MASARYK UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF EDUCATION
Department of English Language and Literature
CHARACTERS’ TRANSFORMATIONS IN IAN McEWAN’S WORKS
Diploma Thesis
Brno 2007
Written by: Bc. Šárka Smejkalová Supervisor: Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, PhD.
Declaration
I declare that I have compiled this diploma thesis by myself and that I have used only the sources listed in the bibliography.
------Šárka Smejkalová
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Lucie Podroužková PhD., for her kind support, patience and help. The thesis would have been unlikely to arise without her guidance and encouragement.
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Table of Content
Introduction ...... 5 1. Ian McEwan, “The Odd One Out”...... 7 2. The Cement Garden ...... 11 3. The Innocent ...... 28 4. Amsterdam ...... 42 Conclusion...... 55 List of Sources...... 57 Resumé ……………………………………………………………………... 60
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Introduction
This diploma thesis is focused on one of the most prolific contemporary British novelist and short story writer, Ian McEwan. As the title of the thesis suggests, it targets the characters’ transformations and all the events that influence the fables’ behavior. For this, I have chosen three of the many McEwan’s novels, The Cement Garden (1978), The Innocent (1990) and the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction winning, Amsterdam (1998) .
McEwan’s writing style and interesting unconventional topics of the books cause that he is popular not only among readers but also among critics. In the course of his career, which started in 1975 by publishing his first short stories collection First Loves, Last Rites , he has won many literary prices. Many times, he has proved his unexceptionable writing craftsmanship which makes the reader think, feel sorrow about the characters, get angry at all the circumstances or dream about them. He is not only the great storyteller but also a unique observer. He suitably describes all the things and events that surround the characters, he mentions all the sounds and feelings and depicts every single detail. He is able to take down both losses and victories, amusing events as well as demanding life phases, and still he is able to entertain. He uses not only an ironic or sarcastic language but also beautiful poetic expressions. His writing style gives rise to the feeling that the reader often does not think about the character as about a “convectional use of words” (http://en.wikipedia.org), therefore none existing, but, due to the fact that the author makes them sound really authentic, they might be imagined as real people. In his novels he mainly focuses on white people, particularly British citizens, but sometimes he mentions some other nationalities, such as Germans, Americans, Irishmen or Russians. The register used in his books differs according to social classes appearing in his stories. Reading McEwan’s books, we have an excellent opportunity to discover the secrets of the characters’ psyche, their thoughts and deeds. Despite the fact that all his books are full of demanding moral topics, McEwan does not tend to moralize. At first he allows the reader to absorb the atmosphere of the story and then he leaves upon him or her to judge.
Even if all the three novels this thesis focuses to differ with their background share demanding topics such as death, murder, incest, solitude and relationships among people. Despite all these heavy themes: “his prose is controlled, careful, and powerfully concise;
5 he is eloquent on the subjects of sex and sexuality; he has a strong head for the narrative possibilities of science; his novels are no longer than is necessary.” (http://www.believermag.com/).
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1. Ian McEwan, “The Odd One Out”
Ian McEwan was born on 21 June in 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. He was considered to be the only child, till an unknown man who traced back in the family history discovered that he is McEwan’s brother. Dave Sharp, the brick layer, is six ears older then McEwan and “was given away at Reading station by his mother, Rose McEwan, nee Wort. She became pregnant from a wartime affair with David McEwan, and gave the child away before her husband returned. When he was killed, Rose married Mr McEwan, and they raised Ian only 15 miles from Mr Sharp's new home.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk) Because of his father who worked as an officer in the army, young Ian lived in many different countries, such as the Far East, North Africa and Germany, which could be the inspiration for his novel The Innocent many years later. After he returned to England he attended Sussex University, which was followed by MA Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. He was one of the first students of this course established by Malcolm Bradbury and Augus Wilson. The university itself became popular because of this course and also because of McEwan, after he became an eminent writer.
Ian McEwan has been married twice. With his first wife he has two sons, his second wife, Annalena McAffe works as an editor for the Guardian’s Review section. It is interesting that a family does not act an important role in his fiction.
The first collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites , was published in 1975 and was followed by the other collection called In Between the Sheets (1978). After these the first novel The Cement Garden (1978) was written. Following postmodern literary principles:
McEwan’s early pieces were notorious for their dark themes and perverse, even gothic, material. Controversy surrounding the extreme subject matter of the first four works [the fourth piece in the raw is The Comfort of Strangers , 1981] , which are concerned with paedophilia, murder, incest and violence, was exacerbated by their troubling narrative framework, the way in which conventional moral perspectives are disrupted or overturned, the reader frequently drawn into prurient involvement with the characters. McEwan’s perpetrator narrators draw us into complicity with their crimes, whilst his victims seem strangely collusive in their own exploitation and destruction. (http://www.contemporarywriters.com/)
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In the course of his writing career McEwan has found many readers, and it is the same until these days, who either admire him, or, hate him and call him disgusting, even perverse. From the very beginning of his writing, McEwan has been the author who talks to his readers using his unique, individual language. He also mentions those aspects of British society which were never mentioned in literature before, the “reversed side” of Great Britain’s life. McEwan belongs to the group of authors who bring not only new aspects of reality, but also new artistic advancement. (Hilský, p.139) According to Zadie Smith Ian McEwan should be called “the odd man out” as “he was not like Amis and he was not like Rushdie or Barnes or Ishiguro or Kureishi or any of the other English and quasi English men.”(http://www.believermag.com/). Kiernan Ryan’s phrase, ‘the art of unease’ (http://www.contemporarywriters.com/) should probably be the most exact comparison which conveys the core of McEwan’s writing style.
Besides writing short stories and novels, he also focuses on other genres, such as librettos. His libretto Or Shall We Die? for an oratorio set to music by Michael Berkeley also solves some demanding topics. In his review Christopher Hitchens comments on it and also on McEwan’s previous work:
The "first" McEwan was (and is) a thoughtful child of the sixties, somewhat hippie like in many ways, yet tense and gaunt and ironic behind his granny glasses. Much preoccupied with war and power and hierarchy, he helped to map the "alternative" ethos of those who could at least imagine a world without exploitation or bigotry or sexual jealousy. The summa of this Green and quasi feminist outlook was to be found in the libretto he wrote for the composer Michael Berkeley, whose oratorio Or Shall We Die? provided a highly sensitive register of the anti nuclear angst that accompanied the Euro missile debate of the mid 1980s. (http://www.theatlantic.com)
Not only librettos but also drama, screenplays and contributions to OUP as a literary critic accompany his profession.
It is worth mentioning his novels which are not to be discussed in this thesis, e.g. The Child in Time , 1987, Black Dogs, 1992, The Daydreamer , 1994, The Short Stories, 1995, Enduring Love , 1997, Atonement , 2001, Saturday, 2005, On Chesil Beach , 2007 (http://www.contemporarywriters.com/). Even if the works differ in the topic, they are similar due to the masterly used language and the novelist’s ability to describe all the events by his own “sharply smooth” style that gives them semblance of obviosity and
8 commonness. In Zadie Smith’s words: “he is not a dilettante of even a natural, neither a fabulist nor a show off. He is rather an artisan, always hard at work; refining, improving, engaged by and interested in every step in the process, like a scientist setting up a lab experiment.” (http://www.believermag.com/). Her words are confirmed by the British and other international literary specialists who have awarded McEwan’s works many times. The first one which, undoubtedly, positively influenced his career and motivated him as a writer was Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his short stories collection First Love, Last Rites . He appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist four times and has won it for Amsterdam in 1998. The novel Child in Time was awarded twice by Withbread Novel Award in 1987 and Prix Fémina Etranger in 1993. In 2002 he received WH Smith Literary Award for Atonement . One of the most recent major literary awards on the long list that should be mentioned is James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for his last but one novel Saturday from the year 2006. (http://www.contemporarywriters.com/)
As was mentioned before, it is not only the otherness, but also the unique narrative style that distinguish McEwan form the major part of contemporary British authors. His novels are full of preciously described events, places and the characters’ thoughts. In his book Saturday , for example, he restricts the dialogues to the possible minimum and uses the stream of consciousness instead. Through the stream of the characters’ thoughts he expresses his own opinions of things, events which take place at the particular time. In his novels Amsterdam and Saturday he uses the main male characters to express the process of writing. Even if their professions differ, McEwan as a writer lets the composer Linley from Amsterdam and the brain surgeon Perowne from Saturday celebrate the beauty of the writer’s work and the process of creating something new. The author himself confirmed this fact in his interview with Zadie Smith: “I’m glad that you found that paragraph. I knew I wanted to write a major operation at the end but it would really be about writing, about making art.” (http://www.believermag.com/)
In his novels, McEwan often uses male and female approaches to the events that occur within the story and the world itself. Surprisingly, the reader has a strong feeling of author’s degrading attitude towards men characters as they are usually depicted as: “prone to construct the authoritative, male dominated hierarchal world order based on purely rational, and therefore “logical” thinking.” (Chalupský, p.4) In virtue of this thinking the male character foolishly regards himself as to a superior member of the society, or at least, the household. Consequently, women are treated as weak and
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“irrational”. The truth, however, is that: “most of McEwans male protagonists are, in fact, insecure men, unable to admit their incapacities for they are too blinded by their belief in their unavoidable fate as natural leaders.” (ibid, p.4) The women characters, on the other hand, follow their intuition and are not afraid of showing their feelings. Seemingly, they play an inferior role in the shadow of the man but in fact they “perpetually undermine the patriarchal illusion.” (ibid, p.4) It is always the woman who has to solve the challenging situations, who tenderly shows the ways to her man and despite all the demanding events reveals her strong character.When choosing children as main characters, McEwan mainly describes the period between the childhood and the adolescence, as it is the most interesting one, full of changes and twists.
Ian McEwan is the kind of author who, definitely, exceeds the average and who deserves to be awarded. As a postmodern writer he forces the readers to think about everything they read, and even after finishing it, which should change the novel’s intention depending on the reader’s point of interpretation. The more McEwan’s novels are read the more different their plot, setting, character or theme might be understood.
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2. The Cement Garden
Almost all the novels and stories in Ian McEwan’s rich writing career are connected by one sharing thing which completely changes the stories and their plots. It is the dark atmosphere and the premonition which accompany the reader through the whole story. “It is an atmosphere of stillness, a paralyzed sterility disguised as seeming peacefulness which evokes an evil foreboding in the reader that something terrible is about to happen that will ruin or completely change the characters’ lives, probably for the worse.” (Chalupský, p. 2) Simply said, there is always someone or something that suddenly appears and alters the life of the main character and his or her family members. The mood of the novel The Cement Garden is no exception.
The Cement Garden written in 1978 was the first novel published after two collections of short stories and immediately caused a scandal. Despite the author being called a master of “short, sharp shock” (Williams, p.217) due to his previous collections of short stories, this novel was something the reader of the late 1970s did not expect. The novel offers us an insight into a life of an urban family with four children. From the very beginning it is obvious that the family relationships do not work very well. We are faced up to the family in which incestuous topic is introduced, the family with perverted values, and last but not least, the theme of death connects all the events from the beginning to the end. According to the correspondent of The Guardian, William Sutcliffe, within the first ten pages of the story the reader is given:
An object lesson in the art of exposition bringing alive and complex set of relationships within a six person family, while at the same time being filled with event (the death of a father, vaguely incestuous sibling games, and the protagonist’s first ejaculation), and giving voice to a protagonist about whom the reader wants to know more. (http://books.guardian.co.uk/)
First the father, later on the mother dies and all the children are left on their own with the outer world behind. Julie, Jack, Sue, and Tom are introduced to us as well as their characters, moods, thoughts, strengths, weaknesses and revolts. McEwan describes all the elements mentioned with the emphasis to the details and analyses the novel’s heroes
11 and heroines in his own way. We learn how the children, who were not used to be without their parents, particularly their mother, bear up against the world of adults, mainly the oldest ones, Julie and Jack. This story, however, is not the “happy end” sort of book, not even the plot is affirmative.
