Ian McEwan and the Mess of Living
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
Imagining you're the type of person that really wanted to like Machines Like Me for its concept but found the exposition truly painful, are other McEwan books worth a read? Basically was Machines Like Me an outlier or standard McEwan?
[Edit: Worded harshly, but without too much malintent; books are art, and appreciation is personal.]
> In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944.
> ..In 1953, the Holy Office informed Greene that The Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism.
> ..In the late 1950s, as inspiration for his novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of leper colonies in the Congo Basin and in what were then the British Cameroons.
> In 1957, just months after Fidel Castro began his final revolutionary assault on the Batista regime in Cuba, Greene played a small role in helping the revolutionaries, as a secret courier transporting warm clothing for Castro's rebels hiding in the hills during the Cuban winter.
As for Nutshell, it looks like exactly the type of story I'd love to enjoy. I'm going to pick it up, then move on to kevmarsden and teh_klev's tips if it pans out.
Thanks peeps!
Never be ashamed.
Sweet Tooth[0] is an interesting novel. It's about how the (British) MI5 involves itself with artists to promote anti-communism in the 70's. The novel opens itself up to to discovering Francis Stonor Saunders' "Who Paid the Piper"[1] which is a book about how the CIA used literature as a cultural weapon against the Soviet Union, also very interesting.
Ian McEwen can take us to all sorts of strange places.
I'm not a big reader of McEwan, but the next thing on my shelf is "Solar" which looks quite interesting. If you want to expand your reading outside of McEwan then dip into his pal Martin Amis and his earlier works such as Dead Babies, or even The Rachel Papers (ignore the film).