Where to start with Ian McEwan: a guide to his best books

You can crunch the numbers any way you like but, by wide agreement, if Ian McEwan has one masterpiece, it’s Atonement, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001. The story of Briony Tallis, and how her childhood innocence destroyed lives, is ambitious, inventive, seductive and surprising. It was inspired by McEwan reflecting on errors that cannot be corrected – particularly the two world wars – and how far we can atone for mistakes. It’s both an original work of art and a tribute to the literary past: a country house drama, a story of the horrors of war, a meditation on memory. It reads at times like a greatest hits compilation of McEwan’s strengths as a writer – the set-piece drama of the retreat to Dunkirk in the Second World War; the ability to immerse the reader in another time – and the plot turns, as McEwan’s so often do, on sexual intrigue. But when he submitted Atonement to his publisher, McEwan thought it a niche novel, a book for writers, and his editor had to persuade him what widespread appeal it would have. ‘I had no idea,’ said McEwan. ‘That’s why I’m not a publisher.’ 

Black Dogs, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992, is McEwan’s own favourite among his novels, and undoubtedly a high point in his career. It’s half the length of Atonement but no less chewy, and it packs in so much – without seeming cramped – that you may suspect the presence of hidden trapdoors. As with all McEwan’s novels from the late 1980s to mid-1990s, Black Dogs animates an idea. It asks whether evil really exists, and whether rationality or religious belief is better placed to explain it. ‘Why do people bend the facts to fit their ideas rather than the other way round? Why do people do that? Why do they go on doing it?’ But it’s the animation of the idea that makes it a brilliant book: through the story of married couple June and Bernard – one sceptical, one superstitious – McEwan takes us on a journey of postwar idealism, political upheaval, and primal fear. The three sustained scenes of violent drama in the book – at the Berlin Wall, in a restaurant, and the black dogs of the title – punctuate the story and keep the tension so high that the reader is relieved, but also regretful, when the book is over.

After The Comfort of Strangers, McEwan needed a break – we all did – and he returned with a series of novels that looked out at the world rather than inward. The first was The Child in Time (1987), which was at once grounded in reality and contained some of his strangest elements yet. It was, said one excited reviewer among many, ‘the McEwan you and I have been waiting for’. The Child in Time begins with one of McEwan’s famously tense opening episodes – a child goes missing in a supermarket – and spreads into a wide-ranging exploration of the politics of children in society, as the central character, Stephen, takes part in a government commission on childcare. But the more we learn about Stephen’s world, the odder it looks: time seems fluid (are we in the future, or an alternative present?), a government minister in the story literally reverts to childhood, and the prime minister is of undeclared gender. The Child in Time is a transitional novel in McEwan’s career, showing a writer spreading his wings and testing his ability. It gave the sense – correctly, it turned out – of a talent that could go absolutely anywhere next.

But McEwan’s most overtly political novel came later: Saturday (2005) was set on one day: 15 February 2003, the day of Britain’s largest ever political demonstration, when more than a million people protested against the imminent invasion of Iraq. It follows its protagonist from morning to night, opening with a rush of energy that never lets up. ‘Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet.’ Perowne is a departure for McEwan – a happy character, content in his marriage – but his day darkens as he encounters a dangerous criminal. McEwan wrote Saturday, intended to be a digressive and meditative novel, as a reaction against the (unexpected to him) success of Atonement. But his skill with immersive action – a high-voltage squash game, a confrontation with violence – made it another bestseller. The novel had its detractors, most notably John Banville, who in a hatchet-job review considered Saturday to be the wrong kind of political – ‘has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong’ – not to mention refusing to believe that an educated man like Perowne could not have heard of poet Matthew Arnold. Yet the precise point is that Perowne is an intelligent man who dislikes books. This is a sort of joke on the character, for, as McEwan pointed out, ‘Whatever he says about literature, he’s doomed to remain a character in a novel by me. There’s no escape.’

McEwan’s 1990 novel The Innocent followed The Child in Time in his new mode of looking out at the world, but the claustrophobic qualities of his early fiction were here in shadow form. The book is set in a tunnel in Berlin in 1955, and the hero Leonard Markham is stuck in a windowless room for much of the time. Amid Cold War phone-tapping chaos involving MI6 and the CIA, Leonard moves from innocence to experience, both in life and in love. This is a very wide-ranging book: it has the espionage office politics of John le Carré; one of McEwan’s most bone-crunching scenes of sustained action when Leonard gets into a fight with his lover’s ex-husband; and brilliantly black comedy in an attempt to dispose of a couple of suitcases. It’s also the first novel to exhibit McEwan’s abiding interest in the rich fictional possibilities of the history and symbolism of the Berlin Wall, a location he would revisit in Black Dogs and Lessons.

The later spy novel Sweet Tooth (2012) is much lighter in tone than The Innocent, via its narrator Serena Frome (‘rhymes with plume’) and her chirpy voice. (There are probably more exclamation marks in this novel than in all McEwan’s other books put together.) The story is about Serena’s work with MI5 in the 1970s and her involvement in Operation Sweet Tooth, which seeks to fund writers who are politically sympathetic. The one Serena recruits – and falls in love with – writes stories very like those of the young Ian McEwan. This set-up gives McEwan the opportunity for lots of fun around the British literary scene of the time, with namechecks for Booker winners William Golding, Kingsley Amis and David Storey, as well as brief cameos from Martin Amis and Angus Wilson. The secret service even reckons that, with enough writers in its pay, ‘sooner or later one of our own is going to be chairing this new Booker Prize committee’. The novel also functions as a portrait of the 1970s, ‘the bipolar world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn’ and the three-day week, when ‘the British mood was self-lacerating’. The overall mood though is, as Serena’s spymasters describe her role, ‘a bit of light-hearted fun. Frothy’ – though with depths that don’t become clear until later. 

Between 1992 and 2007, Ian McEwan wrote six novels, all but one of which were long- or shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Why was Enduring Love (1997) omitted? It ‘just missed out on being shortlisted’, according to Jason Cowley, one of that year’s judges, but in any event it is one of McEwan’s most satisfying and thrilling novels. It starts with one of his most famous sustained action scenes – a rescue involving a runaway hot-air balloon – and turns into a story of obsessive love, when one of the rescuers, Jed, begins stalking another, the narrator Joe. There are plenty of hairpins and switchbacks in this story, but perhaps the sneakiest is the appendix at the end of the story: a research paper by two psychiatrists, Robert Wenn and Antonio Camia – what unusual surnames – showing that Joe and Jed’s story is based on a real case.

But that is not really a plot twist in the usual sense of the word. In fact, recommending a book for its twist is self-defeating: the reader will be too alert from the start and the effect could easily be spoiled. So here’s the twist in this list: we have already recommended, in the suggestions above, two Ian McEwan novels that have enormous head-spinning twists in them, the sort that make the reader recast everything they’ve just read. But we’re not going to tell you which ones. You’ll have to read them and find out – just as the author intended.