The characteristic element of this novel is the usage of a first person narrative, which is not unusual in other fictions. Here, however, the narrator is a fifteen year old boy, called Jack, whose greatest wish is to be an independent adult man. It was undoubtedly a difficult task for the writer who mainly wanted to attract the adult readers, and not only teenagers. We witness the journey of the boy through his mind and psyche, which is obviously traumatised be the events of both parents’ death, even if he pretends the lack of interest. Ostensibly, Jack tries to tell us the story from the position of an adult man, but due to the fact he is not the grown up the reader might doubt about his reliability as a narrator. His dubiousness is expressed in the situation he seemingly tries to avoid the responsible position of the narrator. To separate himself from the reality he looks in the mirror which sometimes gives him the feeling as observing somebody else:
I frequently stared at myself in mirrors, sometimes for as long as an hour. One morning, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, I was searching in the gloom of our huge hallway for my shoes when I glimpsed myself in a full length mirror which leaned against the wall. [...] Coloured light through the stained glass above the front door illuminated from behind stray fibres of my hair. The yellowish semidarkness obscured the humps and pits of my complexion. I felt noble and unique. I stared at my own image till it began to dissociate itself and paralyse me with its look. It receded and returned to me with each beat of my pulse and the dark halo throbbed above its head and shoulders. (McEwan, p.21 22)
From the literary point of view, Jack is, undoubtedly, an example of a homodiegetic narrator. The text itself fully correlates with the narration and gives us the proof that the narrator experiences the events directly. It also should be introduced as the story of “quasi initiation”, not only Jack’s but also his two sisters’, which I understand that McEwan does not try to transform the characters utterly, but that he wants to let them to enter the adult world and to leave it defeated, being aware they are not ready for it yet.
Following the postmodern principles, saying the possible minimum about irrelevant matters or events, the setting, time and the role of the family in the outer world is
12 something the adolescent narrator does not mention. We have only bare clues about all these things. Due to Jack’s information we know the story takes place in the suburb which is about to be torn down and slowly but surely being replaced by some modern buildings, probably office blocks or blocks of flats. Therefore we should assume that the story is enacted in the 1970s when the great building boom occurred:
As I walked up our street I noticed suddenly how different it looked. It was hardly a street at all, it was a road across an almost empty junk yard. There were only two other houses left standing apart from ours. Ahead of me a group of workmen stood round a builders’ lorry preparing to go home. [...] All that was left of the prefabs were the big slabs of the foundations. (McEwan, p.123)
Not only the decadent surroundings, where the shops and schools seem to be unimportant, but also the house and the garden, which is intended to be covered by the concrete, inform us about the uneasiness within the family. In fact, the narrator shares only a little about the house’s or the garden’s organisation or size as well as about the family relationship. According to the psychologists a family is the core of the society. It is a family that must function, and then the society would work well. This family, as, mentioned, seems not to fulfil its role properly. Despite the fact that all the members meet the outer world, parents go to work and children attend school, they are rather solitary kind of people. Children seem to have no friends at school, they are dependent on each other and their parents, the wider society is something the whole family seems to be marginalised from:
No one ever came to visit us. Neither my mother nor my father when he was alive had any real friends outside the family. They were both only children, and all my grandparents were dead. My mother had distant relatives in Ireland whom she had not seen since she was a child. Tom had a couple of friends he sometimes played with in the street, but we never let him bring them into the house. There was not even a milkman in our road now. As far as I could remember, the last people to visit the house had been the ambulance men who took my father away. (ibid. 23)
At the time this novel was written most of the families had their own fixed hierarchy where the members acted according their given roles. These thoughts still partly persist until these days and hence, from the psychological point of view, each person in a family has its exact role. Mother represents the “housewife”, who looks after the house,
13 and the “emotional leader”, who holds the family together and also forms merely positive inner atmosphere among all the members. Adolescents expect that she would carter to an emotional harmony that she would be kind, efficient, optimistic, always willing to help. Father is understood as someone who has a role of the “breadwinner”, as an “instrumental leader” who rather focuses on reaching the whole family’s goals. Teenagers demand their father to be a skilled organiser of the family life, advisor, the emotional support for the members and largely they want to see him in the position of mother’s helper, not only with the housework but also with the children’s education. Friendliness, courage, faithfulness, optimism, deliberation and the suitable strictness are the qualities admired. Son, positively influenced by the father can easily fulfil his own “man’s role”. Observing his father he imitates the relationships to other women, not only in the family but also in the outer world. He will probably look for his female partner similar to his mother. This is even emphasized due to kind, supportive and loving family atmosphere where the gratuity outweighs the punishment and where there is the father’s interest. Daughter, on the other hand, identifies with her mother; a kind of “women’s bondage” appears here but only if the mother is positively accepted by the father. If not, the daughter tends to identify with her dominant father and later on she projects her regained habits onto her own relationships. The men in the family also escalate the daughter’s, sister’s, self confidence as a woman. They set her the “male mirror” and she is able to practise all the female tricks on them. The supportive father often becomes the model for choosing her male partners. Adolescents evaluate their family according to the mutual cooperation among all the family members. The more the teenager is aware of his or her family position the less hostility and intolerance he or she shows. (Čačka, p. 305 323)
Small children, four or five year old, differ from the adolescents in the way that they are influenced by their milieu more. On the contrary to the almost grown ups, who are partly “out of the nest”, they are not able to look after themselves and the sentimental peace among parents and them is one of the requirements of a healthy mental development. As well as teenagers small children tend to identify with the parent of the same sex, they imitate the parent unwillingly but also knowingly. According to Sigmund Freud, this is the age when the child learns to accept his or her sexual role and the desire for the parent of the opposite sex appears here, too. It is the time when the Oedipus or Electra’s complexes occur:
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The Oedipus complex in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a stage of psychosexual development in childhood where children of both sexes regard their father as an adversary and competitor for the exclusive love of their mother. Freud considered the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex to be key to the development of gender roles and identity. The Electra complex is a concept found in Psychoanalytic theory that attempts to address issues of female development. Freud referred to it as the "feminine Oedipus attitude" in his own writings. It was later renamed the "Electra complex" by his contemporary Carl Jung. (http://en.wikipedia.org/)
Still talking about small children, the role of the father at this age is approbatory and streamlining. He should also be the punishing authority, but mainly he teaches the child to understand norms and rules of the society. Mother, on the contrary, is the one who protects, hugs, deplores, and develops friendly relations to other people. To sum it up there should be said: “The father leads to the society and the mother to the people.” (Čačka, p.88)
All the members of this white, lower middle class family are rather socially aloof, the atmosphere of this estate is distressing. The parents never offer their children the opportunity to become less alienated from the others and to get more involved into the outer world. McEwan gives us the access to the lives of these people “as he puts each child under the unnaturally intense microscope of which Jack is the lens.” (http://www.literature study online.com/) The way the adolescent narrator shares his thoughts and views with the reader is unusual. Much information that an adult reader should be interested in is left unsaid. For example, we do not know exactly how old the parents and some of the children are, where they work, go to school or what disease killed the mother. It could be a result of Jack’s way of thinking which influences his narration. Sharing the possible minimum of information about their lives Jack could be compared to any other teenagers. According to the developmental psychology teenagers experience the feelings of insecurity and they are in the constant fight not only with the others but also with themselves. It is caused by the fact that they are excluded from the children’s world but are not included to the adult’s world yet. They rumble between these two life’s periods waiting for a hint but all they need is the surrounding’s patience and understanding. An example of Jack’s inner fight connected with the feeling of embarrassment appears when two workmen come to their house with some cement, “I
15 stood up and held the comic out of sight. I wished I had been reading the racing page of my father’s paper, or the football results.” (McEwan, p.9) Lack of speech, sharing any of their feelings with parents and avoiding all responsibilities give a true picture of teenagers, too. Jack, however, affects the reader of his hostility not only towards his own family but also to the whole world. Typical teenagers share as much as possible with their peers but Jack, as well as his other siblings, does not. He seems to be letargic, apathetic, unemotional, and unsocial. He, as a hero, seems to be the anti hero at the end and invites compassion.
To be the hero means, among others, to be an ordinary man, who is pure and prevails all the difficulties, despite fighting against the odds. Each hero also has a villain, a foe, who tries to defeat him. The anti hero, on the other hand, does not necessary have to be a villain, but has some of his features. What is more, some of the readers should sympathize with him as it should be somebody with noble goals which are usually tried to be reached by villain like methods. “Also, an anti hero is someone who although is the protagonist of the story, shows traits which are in contrast to those of the traditional hero, such as cowardice.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/) Considering Jack is only fifteen, a question about the children’s purity comes up to our minds. Where has the ideal of the Rousseau’s youth gone? Comparing Rousseau’s Émile to Jack would be a very interesting task as they both grow up in different countries, therefore cultures, times, conditions. According to Rousseau the aim of education is to learn how to live, and this is accomplished by following a guardian who can point the way to good living. (http://en.wikipedia.org/) Émile has somebody to look up to, somebody who looks after him, not so Jack. Émile is educated to cooperate with the people, not so Jack. Émile is the youth who in his fifteenth certainly knows how to behave and no temptations cannot harm him, not so Jack. It is obvious that Jack, despite trying to prove that he is the grown up, reminds totally unprepared for the role within the society.
Being brought by the parents, at least a little, Jack is able to obey the general rules. Nevertheless, the break point in his life, and the other siblings’ lives, is the successive death of both his parents. As the book is separated into two parts, the author devoted the whole first part to a description of the sudden death of the father and to the whole “dying process” of the mother. The father’s partial disability and the consciousness of his weakness turn his manners and behaviour on the level of fury and anger. Moreover,
16 he is aware of the fact that nobody looks up to him. His oldest son, Jack, symbolizes the threat for his family status and therefore he does not like him very much. Not always, however, is the hate mutual. Jack, the one who forms his identity, likes some of the father’s manners and sometimes looks up to his manly behaviour. Moreover, a kind of cooperation and male bondage occurs time to time, too:
My father counted them (the paper sacks of cement), looked at his clipboard and said, “Fifteen.” The two men grunted. I liked this kind of talk. I too said to myself, “Fifteen.” [...] Apart from his infrequent, terse instructions we said nothing. I was pleased that we knew exactly what we were doing and what the other was thinking that we did not need to speak. For once I felt at ease with him.” (McEwan, p.10, 17)
It is not only Jack but also Tom who the father “competes” with. At this point it is not because of the family status, Tom seems to be an emulator in his eyes:
Tom was scared of his father and kept well behind me. Julie had told me recently that now Father was a semi invalid he would compete with Tom for Mother’s attention. [...] So simple, so bizarre, a small boy and a grown man competing. [...] And he was strict with Tom, always going on at him in a needling sort of way. He used Mother against Tom much as he used his pipe against her. “Don’t talk to your mother like that,” or “Sit up straight when your mother is talking to you.” She took all this in silence. If Father then left the room she would smile briefly at Tom or tidy his hair with her fingers. (ibid, 13)
Nevertheless, the “I narrator” was so “kind” and donated the whole first chapter in memory of his father. The story itself, and the first chapter, starts with the words: “I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.” (ibid, p.9) Is this note a kind of regret about his father’s death or just a flat, unemotional reaction to an unexpected event which occured? Is it a demonstration of a typical teenage behaviour? Even if Jack knew he should not provoke his father, not to talk back, not to be nasty, as the father was advised to relax and not to get angry, he did everything to do so. Although being aware of the father’s weak health, he does not help him much with pulling out the full buckets of cement from the cellar window on an extremely hot day. He wants his father to work exactly the same way he does and does not give him any free time to have a rest. Later on, trying to avoid the hard work himself, Jack locks up in the bathroom and masturbates. He absolutely prefers his sexual desires, during which he
17 imagines his older sister Julie, to other values. Under the pressure of all thoughts coming up to his mind, he reaches his first real orgasm. Unfortunately, at the same time his father has a heart attack and dies face down in the wet concrete. High symbolism is used here, as the torch is passed from the father to the oldest son who becomes the head of the family. The father’s death and the first orgasm seem to be the most important moments in Jack’s life. After the whole family recovers from the unexpected death and the father’s body is taken away in an ambulance, Jack, the master, returns to the garden, to where the heart attack took place and cleans everything up. “I did not have a thought in my head as I picked up the plank and carefully smoothed away his impression in the soft, fresh concrete.” (Ibid., p.19) Jack intents disposing of the father’s impression in order to show his maturity. This is for the first time he is able to do something without asking his father for permission and, more importantly, there is no father who should protest against it. By this act the father’s existence was smoothed away for ever.
