The Appearance of Evil: Ian McEwan on Film

By Richard T. Kelly

The "literary" novel — by which we mean one that is intended to be not merely Delicious but also Good For You — is often thought to be in decline these days, swamped by the more recreational reading of narrative-driven genre fiction: crime, Chick Lit, wizards 'n' witchcraft, all the sorts of books that usually get turned into movies. And yet, on the UK literary scene there is a shining exception to the general trend, and his name is Ian McEwan.

Four times short-listed for the gold-standard Booker Prize for Fiction, (a winner, in 1998, for Amsterdam), McEwan also moves units: his latest novel On Chesil Beach has comfortably crossed the 100,000-copy mark in the UK. "Increasingly [McEwan] is seen as our national writer", a critic lately opined in the London Sunday Times. And McEwan's renown has traveled, too, particularly since his eighth novel Atonement (2001) expanded his renown in the United States, and has now inspired the sixth and most eminent feature film to be adapted from his work.

But then the movie world has long been responsive to McEwan's dark allure. No novel of his is ever optioned lightly, for he is a superior storyteller — a craftsman of narratives that grip and shake the reader, prompting one to wonder what the movie version would be like. (Just consider the opening of McEwan's debut novel, The Cement Garden (1978): "I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way...") McEwan has a special gift for writing in a startling and original fashion about sex and violence, those two great engines of the imagination. And though big ideas often emanate from his stories, he gets his hands dirty with the common stuff of life. He does his research, be it on quantum physics or cutting people open — you learn things from his books.

The Cement Garden

If there is a recurrent scene in McEwan it is the sudden appearance of evil, pain or death — dreadful things that ought not to happen, but do — in the lives of solid and unsuspecting bourgeois people. The terrible hot-air balloon accident that opens Enduring Love (both novel and film) is a consummate display of McEwan's power. Reality bites, innocence dies, and nothing can be the same again: such is the dynamic that has also been enthralling both readers and viewers of Atonement.

McEwan wrote several fine original scripts for television and film before he began to see his novels adapted, and experience has made him as properly wary as any major novelist about what film can — and can't — do with the written word. "Translating a novel to film", he once told the New York Times, 'is an act of controlled vandalism.' Elsewhere he has echoed a familiar writer's lament about cinema's inability to represent interiority and the flow of thought as a novel can. Be that as it may, McEwan has always attracted very serious directors, and inspired some fascinating movies.

His second novel The Comfort of Strangers, published in 1981, was the first to reach the screen in 1990, when it was adapted with sinister economy by Harold Pinter and directed by Paul Schrader with his customary keen eye for ordinary madness. In the novel, an unmarried English couple holidaying desultorily in Venice are first courted and then menaced by an overfriendly local guide. To McEwan's themes — the deforming grip of childhood trauma, the strange and sometimes depraved ways in which men try to be manly — Schrader applied the visual sheen he perfected previously in American Gigolo and Mishima. Venice was rosily exotic, and the villainy had panache: Christopher Walken in a white suit, rather than the hairy-chested blowhard of McEwan's book.

The Cement Garden was adapted for the screen and directed by Andrew Birkin in 1993. Jack (Andrew Robertson) and Julie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are a teenage brother and sister who reinvent the family unit as a hot-house of morbidity and sick love following the deaths of their father and mother. But Mother's corpse is stowed in the basement, to keep the authorities at bay, and though caring for two younger siblings Jack and Julie also succumb to a curious mutual attraction. The film is not for sissies, as they say, but Birkin builds a purposely drab, clammy, overcast mood of English suburban perversity, impressively true to the source. The Cement Garden could be nicely double-billed with Jesse Peretz's 1998 film of McEwan's 1975 story First Love, Last Rites, a chamber piece transposed from England to a Louisiana bayou, where Giovanni Ribisi and Natasha Gregson Wagner share an adolescent sexual idyll that turns sour once the pair have reached the inevitable limits of each other.

Natasha Gregson Wagner and Giovanni Ribsi in First Love, Last Rites

McEwan performed what is to date his one and only stint as adapter of his own material for John Schlesinger's 1993 version of The Innocent, a piece that draws its special intrigue from the Cold War legend of the joint US-British spy tunnel beneath East Berlin. There, a young British electronics engineer (Campbell Scott) is manipulated by an American intelligence officer (Anthony Hopkins) while struggling to be in love for the first time with a German woman (Isabella Rossellini). McEwan confessed to finding his work on the script "often long, repetitive and frustrating": three years in which he might have written a novel instead. Elements that had seemed central to his novel — sexual innocence and experience, a grisly unplanned killing — were subordinated on screen to a spy story: like the criss-cross Anglo-American casting, this was possibly an instance of a movie paying too much heed to its imagined audience.

And yet, proof of McEwan's compliance with the kind of surgery cinema must now and then perform on a literary source is served by his associate producer credit on Roger Michell's 2004 film of Enduring Love. The adaptation by playwright Joe Penhall reinvents the main characters' back stories, ditches an element of organized crime from the plot, and devises a whole new ending. But all of these changes are in service of a central, pulsing narrative: Joe (Daniel Craig) witnesses a death and worries that he could have averted it, but his guilt recedes once fellow witness Jed (Rhys Ifans), a horribly delusional misfit, fixes on him as a love-object. For all its perversity, Enduring Love was perhaps the most accessible screen rendering of McEwan to that point, and was thoroughly approved by the author. (Michell has recalled that after a screening of an early cut McEwan was "very, very moved. Visibly moved, which is the kind of critical response that I like to see...")

But it is Atonement, masterfully adapted by Christopher Hampton, that has really and deservedly broken through to win McEwan a whole new constituency, both of moviegoers and readers. Just as those readers may now have the pleasure of discovering such stunning McEwan novels as Black Dogs (1992) or The Child in Time (1987), film fans should also take time to view and dissect the body of work that is McEwan on Film.