Silly Little Country

Saturday

I mentioned Ian McEwan's novel in an earlier post.
I cannot recommend it too highly. Most of us in Western societies must feel greatly privileged to have the oppotunity to have lived our lives here and to have enjoyed the enormous fruits of progress. And at the same time to know it does not exist in a world of perfect justice, and that its edges at least are being nibbled at by forces of destruction, in forms we do not always understand and recognize.
I have not ever read a novel where I felt so completely at one intellectually, and mostly emotionally, with its protagonist.
McEwan is not afraid of allowing that character to be challenged, especially by his children, but he is always aware of the great richness of his life; the oppositions with his children actually enrich him greatly, because he delights in new experiences.
And if this sounds too intellectual, I say read it nonetheless. It is to a degree a potboiler. The climactic scene involes a nubile naked young woman reciting Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (My current vote is for Miranda Otto to play this character in the movie, though I know she is too old - but she was the only good thing in the Lord of the Rings.). I am not sure the poem is taught in high school routinely any more, but the oblique references to that rather moody work hit home with me.
In the end though Perowne (the protagonist) does a great job of conveying, at least to me, who already believes in it, the meaning of Darwin's great line "there is grandeur in that view".
Such a delightful and surprising thing to find in literature.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:59 PM