Incest is one of the important elements in this novel. It is probably caused by the alienation of the children, Julie, Jack and Sue, that they often play incestuous games during which they examine their bodies and they mainly focus to the private body parts. Largely, it is Sue who is being examined by the two others, but it is Julie about whom Jack dreams while he masturbates. Even if they do not say it, the mutual desire between these two siblings is noticeable from the beginning and they both want to have sex and, by thus, to gratify their oestrus.
Since the father’s death certain changes in the every day life and in the characters’ behaviour are visible. All of them are more relaxed and even happier. The mother seems to be more satisfied as well. The atmosphere is not as thick as it used to be and especially the two teenagers, Jack and Julie, abuse their unusual freedom. Jack is mainly occupied with his body and spends a lot of time in the bathroom. Unfortunately, he does not have a bath or a shower there, and soon he begins to stink. Hygiene is something excluded from Jack’s life, and neither his mother nor his older sister are able to force him to wash himself. He would do it only if he wants to do so and this knowledge gives him an enormous power over his new life where no authority interferes. He might have thought of this to be a sign of his maturity, but his behaviour would be compared to that of a spoiled child and is rather disgusting. Julie, on the other hand, looks after herself more than necessary, later on, she starts to date somebody. To behave like this when the father was alive was something unimaginable. She shares many experiences with her
18 mother and they seemed to be very close and relaxed with each other. A very tight female bondage appears here. The mother seems that she finally started to live through her oldest daughter and her adventures. The other two siblings, Tom and Sue, seem to live their lives in an unchanged way. Even if Tom is freed from the constant father’s attention and exhortation, he is too small to understand the changes, and the introverted Sue seems not to care about it. She liked her father, she was probably the only one who cried for him when he died. Due to the fact that she is described by Jack as a rather solitary person it is difficult to suggest what does she go through. On the outside she pretends nothing has happened, keeps in her inner world and focuses on reading instead.
The close relationship, the above mentioned female bondage, between the mother and her daughter Julie becomes more apparent when the mother becomes ill. Jack, as well as the others, does not know much about it as Julie keeps it in a secret. The lack of communication among all the family members is something that causes many problems and arguments. Julie enjoys the situation, because now it is her who becomes the head of the family, which irritates her brother very much and hence his constant teenage opposition increases even more. Julie is asked by her mother to look after the household while she is in the hospital and, later on, when she comes back home again, Julie is asked to continue in it. The mother is seriously ill and denies the doctors’ help. She wants to spend the rest of her life with her children and she does so. The cancer, or whatever disease it is, causes that she is really weak and therefore does not leave her bed for a long time before her death. In contrast to these days when people are not afraid of talking about their illnesses and cancer is something what people informed about widely, the mother behaves rather selfishly not telling the children about her troubles. Perhaps it is the way by which she tries to protect her family but the lack of communication causes many problems, again. As she is not able to come out from her house she is forced to ask Julie to do more and more for her; she communicates with the outer world, mainly with the teachers, through letters which are brought to school by Julie. It is also Julie who has to do all the shopping, to pay the invoices and to do many other things connected to the everyday life of a family.
Suddenly, the centre of the house moves from downstairs to upstairs because the children want to be as near to their mother as possible. All of them, except Jack. The initial euphoria after the father’s death, the feeling that he is the head of them all, has
19 passed away and he, realising it is not an easy thing to rule, chooses to live his life in seclusion. He closes up in his world and builds up a high emotional barrier, a wall, around himself. Rarely does he leave his fortress, even if he is aware of the fact that he is alone, that he needs his family and his mother. His mental condition becomes worse, he is rather lethargic and prefers day dreaming to real experience. Nightmares follow him at nights and less and less does he distinguish the reality from the dream:
I was being followed by someone I could not see. In their hands they carried a box and they wanted me to look inside, but I hurried on. I paused for a moment and attempted to move my legs again, or open my eyes. But someone was coming with the box, there was no time and I had to run on. Then we came face to face. The box, wooden and hinged, might once have contained expensive cigars. The lid was lifted half an inch or so, too dark to see inside. I ran on in order to gain time, and this time I succeeded in opening my eyes. Before they closed, I saw my bedroom, my school shirt lying across a chair, a shoe upside down on the floor. Here was the box again. I knew there was a small creature inside, kept captive against his will and stinking horribly. (McEwan, p.27)
What do all the nightmares symbolize? There are many clues from the youth’s life there. The stinking creature should be Jack, as his sub consciousness advises him to obey at least the possible minimum of hygiene. On the other hand, the stinking thing should symbolize Jack’s consciousness which reproaches him for his dirty thoughts, and his behaviour. The captivity of it might be connected with the house itself, which is understood as a prison for all its inhabitants.
The Cement Garden ’s seems to be quite perverted. Above mentioned Oedipus complex occurs here mainly due to the both sons who dislike their father and therefore they try to protect their mother against him. The love of the youngest child, little Tom, seems to be exaggerated after the father’s death as he does not have to share mother’s love with his father anymore. Whenever possible he wants to hug her, to sleep with her in one bed, he demands her constant attention. Even after her death Tom is not willing to accept it and wants to lie next to her and hug her dead body again. The other influence of Freudian psychology is striking here. It is the one of the incestuous behaviour of the three siblings, and mainly of Jack and Julie. All the fantasies Jack dreams about fulfil at the end of the story when he is seduced by his sister.
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After the mother passes away Julie demonstrates her power again as she locks the bedroom the mother has died in and does not want to allow anybody to come in and see her. Jack, however, as the second important person in the house forces his sister to let him see their mum. Later on, these two have to tell the younger ones the sad message. In contrast to their father’s death, nobody wants to accept the fact that their mother has just died. Jack’s regained position, however, does not allow him to suffer as much as his mother would deserve, nevertheless, he is not able to face the pressure of all those circumstances and when alone he allows all his feelings to come up: “For a moment I perceived clearly the fact of her death, and my crying became dry and hard. But then I pictured myself as someone whose mother has just died and my crying was wet and easy again.” (ibid, p. 53) The confused Jack does not know how to behave and it might be the shock that the narrator tries to extricate from the character and describes his suffering as it would be somebody completely different.
One of the strongest passages in the book occurs at the end of the first part, when Jack, Julie and Sue have to decide what to do next with their mother’s dead body:
Towards the end of the next day, Sue said, “Don’t you think we ought to tell someone?” I said, “If we tell someone...” and waited. Sue said, “We have to tell someone so there can be a funeral.” [...] “If we tell them”, I began again, “they’ll come and put us into care, into an orphanage or someting. They might try and get Tom adopted.” [...] “But if we don’t tell anyone”, said Sue [...] ,“what do we do then?” [...] Julie said, “We can’t leave her in the bedroom or she will start to smell.” Sue was almost shouting. “That’s a terrible thing to say.” “You mean,” I said to Julie, “that we shuldn’t tell anybody.” [...] Julie said, “If we don’t tell anybody we’ve got to do something ourselves quickly.” (Ibid., pp.57 59)
The insufficient communicativeness before the mother’s death has caused that the children are lost in the reality and do not know how to behave. On the other hand, all their arguments should be understood as an act of unity and love. The worst thing which could happen to them is their separation. Even if the reader should be disgusted he should feel sorry for the children at least a bit. The way they behave is not their fault only, it is closely connected with the whole family and their previous upbringing. They were taught to act together, to support and defend themselves against the others. Julie, however, as an almost adult person, who is supposed to decide, does not want to rid of the freedom, the power she has over all her siblings and decides to bury their mother
21 into the trunk down in the cellar. Because of this wrong decision she fails in the role of the family leader right at the beginning of their solitude and later all the members suffer from the consequences.
Soon, she realises that the role of the head is sometimes very difficult and allows her younger brother, Jack, to cooperate with her and to help her, especially when she needs to take the body of their mum down to the cellar. In order to protect Sue and Tom, Jack and Julie are supposed to cooperate and work quickly and precisely. Despite being aware of what are Jack and Julie about to do, Sue refuses to help, as she understands burying their mum in the house as a bad thing. She is the only one who thinks that somebody else should be informed about what has happened and that their mother must be buried properly. The cement used for covering of mother’s body brings us back to their father who bought fifteen packets of it and did not manage to use it before he died. Jack mentioned it at the very beginning, saying, “I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.” (Ibid., p. 9)
Since their mother is buried a new organisation of the family is created, but it is not able to work for very long time. The role of parents falls upon Julie and Jack, who are the oldest and the most suitable. Despite becoming allies their cooperation fails soon. Both of them are strong personalities who want to rule everything in their own way and because they are not able to find any possible compromise, discuss problems and do not know how to communicate they start to behave in rather a hostile way. Soon they begin to act in the same way as their parents did when alive. Sue with Tom start to fulfil the role of the children and the mood in the house changes as well. Although, they try to live their lives as if nothing has happened it is a very difficult task for all of them. The whole house seems to fall asleep and all the children start to live in their own way.
Tom, the youngest and the weakest member of the family, begins to experience what psychologists would call regression. It is the state of mind caused by frustration and causes that people move backwards in their behaviour. According to the psychologists regression is one of the defending reactions of human’s ego. (Nakonečný, p. 463) In Tom’s case, he behaves as he is an infant after the mother’s death. He demands nursing and full time care of nobody else but Julie, who substituted the role of the mother.
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Everybody in the house is surprised with Tom’s change at first, but Julie who quickly tires of all his demands and who refuses to control him all the time greets this modification, and accepts the game by which she admits her immaturity. She moves the cot from the cellar to her bedroom as Tom does not want to sleep in his bedroom on his own anymore. Fortunately this state of mind does not last for long, but instead of improving himself and moving his behaviour to the level of four year old boy again, he wants to dress up like a girl and asks Julie and Sue to help him to realize his demand. Due to Julie Tom becomes a crossing between a wild child and a baby house pet. (http://www.literature study online.com/) The only one who does not agree with it is Jack, who thinks it is against nature to dress up a boy into the girl’s clothes. The others do not care about his opinion and are happy because Tom seems to be in a better mood. Julie would do anything to get rid of her little brother’s constant attention. Since this time Tom spends most of his time playing outside with his friends.
Sue, the least featured, introverted sort of person, who is not old enough to rule with her older siblings, but is not a baby anymore, becomes even more introverted and in order to come with the whole situation she decides to write a diary to her dead mother. The diary itself is very important to her and she takes it with her wherever she goes. Sue is an extremely careful observer and notes down everything that is happening in the house or with her brothers and sister. The diary is the only connection with the woman she loved the most and she probably feels it as a duty to inform her about everything. She might imagine her mother to be in the house as a ghost who reads everything she writes. Sue does not want anybody to know about her newly acquired role within the family and is really annoyed when Jack finds out her secret. Not only the diary but also reading merely occupy her during the holiday. Even if she was a keen reader before her mother’s death, now she reads more. The world of books helps her to escape from the dreadful reality, from the fact that she is an orphan. Though Sue is probably only twelve, she seems to be the most responsible and moral person in the whole house. From the literary point of view, Sue is introduced as a static character as she is characterized by a very restricted range of speech and action patterns (http://www.uni koeln.de/). In case she suggests anything there is nobody who would accept her suggestions and therefore she does not express herself. She is rather passive and lets Jack and Julie to do anything they want to.
