But the allegation is symptomatic. Were he not thought, to summarise the above – too rich, too happy, too successful, too popular – the accusation would never have been brought.

Objection nine

Envy.

Objection 10

Envy.

The bottom line is that the McEwan problem is our problem, not his. He's the best we've got – and as good as any we've had. Let's live with it. And let's applaud it.

Further viewing: The film of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' goes on general release from Friday