Ian McEwan (1948 – )

I’m still reading 1001 Books and when one arrives in the 1970s one finds Ian McEwan and he looks just like my kind of writer. I knew of the film The Cement Garden (starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg) but did not know it was written by Mc Ewan. I’ll probably start by seeing the filmed version of The Comfort of Strangers (Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren) directed by Paul Schrader who is also a purveyor of dark culture and who likes Bresson (so do Michael Haneke, Girish Shambu and Dennis Cooper). Below are some pointers to Ian Mc Ewan, definitely an artist of the grotesque.

The Cement Garden (1978) – Ian McEwan
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In The Cement Garden, the father of four children dies. His death is followed by the death of the children’s mother. In order to avoid being taken into custody, the children hide their mother’s death from the outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in their basement. Two of the siblings, a teenage boy and girl, descend into an incestuous relationship, while the younger son starts to experiment with transvestism. [Sept 2006]

The Comfort of Strangers (1981) – Ian McEwan
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A story of sexual predation and entrapment set in Venice (like Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now) featuring Colin and Mary (an innocent couple that reminds of Bitter Moon’s innocent couple) and Robert and the invalid Caroline (the evil couple). Caroline’s invalidity is the result of Robert’s sadistic sexual violence. The theme of male dominance and brutality toward women is re-examined when it is revealed that the object of Robert’s desire is Colin.

The Comfort of Strangers (1990) – Paul Schrader
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Like many of Paul Schrader’s films, The Comfort of Strangers is a mournful examination of decaying innocence and sexual transgression.

Based on a creepy Ian McEwan novel, this Paul Schrader film stars Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett as a married couple who find their marriage sliding into a morass of tedium. To reignite it, they visit Venice, where they fall under the spell of an urbane older couple, played by Christopher Walken (in one of his most chillingly insinuating roles) and Helen Mirren (who seems to be more his crippled acolyte than his wife). British reserve forces the younger couple to be polite to these strange birds, but increased exposure to them through coincidental meetings gradually pulls them into their deadly orbit. Adapted by Harold Pinter, it’s a slightly arid but still goose-fleshy film in which nothing is what it seems to be and, what’s worse, nothing familiar looks familiar anymore. –Marshall Fine for Amazon.com

Ian McEwan CBE, (born June 21, 1948), is a British novelist (sometimes nicknamed “Ian Macabre” because of the nature of his early work).–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian McEwan

See also: 1948British literaturemacabre