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Tom and Sue occupy themselves in their own way, Jack, however, feels he has nothing to do and therefore spends most of his time sleeping, or as there was mentioned above, daydreaming. Instead of proving that he is trustworthy and deserves the role of the head he occupies himself with his body and masturbates as much as possible. Sue, who can not stand his behaviour any longer, gives him a trashy science fiction novel as a birthday present, which he, amazingly, reads and likes. Moreover, he identifies with the hero and after some time he reads it again. The younger sister thinks that he is about to start reading as well, but the book is probably the first and also the last one he would ever read. It is another undoubted sign of his juvenile behaviour, non definition of his interests, as he does not know into which world does he want to fall into: “I liked it here in Tom’s bed. [...] I gave up the cot to Sue long before that, when I was two, but lying in it now was familiar to me – its salty, clammy smell, the arrangements of the bars, an enveloping pleasure in being tenderly imprisoned.” (McEwan, p.132) At the beginning Jack introduces himself as a young man who will become an adult soon, but the more he tells the story the less active role does he act in it. Despite having noble ideas about his new life, after the father’s death, he realises how difficult task it is to rule and to be responsible for everybody and everything and soon he gives up all his effort. He becomes even more moody, hostile, reserved and his nightmares come back. He is also very proprietary of the members of his family. He cannot stand anybody from the outside world coming closer to his siblings. He accepts Tom’s little friends. Sue represents no menace as she has no friends, except her books. But, unfortunately, his secretly admired Julie started to see somebody, which irritates him.
Jack focuses almost all his attention to Julie and describes several events and adventures in her life. Sometimes, the reader should be awed by her dynamism and by all the changes she comes through during the story. Before her mother died Julie had been given the access to the family bank account and she had it ever since. She is the one who gives pocket money to her brothers and sister, who decides what to buy, and also she is the one who abuses this situation by buying many things for herself without telling the others, or at least Jack, or asking them for permission. After all the initial enthusiasm, quickly she realizes how demanding her new role is, and in order to escape the every day reality she starts to date somebody without telling anyone at home. Jack and Sue find this out by discovering some new, very expensive shoes in the kitchen and
24 are very angry, as they think that she bought them by herself, that she stole money from their bank account. She explains them this is not true and tells them it was a present.
“What’s that?” I said, looking across the room. Almost concealed under a chair was a long cardboard box with its lid half off. [...] “Ah!” Sue cried, “that’s Julie’s.” [...] Inside, embedded in white and orange tissue was a pair of calf length boots. [...] “Where did you get these?” “In a shop,” Julie said without turning round. “How much?” “Not much.” Sue was very excited. “Julie!” she said in a very loud whisper. “They cost thirty eight pounds.” [...] “Who gave them to you?” [...] “A bloke.” (McEwan, p. 80)
Since this time the new person is introduced to the family. Whoever it is, he is seen as somebody who is not welcome in there, who disrupts their unity and whose impact is rather disturbing. The author himself comments on the boyfriend and his role in the novel as on somebody who is supposed to enter the world of the children and breaks it. (http://www.litencyc.com/) And this is exactly what he has done.
The partner’s name is Derek. Jack describes him as the only child, a snooker player, a very smart person who is particular in good manners and smart clothes. Derek fell in love with Julie not only because of her beauty but also because of the independence she has. She is his true opposite which might attract him even more. Later on, Julie describes him as a good boy who: “lives with his mum in his tiny house. I have been there. She calls him Doodle and makes him wash his hands before tea. [...] She told me she irons fifteen shirts a week for him.” (McEwan, p.134) Derek wants to become friends with all the members of the family. He has no problem with Tom, as he is not any threat and Sue is very nice and friendly and likes him since they have first met. The only hostile person among all of them is the possessive Jack. Due to his family status, it is him who substitutes the role the role of the father, of the person to whom Julie’s boyfriend is supposed to be introduced. Jack is really furious about the stranger who has jumped into his life and turned it upside down. Derek does not like Jack either. As somebody who extremely looks after himself, Derek disapproves Jack’s clothes and hygiene, if there is any, and is not afraid of telling him so. Even if the teenage boy pretends he is not interested in what his rival says, secretly he thinks about Derek’s
25 words and slowly but surely begins to look after himself properly. It is not because of Derek but because of Julie, who, as Jack hopes, probably likes clean and smart men. Not only Jack’s hygiene does Derek influence, but also his attitude to tidying. Thinking about what has been said, he examines his room and finds that: “On the floor were Coca Cola tins, dirty clothes, fish and chips wrappers, several wire coat hangers, a box that once contained rubber bands. I stood up and looked at where I had been lying, the folds and rucks in the yellowish grey sheets, large stains with distinct edges. I felt stifled.” (ibid, 127)
After Derek is invited, but not accepted, into the family he starts to ask more and more questions and becomes more and more suspicious of the condition of the family and the dead parents. The more he asks Julie for further information the less Julie likes him. Suddenly, she realizes he should usurp her authority and being aware of what mistake she has done by inviting him into their house she wants to break up with him: “He wants to take charge of everything. He keeps talking about moving in with us.” (ibid, 134) That is a fatal mistake. As soon as he understands what a nasty game Julie plays with him, he has a strong feeling of being abused by her, he decides to discover the secret which is held in the household. Even before, he blamed his girlfriend of not telling him the truth, as there was a nasty sweet smell all aroud the house. Trying to persuade her to tell him what it is, she has never done it. Later on when he is pretinacious, they tell him they have buried their dog down in the cellar. Hoping this would break all the barriers between him and the others, he helps them to repair the cracking concrete to avoid the smell to come up. Unfortunately, the only result of it all is that they have integrated more than before. “We had not been at all careful with Derek. Often what was in the cellar did not seem real enough to keep from him. When we were not actually down there looking at the trunk it was as if we were asleep.” (ibid, 127)
As mentioned before, the whole novel finishes by an incestuous encounter after Jack is seduced by his sister, Julie.
“You sweet little thing.” She stroked my head. Her white cotton blouse was unbuttoned down to the swell of their breasts and her skin was a deep, dull brown. [...] The sweet, sharp smell of her perfume wrapped itself around me and I sat there grinning foolishly, staring into her eyes. [...]
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“Go on,” she encouraged, “don’t be afraid.” (ibid, 132 133)
Unfortunately, they are surprised by jealous Derek. He is terrified by the whole thing and moreover, he is shocked that they make love right next to the cot with their sleeping brother. Instead of apology he is faced to the hostility and apathy of them both and he is sent away followed by Julie’s words: “Actually, it’s none of your business.” (ibid, 135) After this he runs down the cellar, breaks open the trunk of cement where the mother is buried and fetches the police. While listening to the strokes into the mother’s concrete sarcophagus, Jack and Julie continue making love and being aware of the coming end of their shared living they enjoy the last moments of their mutual presence. They stop just as the police arrives and they all gather in Julie’s bedroom. It is probably a kind of saying goodbye ritual. Julie, demonstrating her head role for the last time, calms down little Tom who has just woken up, saying: “There! Wasn’t that a lovely sleep?” (ibid, 138) Then they wait quietly in her room till somebody comes in and takes them away.
All the characters’ transformations should be assessed negatively because none of the children has made at least a positive improvement, which is understandable. Facing such demanding events and life situations without sufficient previous experience cannot be managed successfully. The children seem to alienate to the outer society even more after burying their mother in the cellar and even if they pretend to live their lives as nothing has happened they lose out. Both, Julie and Jack, do not get their parental roles under control. Jack, more than before, starts secluding himself and becomes only the morose and hostile narrator. Julie, in spite of all the freedom, does not know how to act in the real world. Not only Jack but also Julie seem to be lethargic which graduates with their sexual act as they are aware of the fact they have nothing to lose. Apathy is the word that characterizes all the siblings, their state of mind, their transformation result. Sue bears up with the situation in her own way. She becomes an introverted bibliophile, whose suggestions and protests vanish in the sinister atmosphere. Tom, too small and too weak to defend himself, is being transformed by Julie. By her behaviour she causes that he becomes half a spoiled child, half a wild creature.
In conclusion, The Cement Garden is, undoubtedly, one of the breaking novels discussing such unusual topics which incest and dysfunctional family relationships certainly are. McEwan puts all the characters into the roles they cannot succeed in,
27 moreover, he sets them into an anonymous and waste urban surrounding where they can hardly survive on their own. It is a novel which leaves the reader thinking about all the sorrow things, about the further children’s fate and also about the society within which such events can happen.
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3. The Innocent
“To call The Innocent a spy novel would be like calling Lord of the Flies a boy’s adventure yarn ... it ensures McEwan’ major status”. SUNDAY TIMES
This novel was written in 1990 as the fourth novel in the rich range of McEwan’s bibliography. It is said to have been McEwan’s most successful novel at the time written by the author’s characteristic straightforward prose which makes the story readable as a whole. The story takes place in Germany, in Berlin, and gives the reader an insight into the situation in the divided city of the mid 1950s. The choice of the place was not probably coincidental. McEwan used to live there when he was a child. It shows the differences between the Eastern and Western parts, does not forget to mention the impact of the Cold War and the unpleasant past of the German war time era. Mainly, it describes the adventures of a young man who learns how to live within this city’s walls.
The third person narration, full of irony and sarcasm, takes us to the year 1955, when a twenty five year old British, Leonard Marnham, who works as a post office telephone technician, is coming to a postwar Berlin to work on a secret project of the British and Americans, called “Operation Gold”. He is not allowed to share any information about it and therefore if someone asks him why he has come to Berlin he answers that he is: “a Post Office engineer come to work on the improvement of the Army’s internal lines.” (McEwan, p. 27). Despite his age, the innocent Leonard has never lived without his parents and his stay in Berlin should be compared to the entrance to the adult man’s real world. Due to his special work he manages to escape his ordinary life, and later, after he is initiated into the mystiques of the man’s world, he also loses his unwanted innocence.
The beginning of the novel describes the prime experience of Marnham’s work and his peripheral role in the whole project. Even if it is the project of both nations there are only a few British working on it. Due to the fact that Leonard meets mainly Americans he loses the touch with his culture and principles. He has a lot of time to think about his previous life and values and finds out that he likes the American freedom, frankness and attitudes to life more. Due to Americans his life has changed, and it is his American
29 superior Bob Glass who plays an important role in Leonard’s introduction into “the real world”. He leads Leonard into the world of entertainment and bars, where he meets and, later on, falls in love with a thirty year old German woman, Maria Eckdorf. Since that time, the main character’s job and the others affairs connected to the Operation Gold tunnel are not as relevant as they used to be. The relationship between Leonard and the experienced Maria covers the most of the book. Due to the heterodiegetic narrator the reader has an excellent opportunity to witness all the events of the couple’s revealing happiness, as well as some of the unpleasant matters. These are mainly connected with Maria’s past, as she was once married to an abusive German “war hero” Otto, a heavy drunkard. From time to time Otto comes to Maria’s flat, demands money and attacks her in order to demonstrate his power. In an effort to protect his lover and himself, Leonard kills Otto. After that, he has to face the problem how to dispose of the body and after they cut it in pieces on Maria’s kitchen table, he decides to take it down to the tunnel, even if he knows he will have to betray all the promises he has ever given to Glass. To save himself and to protect Maria, Leonard goes to the Russian sector and tells to the Eastern agent about the tunnel. He does not know that the Russians have already been informed about it by the mole, the double agent George Blake, Marnham’s Berlin neighbour, who betrayed the whole project before it had even started. After Leonard solves “the dead body’s placement problem”, the Russians break into the tunnel and close it up for the Americans. Despite saying and pretending the opposite, Leonard’s relationship with Maria is already lost. Their shared guilt is something they cannot deal with and their relationship ends. Leonard flies back to England and never sees Maria again.
The last chapter takes place thirty years later, in 1987, when Leonard, the owner of a small company that makes hearing components, comes back to Berlin after he has received a letter from Maria. We realise that she married Bob Glass, who is dead now, moved to the USA with him and had three daughters. Elderly Leonard reads the letter near the tunnel, not far away form the Berlin Wall, in an effort to understand her and to reconcile himself with the harmed relationship and virtue. After all that long time, the power of the place and the letter make him forgive Maria everything that has happened. The story itself closes with Leonard imagining Maria and himself as they walk out together and take the last looks at all familiar places and, last but not least, at the Wall
30 which is supposed to be torn down. As soon as the Wall disappears, all the remaining bad memories would be taken with it.
