Thoughts on Ian McEwan from Amakusa

Yesterday was the last day of classes before natsu yasumi, so today I spent hanging out in my school's staff room studying a bit of kanji and finishing Ian McEwan's "Atonement" (and feeling incredibly anxious to no longer be in a sweltering school when it's supposed to be "summer holiday" and wondering why don't the Japanese seem to understand the concept of "taking a break?" or is it that I am just too relaxed too much of the time and need to be taught a lesson in dilligence?) It's taken me awhile to come around to reading his stuff after being horrified by a novel I had to read in my last year of university called "The Comfort of Strangers." Has anybody read this? It is one of the most disturbing novels I can imagine reading, nonetheless cramming into the wee hours of one creepy morning because I'd procrastinated and left it to the last moment to read. Among other things, it's about sadomasochism. It was well-written, of course, and did explore some interesting ideas, but it didn't let me sleep for over a week. I just found this review of it from the New York Times. This quite neatly sums up how I felt about this book:

No reader will begin ''The Comfort of Strangers'' and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work. And yet everything that is erotic is also sick. Mary at the end will form a theory, of course - men want to hurt, women seek to be punished - and miss the point. Theory doesn't hurt; murder is sexy. The sexual imagination doubtless has its bloody excess; this novel, by a writer of enormous talent, is definitely diseased.

A few months ago I picked up "Amsterdam", which won the Booker in 1998. It's a short novel and entirely engrossing. McEwan isn't easy on his characters and his novels seem always to end up in unexpected, if disturbing, places (I can say this now after having read three...Ha!) Amsterdam was kind of a literary thriller, I thought (and we all know how much fun it is to lose ourselves in a well-crafted plot.)

So I finished "Atonement" this morning and am wondering why this was not the novel to win the Booker Prize (I guess likely because he'd just won it a few years before?) At moments I wasn't convinced I was going to be satisfied by the plot in the same way I was with Amsterdam, but in the end it was fulfilling in a much more whole-hearted manner. The characters are real, and cruel, and selfish, as his characters seem to be, but more fully dimensional. I'm sure this guy says it better (for anyone who's interested in thinking about a novel that was the thing to read three summers ago...)

Here's one of my favorite passages, from the point of view of 13 year-old Briony, the central character.

A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself, as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face. Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thought striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. The was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else has thoughts like here. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it.

Japan anecdote:

Around 1:00 p.m. today I was in the midst of a post-finished-reading-deeply-thinking-about-this-novel reverie when I went over to wash my chopsticks at the staff room sink. I had to bump past another teacher making a cup of tea who exclaimed "hashi o tsukaemasu ka?" (Can you use chopsticks?) "Hai," I answered a little coldly (any gaijin who's lived here knows how frustrating this charming little inquiry can become...) to her excited "Sugoi!" (Wow!!!!!) Lost in contemplative reverie, I'd been vaguely aware of who I was or what I was doing. I was jolted abruptly back. I am gaijin in Japan. I can use chopsticks.