Despite having consultants, McEwan shows the knowledge of the language and the place and also the acquaintance with the German historical affairs which play an important role in the story. The novel’s background is inspired by a true event, the so called Operation Gold which took place from December 1953 to September 1958. Inspired by some post modern attributes, McEwan uses much true information while describing the setting, the place and also one of the characters, George Blake, the mole.
Operation Gold (also known as Operation Stopwatch by the British) was a joint operation conducted by the American CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin using a tunnel into the Soviet occupied zone. Although it was planned by the SIS and the CIA, it was CIA money and manpower that carried it out. British and U.S. intelligence officials met in London to plan the tunnel. One of those who attended those early meetings was George Blake, a mole in the British intelligence apparatus. Blake apparently alerted the KGB immediately. On 21 April 1956, eleven months after the tunnel went into operation, Soviet and East German soldiers broke into the eastern end of the tunnel; calling it a "breach of the norms of international law" and "a gangster act." Newspapers around the world ran photographs of the underground partition of the tunnel directly under the inter German frontier. The wall had a sign in English, German and Russian reading "Entry is Forbidden by the American Commander." (http://en.wikipedia.org/)
Leonard Marnham comes to Berlin in 1955, at the time when the whole project has been running for a couple of years. As mentioned, the project itself has been on for two years, not so the tunnel, which has been on the verge of its existence. At the very beginning of his new career he is not informed enough and spends his days unpacking and putting together telegraphic machines. Nevertheless, this young man who has just left his hometown, Tottenham, and his parents, does not mind the whole situation and does what he is told. He has always been like this, the good boy who fulfils what he is asked for, helps his mother with anything, used to be successful at school and now is at work. Marnham sees his Berlin sojourn as a good opportunity for his future career, his further development. Despite all his doubts he keeps working without inquiry, even if he does not see the sense of his work sometimes: “Leonard was uneasy. He knew nothing about
31 radar. His field was telephones. […] He stared ahead, sensing a terrible mistake. But he knew from experience that it was poor policy to express doubts about a procedure until it was absolutely necessary.” (McEwan, p. 11)
Learning how to survive in the foreign country and how to look after himself brings about that Leonard starts to change his habits and long used attitudes. At first, Leonard is described as a true British gentleman of the mid fifties of the twentieth century. He is courteous but distant, rather a lone kind of man, well kept, always wearing a tie, bought by his mother. The narrator describes him as: “The young man who stood in his Y fronts and the extra thick vest his mother had packed, staring into the wardrobe at three suits and a tweed jacket.” (ibid, p.7) He is the right opposite of his American superior Bob Glass, a very talkative and friendly man, who is interested in his work and sometimes a bar entertainment. Very soon Marnham realises that some of his attitudes must change, because of the atmosphere he works and lives in. “His Englishness was not quite the comfort it had been to preceding generation. It made him feel vulnerable. Americans, on the other hand, seemed utterly at ease being themselves.” (ibid, p.7) The influence of American life style and manners is really significant, starting with getting Coca Cola instead of tea with milk in the canteen and ending with the exaggerated sincerity and friendliness towards strangers. McEwan also expresses the differences between the two worlds not only comparing East and West but also these two nationalities, the Americans and the British. It is not only a story about different cultural philosophies of Communism and Capitalism, but also of the two Allies. The above mentioned article from Wikipedia tells us about the organization and the supposed cooperation of the two world powers. Here, according McEwan’s interpretation the Americans abuse the British conservative and abstract manners and overdraw their guidance. Even if the British do not agree they do nothing about it but complain, as the money and the manpower is mainly American:
“It’s not the Germans or the Russians who are the problem here. It isn’t even the French. It’s the Americans. They don’t know a thing. What’s worse, they won’t learn, they won’t be told. It’s just how they are. […] As you can imagine, there are a number of joint projects, pooled resources, know how, that sort of thing. But do you think the Americans have the first notion of team work? They agree on one thing, and then they go on their own way. They go behind our backs,
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they withhold information, they talk down to us like idiots.” (McEwan, p.1)
A hidden symbolism and a warning for the British culture appear in McEwan’s work, though. The author tries to show the loss of the prime position of the UK and the fall of its influence by this way. According to Peter Childs, “It is also a story about the end of the British Empire, and England's eclipse as a major world power by the USA. Set in the crucial years of the mid 1950s[...] The Innocent is about the loss of Britain's international role, and its position as a naive, old fashioned figure in the new world order.” (http://www.litencyc.com/) Although being warned, Marnham tends to like the new American culture more than his own.
Slowly but surely Leonard Marnham changes. The power of the long fixed rules set by his parents vanishes the more the longer he lives without them. Living in a new and modern flat is very important to him, as well as his secret work, which helps him to escape the bond of his previous, ordinary life. According to the psychologists, the age of twenty five is the time of the entrance into the real world, of achieving independence upon parents. It is the time when the young man fully develops his working skills and his personality. Leonard Marnham fits the description perfectly.
Work, and sometimes one or two drinks in Berlin’s bars, accompanies his life till he meets Maria Eckdorf, who opens the door to the adulthood to him widely. It is no wonder that Marnham falls in wide eyed love with this woman. At the very beginning of their relationship Leonard is a happy person, sensitive and tender to his lover. Maria is the first woman ever he makes love to and who shows him what to do, how to behave when being with a woman. But the more time they spend together and make love the more possesive Leonard is. Slowly but surely he feels the man’s power and all he wants to do is to demonstrate it. Through the narrator and his interpretation does the author introduce the evil thoughts coming up to the character’s mind. Although Leonard understands that they are against his nature, he is too weak to fight against them:
There was an element of his mind creeping in, of bits of himself, bits he did not really like.[...] He looked down at Maria, whose eyes were closed, and remembered she was a German[...]German. Enemy. Mortal enemy. Defeated enemy. This last brought with it a shocking thrill[...]Then: she was the defeated, she was his by right, by conquest, by right of unimaginable violence and heroism and
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sacrifice[...]He was powerful and magnificent[...]He was victorious and good and strong and free. (McEwan, p. 77).
Even if Leonard realizes that nasty thoughts like these are wrong and tries to fight against them, as: “they were alien to his obliging and kindly nature, they offended his sense of what was reasonable”(ibid, p. 77), he feels he has changed and does not want to do anything about it. He is a successful man who lives on his own, has a good and interesting job, a beautiful mistress and, therefore, he is the master of it all and can treat anybody the way he wants. Unfortunately, the method he chooses is completely wrong.
After Maria refuses Leonard who demands making love, his fantasy starts to work and he understands it as foreplay. Unfortunately, Maria does not play any trick on him. He dives into his role of the conqueror more than intended, and the whole “game” ends by Maria’s rape. It is such a dreadful experience for her after which all the nasty memories about her ex husband come up to her mind. After this she cannot stay with her beloved “innocent” any more. In fact, he can be called the innocent no longer after this. She leaves him without a word and goes to her parents to the Russian sector. Soon does Leonard realizes what fatal mistake he has made and experiences an inner fight with his own conscience. Despite admitting himself that he has done such a terrible thing, there is nobody he can apologise to. He is also very bussy at work, therefore: “as more time passed since his attack on Maria, the more unbelievable it seemed, and the less forgivable [...] He could not recall the steps along the way. It was as if he was remembering the actions of another man, or of himself transformed in a dream.” (McEwan, p. 87, 88) Although being an adult, certain child like traits appear here. Leonard should be compared to the main character and the narrator Jack from the novel The Cement Garden , who also tries to get clear of his responsibility and therefore attempts to escape from the reality separating his mind from his body. Jack, on the contrary to Leonard who tries to excuse his atrocious deed by this way, wants to escape from the demanding life teenage phase.
After Marnham realizes that Maria might not come back he tries to reorganize his life. He cleans his flat, irons his clothes, writes a letter to his parents. Especially the last point is the most difficult one as he does not know what to tell them, he is not the same man who left them many months ago and, consequently, his tone is rather flat:
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Despite all his changes, he was unable to break with the flat tone, the stifling lack of information or effect. Dear Mum and Dad, Thanks for yours. I hope you are well and over your colds. I’ve been very busy at work which is going very well. The weather… The weather . He never gave the weather a second thought unless he was writing to his parents. He paused, then he remembered. The weather has been very wet, but it’s warmer now. (ibid, p.93)
He does anything to forget about his deed, the worst thing he has ever done in his life. At the time he does not believe in Maria’s return she suddenly appears in front of his door. The relief that comes is beyond description. All his emotions suddenly burst and he apologises to Maria in the best way he is able to do:
Leonard had never in his life spoken about himself and his feelings in such a way. Nor had he even thought in this manner. Quite simply, he had never acknowledged inhimself a serious emotion. He had never gone much further than saying he quite liked last night’s film, or he hated the taste of lukewarm milk. In fact, until now, it was a though he had never really had any serious feelings. Only now, as he came to name them – shame, desperation, love – could he really claim them for his own and experience them. (ibid., p. 99, 100)
Maria’s comeback is a glorious event for Leonard, but not for her. She experiences an inner struggle against her will, which advises her not to stay with him. Her love, however, is much stronger and, even if it takes some time, she feels that she is able to trust him again. Since this time the couple live their lives together, they enjoy themselves even more than before and, what is more, they decide to get married. These rather solitary people, who normally spend their free time on their own and have only few friends, decide to have an engagement party. They seem to the others to be the most satisfied couple in the world and everybody is happy because of them. None of their guests, except Glass, however, knows about the unpleasant intermezo. This euphoria, unfortunately, does not last for long.
The main character’s transformation does not take place at one time. It is a long and demanding process during which he has to coordinate all his life values and habits. The first change of Leonard’s innocent character took place when he moved away from his parents and got an interesting job abroad, the second phase started at the time Marnham met Maria and, as there was mentioned before, raped her, the third wave comes at the time Maria returns after three weeks of separation and he realised how much he loves
35 her and how wrong and useless his behaviour was. People change all the time according to the situation they occur in, the place they live or work, the people they meet. Leonard is no exception, nevertheless, meeting Otto is the event that changes his life completely.
Although he has heard about Maria’s ex husband many times before, he can see what sort of person Otto is after he, Otto, attacks Maria and harms her badly. At the time this happened, not long after her return and when their life was settled and calmed down, they promise to each other not to come to Maria’s flat separately. Till that time this small and rather uncomfortable flat, there is no central heating and hot water, should be compared to the lovers’ fortress. According to Dana Chetrinescu it can be called the “Holy Grail […] because of its position […] its protection” but also the danger it conveys. (http://www.ianmcewan.com) As Leonard is supposed to have no relationships, because of his work, they prefer to meet at Maria’s place rather than at his where many people involved in the project live. They feel protected from the other people outside and, being aware of this fact, they feel safe. The danger, however, is hidden in the disturbing and jealous Otto who still makes claims not only to the flat itself but also to Maria. Nevertheless, they live happily for some time till their engagement party which takes place in Leonard’s flat. After it finishes they leave for Maria’s apartment to spend a night there. Seemingly, a kind of love story opens up here. McEwan, however, is not the love story novels writer and the shock and the complete change of the story’s mood comes soon.
After they get to Maria’s place and start to make love, something strange happens. They both can hear something that resembles snoring coming out of her wardrobe. After they open it they can see drunken and sleeping Otto, who has probably come to Maria’s place for some more money. Still jealous of his ex wife, he wants to catch her with her new lover. He hides in the wardrobe but, accidently, falls asleep. Shocked and desperate are both, Maria and Leonard, and before they settle on what to do Otto appears at the bedroom door and surprises them. Otto, who is ready for a fight anytime, suddenly attacks Leonard, who, goaded by his lover, kills him in self defence:
To protect himself from this as well, Leonard stretched up his right hand and time slowed as his fingers closed round something cold. He could not sway it from its course, he could only take hold and participate, let it carry on down, and down it came, all force and iron, the sign of the kitchen feet, down it dropped like justice, with his
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hand on it, and Maria’s hand, the full weight of judgement, the iron foot crashed down on Otto’s skull, and pierced the bone toe first and went deeper still and dropped him to the floor. He went down without a sound, face forwards, and he was stretched full out. The cobbler’s last still protruded from his head, and the whole city was quiet. (McEwan, p. 145 146)
Leonard’s, but also Maria’s, life changes to horror within a couple of minutes, without any chance of taking it back. It is such a shock that they are not able to do anything at first. After they calm down a little, Leonard wants to call the police. Maria, however, thinks it is not a good idea, because Otto, as a war hero, has many friends among the police officers, and she is afraid that they might be blamed for a murder. Everything that comes after might be compared to a bad dream. Under all the circumstances, which cause Leonard’s confusion, his conscience tends to separate from his body again as he does not want to admit himself what a terrible thing he has done. Retrospectively, he thinks about the whole event and what followed after it. Even if he knows it was a self defence he cannot ease his conscience as he feels they should have announced it to the police. The other important similarities to the novel The Cement Garden occur here. The children from the story were supposed to solve the same problem whether to inform or not to inform someone. And, again, it is the woman who decides what to do at the end. After many arguments Maria decides to dispose of the body using the least possible way of doing so. They cut it in pieces. Leonard wants to think the whole situation through again, nevertheless, it is too late and the only thing they can do is to finish it. They place the corpse on her kitchen table and Leonard dismembers it there. Before he starts doing so Maria advices him: “Don’t think about it, [...] Just do it. […] Remember I love you.” (ibid, p.163). Using his highly descriptive style, McEwan offers an insight to the whole dreadful situation. The author does not forget to mention any single detail which moves the story to a completely different domain; to the genre of the horror story:
Then he was through something, then it was grating bone again. He was trying not to see, but the April light exposed it all. The upper leg was oozing almost black, covering the saw. […] He was through, there was only skin below, and he could not get at it without sawing the table. […] He had to get in there, he had to put his hand into the chasm of the joint, into the cold mess of dark, ragged flesh and saw at the skin with the blade of the knife. (ibid, p.164)
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The author’s idea about disposing of the body is understood as the symbolism to the dismemberment of Berlin by the Allies, with Leonard representing the Western world, Maria the Eastern. It is difficult to express what is in Leonard’s mind during the whole time he dismantles the body. The longer he spends cutting and sawing into the flesh the less he thinks about it and the fewer reproaches he has. He tries to alienate from all this and to finish it as soon as possible. The reader can only doubt whether Leonard completely gave up all his life ideals he has been brought up by. After the whole act finishes it is up to Leonard to take both suitcases, in which the body was placed to and to take them somewhere. What he feels toward Maria should be described as anger, because everything was her fault. It used to be her husband, he came to the flat because of her, he killed him because of her. Everything is connected to Maria and now it is him who has to take those heavy bags and carry them away. But where? Without thinking this through:
He put his coat on while she opened the front door. He stood between the cases, braced himself, lifted, then made a quick straight run with them out onto the landing. He put them down and turned. She stood in the doorway, one hand on the door, ready to close it. If he had felt the fraction of an impulse, he would have gone over to her, kissed her cheek, touched her arm or hand. But what hung in the air between them was disgust, and it was not possible to pretend. (Ibid., p. 171)
After this it is obvious that all the happy days they spent together vanished due to this event and they will never return, even if they pretend nothing has changed. While Maria is cleaning her flat and is safe, it is Leonard who has to walk around the city and think about the best place where the bags should be hidden. Intentionally or not, McEwan has used the problem of placement of the dead body for the second time. Firstly, he used it in his first novel The Cement Garden , where the children deal with the same problem after their mother dies. The children choose the possibility to bury her in their own house, down in the cellar. Leonard, tired after the whole day at work and then at Maria’s place, chooses to do the same. He does not bury Otto’s body in his flat, there are no cellars or secret chambers, but he sees his flat as a place where he can recover from the shock he has just experienced. While the deep sleep, his conscience tries to remind him of what he has done. He suffers from nightmares, another remarkable match with Jack
38 from The Cement Garden , in which he is putting Otto’s body together, which suddenly comes back to life again. McEwan’s masterly writing style reveals even in difficult and unexpected moments of the novel because what happens after Marnham leaves his flat should be compared to a situational comedy, to the grotesque of everyday life. It is admirable what witty language and ideas he can put in such a demanding topic. At the time he goes down in the lift he meets George Blake, the mole, who offers him his help with the suitcases. After Blake weights them up, he thinks Leonard must smuggle some secret equipment in it. Blake knows about Leonard’s promotion and his higher status in the tunnel and the notice on the bags reassures him. Nevertheless, he leaves Marnham in front of his house and right at the time Leonard thinks where to go and where to leave the suitcases Bob Glass appears with his car. Despair, confusion and desperation are the feelings Leonard experiences. There are thousands of thoughts in his head but none of them gives him any advice of what to do. It is interesting how little are people able to work or think under the pressure. On the other hand, it is understandable in the situation like this. After he gets in the car, which is taking him to the tunnel, Leonard sums up his chances, he prepares his explanation, which would not help him anyway, he thinks about the rest of his life spent in German, if he is lucky, may be British prison, his family and the woman he did all this for. When they get to the entrance gate and the suitcases are supposed to be examined Leonard uses the last possible trick in order to cheat the guards and Bob Glass. He tells them it is a highly confidential equipment from the tunnel and tells his superior Bob that he has became a crutial part of the surveillance team. Glass is rather shocked and asks Leonard to tell him what is inside. Marnham, having nothing to loose, reveals the whole truth to him, but, understandably, Bob does not believe him. Marnham feels a great relief after passing the gate, but, on the other hand, he knows it will not take long and the body will be discovered by his colleagues. Realizing this, he decides to betray all the promises given to his employee and betrays the project to the Russians.
Not only the language but also the plot itself is well organized. Timing and all the conjunctures come one after the other precisely. Not long after Leonard places the body into the tunnel, into the part dug under the Russian sector, the Russians break in and close it for good. Leonard expects the police to come but, surprisingly, nothing happens. In case they would occur at his door, in his mind, he prepares the statement of his defense: “Yes, gentlemen, I plead guilty to the charge as described, I killed,
39 dismembered, lied and betrayed. But what follows are the real conditions, the circumstances which brought me to this, and you will see that I am no different from you, that I am not evil, and that all along I acted only for what I took to be the best.” (ibid., p. 201,202)
After the project and the tunnel are sealed, all of the staff is supposed to leave Berlin and go back to their ordinary lives in their home countries. Leonard is no exception, and in fact he looks forward to go back to Tottenham, back to his innocence. Despite maintaining the relationship with Maria, they both feel it is not the same as it used to be. They know it but nobody wants to say it aloud first. At the time Leonard flies back to England and Maria comes there to bid him goodbye they only keep pretending the reciprocal love but inside, even if it hurts, they are aware of the fact that their affair is over. It takes another thirty years till they are able to communicate again and to forgive themselves.
From the literary point of view, Leonard as well as Maria are round, dynamic characters as they fully develop and transform within the story. All the Marnham’s changes have been described before, not so Maria’s. This woman who has experienced the Second World War reveals almost nothing about her previous life, the life before she met Leonard. The narrator reveals only fragmented information about her job, friends, family and the marriage with Otto. Considering what she was faced to during the war, and even after it, we should apologize her non committal approach after they killed her ex husband. On the contrary to Leonard, she was, undoubtedly, faced to a death and due to this skill she was able to stay calm and think rationally and though she seems to be one of the strong women appearing in McEwan’s novels. Even before the incident, we meet this woman who can speak English, she was supposed to learn the language at the end of the war when she started to work for Americans, and leads a rather solitary life. As well as Leonard, she starts to like American culture more than her own, becomes a keen learner of the English language, in order to improve it as much as possible, listens to the Voice of America and at the end marries Bob Glass, the American.
Although, being only a flat character, it is Bob Glass who should be called “an involuntary master of the puppets”. To be more specific, it is him who attracts Leonard’s
40 attention since the very first time because of the way he behaves, works and lives, and because of whom Marnham changes his long lasted attitudes:
He (Leonard) entered what was partly an office, partly a bedroom. On one wall was a large map of the city, and under it was an unmade bed. Glass set at a chaotic desk trimming his beard with an electric razor. With a free hand was stirring instant coffee into two mugs of hot water. An electric kettle was on the floor. (ibid, p.7)
This man, due to his friendliness, becomes Leonard’s friend, an initiator and the Berlin’s guide and it is him who causes that Leonard meets Maria. Slowly but surely he becomes a confidant: “somebody the protagonist can speak to, exchange views with, confide in usually a close friend” (http://www.uni koeln.de/) who knows everything about the main character’s life and, later on, his girlfriend’s as well. It is Bob who helps Leonard to find Maria in the Russian sector and it is also him who listens to Maria’s confession after Otto’s death. He should be compared to “a fairy godfather” who appears at the time he is needed and is willing to help. After the tunnel’s betrayal and Leonard’s departure he becomes Maria’s close friend and, as time passes on, a lover whom she later marries and moves to America with.
The novel’s title, The Innocent , and the main character’s transformation go hand in hand. Not only at the beginning of the story is Leonard a pure, innocent young man. During the time he faces various life situations, both pleasant as well as demanding, he is not used to. No matter how experienced he is or in which phase of his Berlin’s sojourn he appears, Leonard has to solve problems that poison his innocence. Everything opens with a “good English boy” as pure as ice. Here the word “innocent” is used in its all intents and purposes. Then we meet an independent Marnham as a young man inexperienced and innocent with alcohol and women. Later on after raping his girlfriend he is innocent in his eyes because everything was her fault. At the end he accidentally becomes a killer but under all the circumstances he still feels innocent. Despite the entire hero’s self convictions it is certain that the whole transformative process develops negatively and Leonard returns to his homeland as a crushed man.
Undoubtedly, The Innocent is another McEwan’s novel which leaves the reader thinking. What has led the honest man like Leonard to act like this? It is logical that as
41 there are only two things he should choose from, his freedom and life with the beloved woman or his work, he chooses the first one. There would be no work if he is caught, anyway, and he feels innocent, he did exactly the same thing anybody else would do in the situation like this. The author’s precious work causes that the readers themselves feel the dread of the protagonists, they share their feelings, their moods. It is a piece of work focusing to the psyche of the characters who are supposed to face up such a demanding event which manslaughter certainly is. According to Peter Childs, “the novel ends ambivalently but hopefully,” (http://www.litencyc.com) as both the protagonists reconcile not only with each other but also with their destiny.
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4. Amsterdam
The cover of this book published in 1998 cites, among others, a piece of article from Sunday Times written by John Sutherland, which describes McEwan’s new masterpiece in brief: “The novel twists and turns unexpectedly…Amsterdam is an enigma…The narrative pivots on mystery and blinding last chapter revelation. On the way, the reader can relish the black tints of the prose…McEwan has a master’s control over his instrument.” Not only Mr Sutherland, but also other professionals from the literary world admired this work and his ability to express himself in the way he does, as it was honoured by one of the most important British literary award, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1998. However, reactions of critics to the novel and especially on the award are not merely positive. By the very critical Nick Lezard’s review for Guardian Unlimited McEwan has been reproached for the implausible story, filled with absurd plots, and from insufficient length of the novel: “Will Self was right to do his nut when this won the prize: it really is meant to go to novels, not five finger exercises. A more fitting award, we feel, is that of the modestly coveted Paperback of the Week slot.” (http://books.guardian.co.uk/)
On the other hand, hundreds of theses, articles and essays were written about this book and it is certain that all their authors found something positive, new and inspiring about it. For example, Petr Chalupský sees this piece as the break point in McEwan’s writing style:
While I consider the first three novels [ The Cement Garden (1978), The Comfort of Strangers (1981) and The Chid in Time (1987)] mentioned to be some of the most original British novels of the period, Amsterdam can hardly be compared to them in terms of originality. This being said, I still believe it should not be neglected, since it did point to a new direction in the author’s literary career which consequently culminated in Atonement . (Chalupský, p. 1 2)
The most important question appears here, “How does it differ?” The answer is simple. All the previous topics occurring in McEwan’s short stories and novels, such as incest, murder, paedophilia, violence and others, are almost forgotten. Instead, McEwan chooses another demanding theme that other writers would avoid mentioning,
43 euthanasia. He also uses milder language and a slightly different writing style. Even if the book shocks, somehow, it is not the same as in the previous volumes where the shock and the disgust often go hand in hand.
According to Allain de Botton: “Amsterdam is a pitiless study of the darker aspects of male psychology, of male paranoia, emotional frigidity, sexual jealousy, professional rivalry and performance anxiety.” (McEwan 1998, cover)
This heterodiegetic story conveys a lot of sarcasm and irony. It shows the world of prominent people from the higher society who are not only influenced by the British social, cultural and political life, but also act an important role in it. The story opens on a chilly February day, in the atmosphere of the funeral of Molly Lane, a famous newspaper reporter, restaurant critic and photographer. She died suddenly from cerebral disorder devastating her mental abilities, sense of reality, memory and orientation. At the funeral rites we meet not only her possessive and morose husband George, but also some of her former lovers, Vernon Halliday, a reporter of a quality broadsheet The Judge, Clive Linley, a successful composer, and Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary and, possibly, the candidate for the Prime Minister.
As the story develops we meet all the characters who have to face up to the reality that they have lost the most important woman in their lives. Even if she cheats on her husband, Molly is described as a merely positive person, who acts an important role in each man’s life, except her husband George. He finally got possession of her at the time she was helpless and needed someone else’s treatment. The plot itself is focused on the two friends, Clive and Vernon, and on their lives and careers. After Molly’s death they both think about their own health, and as all of them are approximately the same age, they ponder on the quick and unexpected fall of her mental health, and all the related issues that evoke the thought about euthanasia. McEwan attempts to resolve this problem through the Clive’s character. To Clive it is an extremely important issue which influences his life after the incineration as he becomes aware of men’s vulnerability when being seriously ill and therefore depended on someone else’s treatment. After a careful deliberation, Clive invites Vernon to his house and asks him for a favour; to use euthanasia upon him in case he would be in the same situation as Molly was.
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During the story we follow Vernon’s and Clive’s lives, we witness their moral and career failure which, consequently, leads toward the inevitable end, their death. In fact, they perpetrate the reciprocal suicide. As euthanasia is strictly forbidden in Britain, the author chooses the only possible place, Amsterdam, Holland, where the euthanasia laws are liberalised. The connection to the title appears at the very end of the story which takes place in the Dutch capital, where Clive’s millennium symphony rehearsal proceeds. It is also the place of their expiration.
Molly Lane, who died suddenly at the age of forty six, is introduced at the very beginning of the book, however, she occurs here only as a fragrant to a nice and supportive woman. Due to these aspects she has one of the crucial roles in the novel. She is introduced at the time of her funeral and since then we get to know her only through the main characters’ memories and flashbacks. The reader is familiarized with her life during which this strong woman influences all the male characters, their attitudes to life and love, as she is the one they would confide to and the one they look up to. This efficient woman, full of life and mental energy is unexpectedly hit by a rapid onset of a debilitating disease that disconnects her from the reality, in which she had always moved with grace:
It began with a tingling in her arm as she raised it outside the Dorchester Grill to stop the cab; a sensation that never went away. Within Weeks she was fumbling for the names of things [...] It was after the temporary disappearance [...] that she sought medical advice, expecting reassurance. Instead, she was sent for tests and, in a sense, never returned [...] Molly became the sick room prisoner of her morose, possessive husband, George. (McEwan, p.3)
All the characters are afraid of the fact they would ever experience the same, as it must have been dreadful for her. Due to the narrator, and also the characters, we know she suffered very much and her last weeks and days were full of pain, not only physical but also mental, as pain goes with the social boundary and solitude hand in hand. In her essay focusing to spatiality and the degraded body, Dana Chetrinescu uses quotations from Marja Liisa Honkasalo’s research where she: “argues that various forms of physical or mental suffering can re shape the space around the individual. Space is no longer an objective category, it is subjective and relative, multiple and moving.” (http://www.ianmcewan.com) Unwillingly, Molly acts the most important role within
45 the story as her death forces the characters to focus on their bodies, “on the notion of pain.” (ibid)
Even though married, she does not live with her husband as a wife; she has her own flat in the separate wing of their house and keeps herself, her stuff and her guests away from parliamentary George. During her life she came in, turned up and left the lives of her former lovers, especially of Clive and Vernon. They both had love affairs with her and even after if there was no sexual desire they remained friends. “They were companionable, too wry with each other to be passionate, and they liked to be free to talk about their own affairs. She was like a sister, judging his [Clive’s] women [...] Otherwise they talked music or food.” (ibid. 20) Due to her close friend’s description we realize that she was enthusiastic, fully supportive and nurturing. Her death binds all the characters together, except George, as they realise their frailty, and the potential humiliation in case they appear in the same situation as she did. Knowing Molly had never been only his, George enjoyed the whole process of her dying. It should be described as the first transformation of a character in this story. During their marriage he got used to sustain his wife’s slights, after her death, however, “He appeared to have grown an inch or two, his back had straightened, his voice had deepened, a new dignity had narrowed his pleading, greedy eyes.” (ibid. 5) The whole situation Molly appeared in was a kind of satisfaction for him, being aware of the fact that, “She would have killed herself rather than end up like that...Brain dead in George’s clutches.” (ibid. 5)
One of the crucial, the best and the most admirable characters in the story is Clive Linley, the classical music composer, who lives alone and considers himself a genius. “He had known Molly first, back when they were students in ’68 and lived together in a chaotic, shifting household in the Vale of Health.” (ibid.4) He is an altruistic kind of person, always willing to help, generous to his friends, especially to his only best friend, Vernon Halliday. On the other hand, there might be a kind of satisfaction to his loneliness, which is typical of most of the artists. However, he did not use to be as lone as he is nowadays, after Molly became ashes. Nevertheless, he should be called the “lucky boy” as he: Inherited from a rich and childless uncle a gigantic stuccoed villa with a purpose built two storey artist’s studio on the third and fourth floor [...] he was twenty one – he had the outside painted purple and filled the inside with his friends,
46 mostly musicians [...] John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent a week there. Jimi Hendrix stayed a night. (ibid, p. 45)
But as the years went by he calmed down and changed his Bohemian life to the life of a grown up young man: “The stucco restored to cream,[...] the grand piano was carried up to the studio, bookshelves were built, oriental rugs were laid over worn out carpets various pieces of Victorian furniture were carried in.” (ibid, p.45) He also started to work on several musical projects and became rich and famous due to his own talent and hard work, not only due to his uncle’s money. He is presented as a successful composer for the considerable part of the story and he is also introduced as an author of The Millennial Symphony. Only in the end does it come out that his symphony is a failure. But how this could happen? After his Muse, Molly, is dead he feels that the world, all the people in it and he himself, are not the same. Slowly but surely everything changes. His friend is not the true friend he had always thought, his work does not satisfy him and does not come to him easily as it used to, the world is full of hostile people who disturb him all the time with irrelevant matters and events.
Clive’s turnover within the storycannot be passed without noticing. As mentioned, we meet Clive at the Molly’s funeral with Vernon, and even if they both suffer from the loss, Clive seems to mourn even more. It is probably caused by the fact that he is an artist, therefore, more sensitive to things like these, despite saying the opposite. Not only the dreadful illness, but also the whole process of it, is the releasing factor of Clive’s resolution what to do in case he would become ill. To avoid the same situation Molly was faced to he asks Vernon, the only one possible entity, for a favour:
“Just supposing I did get ill in a major way, like Molly, and I started to go downhill and make terrible mistakes, you know, errors of judgement, not knowing the names of things or who I was [...] I’d like to know there was someone who would help me to finish it [...] I mean help me to die. Especially if I got to the point where I couldn’t make the decision for myself, or act on it [...] I’m asking you, as my oldest friend, to help me if it ever got to the point where I could see that it was the right thing [...] It’s an odd thing to ask, I know. It’s also illegal in this country [...] But there are ways, and there are places and if it came to it, I’d want you to get me there on a plane [...] All I can say is that I’m not in state of panic or anything. I have given it a lot of thought.” (ibid. 48 49)
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The death of someone we love is always a painful experience and it is natural that people suffer from and mourn the loss. Therefore, the less understandable for the reader it s the more Clive thinks about the possibility he would ever appear in the same situation like Molly. In her essay on Amsterdam Dana Chetrinescu compares Molly’s death to contamination, when: “her former friends and lovers, the two men undergo a process of physical, mental and moral involution until the end of the novel when, unawares, they perform euthanasia on each other” (http://www.ianmcewan.com). Clive has more and more problems with finishing the symphony. That is why he decides to leave the safety of his house and sets out on the trip to the Lake District where, “The best ideas caught him by surprise at the end of twenty miles when his mind was elsewhere.” (McEwan, p.24)
Vernon Halliday, on the contrary, is married and a very busy man working as an editor of The Judge broadsheet. Clive is also busy but he works at his home studio and sometimes loses touch with the real world outside. As the story is described mainly from Clive’s point of view, Vernon should be imagined as a person benefiting from the others, however, giving back less. He is mainly focused on his own family and his career, his moral qualities are spoilt by his craving for success. He is probably a kind of person who doubts his abilities and values and needs assurance of the outside world. What Vernon and Clive have in common is their friendship, Molly and the cumulative sensation of their weakness. After he is asked to do his friend a favour he hesitates first as it is a demanding topic to discuss after a tough day at work, but after he visits George and enters Molly’s flat, after he realises he is “homesick for Molly.” (ibid.54) In a hurry and on a piece of paper, he leaves a message at Clive’s door: “Yes, on one condition only: that you’d do the same for me. V.” (ibid.57). It is an odd way how to let his only best friend know he is willing to kill him.
Not only Clive but also Vernon seems to be contaminated by the events of the last few days and he also has problems to focus on his work, which is something this career oriented man has not known before. When alone, he thinks about his body, all the aches and possible symptoms that devastated his lover:
Now he sat at his desk and tentatively massaged his scalp [...] There was now a physical symptom. It involved the whole of the right side of his head, both skull and brain somehow, a sensation for which
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there was simply no word. [...] He knew exactly when it had begun, the night before, as he had stood up for dinner. It was there when he woke in the morning, continuous and indefinable, not cold, or thigh, or airy, though somewhere in between. Perhaps the word was dead. His right hemisphere had died. (ibid. 31) Another three hours passed before Vernon found himself alone again. He was in the washroom looking in the mirror while rinsing his hands. The image was there, but he wasn’t entirely convinced. The sensation, or the non sensation, still occupied the right side of his head like a tight fitting cap. When he trailed his finger across his scalp, he could identify the border, the demarcation line where feeling on the left side became not quite its opposite, but its shadow, or its ghost. (ibid. 38)
It is obvious that both of the main characters examine their bodies with an extreme attention. On one hand they pretend to be rationalists, those who understand the world and its rules, but, on the other hand, they behave in a rather irrational way connected with their middle age crisis.
Clive develops remarkably during the story from a friendly and almost altruistic person into an insensitive individual who doubts people, mainly Vernon, and puts his work first. After the quarrel with Vernon he is not able to think about anything else, doubts their friendship, realises the inequality of it and gets even more annoyed that before. It is certain that many strange ideas come up to man’s mind in anger and Clive, being no exception, lets his passion influence his once kind and good natured heart:
And perhaps that was typical of a certain [...] imbalance in their friendship that had always been there and which Clive had been aware of somewhere in his heart and had always pushed away, disliking himself for unworthy thoughts [...] There was the time, for example, way back, when Vernon stayed for a year and never once offered to pay rent [...] over the years it had been Clive rather than Vernon who had provided the music – in every sense? The wine, the food, the house, the musicians and other interesting company, the initiatives that brought Vernon to return houses with lively friends in Scotland, the mountains of northern Greece, and on the shores of Long Island [...] Put most crudely, what did he, Clive, really derive from this relationship? He had given, but what had he ever received? What bound them? They had Molly in common, there were the accumulated years and the habits of friendship, but there was really nothing at its centre, nothing for Clive. (ibid, p.65 66)
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The first great disagreement the friends experience deepens the doubts about their friendship even more. They argue because of the photographs found in Molly’s flat by her husband that are about to be published in Vernon’s broadsheet. Vernon assumes that the newspaper and his career of the editor should be saved. What is in the photographs that they are so explosive? Julian Garmony, the Foreign Secretary and, possibly, the future candidate to the position of the British Prime Minister, is perpetuated “in a plain three quarter length dress, posing cat walk style, with arms pushing away a little from his body [...] the edge of bra was visible. The face was made up [...] The strained, self absorbed expression was that of a man revealed in a sexual state. The strong gaze into the lens was consciously seductive.” (ibid. 69 70) If only had Molly known that what she had unwillingly left behind would cause a disaster in somebody else’s hands, she would have definitely destroyed them. Clive realises that this is the worst thing Vernon could do to Molly. He simply feels it as her betrayal. Molly and Garmony’s relationship must have been really tight and they made the photos only for their eyes, nobody else’s. They, undoubtedly, are ridiculous and can discredit the seemly politician, however, they were taken not to compromise the model but to amuse him and the author, to push their relationship further.
Vernon, however, is determined to publish them and to show to the public who is going to be their next Prime Minister. He is looking forward to show this “family value man, the scourge of immigrants, asylum seekers, travellers, marginal people” (ibid. 73) in the real light. The photos bring slight inconvenience for their model, however, they influence Vernon’s life and career more than Garmony’s. The impact of their promotion comes back later as a boomerang and burns Halliday’s career, social position and ego as a piece of paper.
Molly’s death has brought many sleepless nights to Garmony and everything he was afraid of, all the nightmares, came true. When he realises the photos are about to be published he starts to doubt himself and feels weak, ill, hit by an unidentifiable disease, exactly like the two others. It is Julian’s supportive wife, Rose, the surgeon, who remains calm and rational, helps him to solve the whole situation and saves his face. In the photo call where “the Foreign Secretary was uncharacteristically hanging back, looking, well, sheepish, even lambish,” (ibid, p. 122) Rose announces to the public that:
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Julian told her something about himself, something rather startling, even a little shocking. But it was nothing that their love could not absorb, and over the years it had endeared itself to her and she had come to regard it with respect, as an inseparable part of her husband’s individuality [...] It hadn’t entirely been a secret either, this curious thing about Julian, because a friend of the family, Molly Lane who died recently, once took some pictures, rather in a spirit of celebration. (ibid. 123)
After these words she shows the photos for all to see and being aware of the fact they will be published by the other day she adds: “the newspaper would not succeed because love was greater force than spite.” (ibid, p.124) and sends word right to Vernon: “Mr Halliday, you have the mentality of a blackmailer, and the moral stature of a flea.” (ibid.125) whereby, she buries his career and his life.
Before Vernon’s career is ruined, right after the feud with him, Clive sets on the journey to the Lake District to find the best inspiration to finish the symphony of which he has already missed two deadlines. Annoyed with his friend and all the events that forced him to stay in London longer than he had planned, he leaves by train where he has plenty of time to think about everything. He senses that people have become hostile towards him, thinks about the quest and starts to be rather paranoid: “As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.” (ibid.64) What is more, his body and his movement coordination become to malfunction. He feels it clearly after he examines himself carefully: “Coming along the platform, in a dark mood, he had become aware of an unevenness in his stride, as though one leg had grown longer than the other.” (ibid. 62 63) After reaching the destination he is finally optimistic and finds this long lost inspiration. In London’s home studio he was only able to make “attempts, little sketches, bold stabs, but he produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work” (ibid. 61), but here he feels the power of the place and his self confidence is regained again. But still, somewhere behind the peace is tension. Hiking, unfortunately, does not bring him the satisfaction he was used to and instead of composing, he analyzes his life again. He “cursed his friends for their dullness, their lack of appetite for life. They had let him down. No one knew where he was, and no one cared.” (ibid. 80) Not giving up what he has decided for he keeps walking, hoping that everything will change and suddenly, “it began to happen at last – he began to feel good...it finally happened, just as he had hoped it would: he was relishing his solitude,
51 he was happy in his body, his mind was contentedly elsewhere, when he heard the music he had been looking for, or at least he heard a clue to its form” (ibid. 84)
His ebulliency, however, does not last for ever as he is interrupted by two strangers, a man and a woman. They both have, evidently, a problem with each other, but Clive does not accept their presence and does not care about them because of his work. As he later realizes the two people are the Lake rapist and his victim, but he continues working on his symphony rather than helps a woman in obvious danger: “Clive’s immediate thought was as clear as neon sign: I am not here. He ignored the woman’s voice when he heard it.” (ibid, p. 85) Even if he experiences an inner fight he leaves them to their own fate and he stays in his own. Clive persuades himself he has done the right thing, and to ease his conscience he defends himself by: “...It was as if he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there. He was in his music. His fate, their fate, separate paths. It was not his business. This was his business, and it wasn’t easy, and he wasn’t asking for anyone’s help.” (ibid. 88 89)
After Clive comes back to London he locks up in his studio, again, in order to finish the symphony. The contact with Vernon, however, is something he cannot avoid, and the next quarrel comes immediately. This time they blame everything that happened within last few days reciprocally; publishing photographs, avoiding helping the woman; their antipathy seems to grow up and at least some kind of reconciliation seems to be lost for ever. It is known that once the reproaches are said aloud they can never be taken back. What is more, in passion, Clive sends a terse postcard to Vernon saying: “Your threat appals me. So does your journalism. You deserve to be sacked. Clive.” (ibid. 138) Unfortunately, Vernon understands it as another attack to his personality and the wrong interpretation of it causes he feels even more scammed, humiliated, isolated from the others, idle. “What Clive had intended on Thursday and posted on Friday was, You deserve to be sacked . What Vernon was bound to understand on Tuesday in the aftermath of his dismissal was, You deserve to be sacked...This was the comic nature of their fate;” (McEwan, p.148). The message, however, is the prompt which releases the sequence of events that ruin their friendship irrevocably. Although married, no Mrs Halliday comes to help, everything is left only upon himself.
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Where do all the characters occur by the end of the story? Molly Lane is dead. Julian Garmony is defaced and all his chances for the position of the Prime Minister are ruined by the reorganisation of the Cabinet. Vernon Halliday has lost his only friend and lover, job and the true friend. And Clive Linley is about to finish his Millennial Symphony that is about to be a failure. All of them seem to lose their faces and their sense of life. According to Morten Høi Jensen: “Often, the protagonists of his [McEwan’s] novels find themselves lost in a world unfamiliar to them, isolated and thus forced to look inwards.” (http://www.ianmcewan.com/)
To save, at least, some of the reminding pieces of their friendship, Clive invites Vernon to Amsterdam where his rehearsal takes place. It is right at the time when Clive, this self confident man, the musical genius, the best composer ever, doubts himself, his work, everything. It is an extremely long way he has covered from the beginning of the story till now. Amsterdam is the place where he finds out that his symphony is a real disaster, he feels it, understands his failure, his stupidity: “The music conjured for Clive the disorder of his studio in the down light, and the suspicions he had had about himself and hardly dared frame.” (ibid.159) Reintroducing the Beethoven’s Ode to Joy with some alterations made rather a farce from the symphony. Nobody knows under what pressure he has worked and, in fact, nobody cares. All they want is to have this piece finished and to prepare for the coming millennium. McEwan constantly keeps the readers in suspense during the story which is caused by the fact that the narrations and events change unexpectedly. The author confirms this at the very end which is breathtaking, also slightly disappointing. Both, Vernon and Clive, cannot forget all the offences they have mutually experienced and pretending penance, they kill each other:
A waiter was standing by the door with a tray from which Clive took a glass for Vernon and one for himself, then retreated to a deserted corner where he settled on a cushioned window seat to read the doctor’s instructions and open a sachet of white powder [...] They (his hands) were shaking now as he tipped the powder into Vernon’s champagne which effervesced briefly, then subsided [...] Vernon’s in the right, his own in the left. Important to remember that. Vernon was right. Even though he was wrong [...], he saw Vernon coming towards him with a big smile. Unfortunately, he had two full glasses of his own [...] Then Vernon offered a glass to Clive, and Clive gave his to Vernon. “Cheers [...] Friends.” “Friends.” (ibid, p. 162 165)
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What is more, they both believe they are fulfilling their friend’s wish after they both have appeared in a difficult life situation. For Clive, though, it has come at the right time as he started to have problems which could end in the same disease like Molly’s. Despite of the villain Vernon, who is aware of the circumstances of his dying and of betrayal of his true friend, Clive seems to be McEwan’s favourite character and therefore the author lets him die happy and content. Dead: “they looked surprisingly at peace. Vernon had his lips parted slightly, as though he were halfway through saying something, while Clive had the happy air of a man drowning in applause.” (ibid, p. 176)
In the final chapter we meet the Foreign Secretary and George Lane again as came to Amsterdam to escort the coffins back to England. Unlike Garmony and all the others, George seems to win at last. He has beaten all the lovers and achieved the fact that Molly is only his, nobody else’s. Finally there are no former mourning lovers who might have a speech at her memorial service, there is no other menace at all. “Garmony beaten down, [...] and now Vernon out of the way, and Clive. All in all, things hadn’t turned out so badly on the former lovers front.” (ibid, p. 178)
Both protagonists, Clive and Vernon, are introduced as round characters, as well as dynamic. This means that those are mainly these two men whose affairs, thoughts and experiences are introduced to the reader within the story. Clive, who is obviously the author’s favourite one, is described as a tender artist, an aesthete, whose soul suffers the loss, who thinks about the death and perceives his own emotions more than the others. The dynamism is, however, connected with the process of loosing the touch with friends, reality, space and his ability. Not only Clive’s but also Vernon’s dynamic character transformation might be described rather negatively as they both change their values and commitments significantly. They both experience their failure and appear in the position from which there is, from their point of view, no way back. This, consequently, finishes with their death, their mutual murder. On the contrary to Clive, Vernon is understood as a villain: “it meant a person of less than knightly status, and so came to mean a person who was not chivalrous; because many unchivalrous acts, such as treachery or rape, are villainous in the modern sense, and because the word was used as a term of abuse, it took on its modern meaning.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/) Abusive is the word which exactly defines this character. The only thing he is able to do is to abuse people or information in order to do good himself. These two men should be defined as
54 total opposites of each other, which could attract them at first. Since the very beginning the reader knows they are, later on they only pretend to be, friends, but what is not mentioned here is the way they got to the position of their friendship. Mentioning before, they had Molly in common and, consequently, after her death they realize that there is nothing that might connect them any more.
Despite acting only a marginal role in the story, George Lane is also introduced as a round character. He is another example of a dynamic character as his personality fully develops as well. On the contrary to Clive and Vernon, this man evolves in the positive way because he regains his long lost self confidence and appears in the position of a poor widower who treated his terminally ill wife. Hidden behind he observes the fates of his rivals and does not gloze over his satisfaction at the end. Garmony, the Foreign Secretary, does not often occur in the story, either. On the contrary to Clive, Vernon and George, he is introduced as a flat and static character. This means that he “does not undergo significant change” and “his personality remains essentially stable throughout the course of the story. This is commonly done with secondary characters in order to let them serve as thematic or plot elements.” (http://en.wikipedia.org) Despite being an important person in British society and its political system, the author describes him as a weak personality who is not able to face his behaviour’s consequences which ruins is career as well.
The ending of the story is quite surprising although there are certain clues which might lead the reader to the right conclusion. It is slightly an exaggerated, ironic twist of fate. McEwan commences the story with death and at the end returns to the topic again. In his review for Salon Craig Seligman writes: “McEwan is an aesthete like Clive, seduced by the beauties of symmetry, and he’s undone, in the end, by his own exquisite craftsmanship: Instead of betraying his structure, he betrays his book.” (http://dir.salon.com/) It is a true description of an unsuccessful ending of a compelling book. Amsterdam definitely leaves the readers thinking, as moral issues attack from nearly every page and lead the readers to cogitate about them. All the topics introduced in this book, such as euthanasia, misuse of it, right to decide about one’s existence, responsibility to others, moral values and their validity in the modern society are serious topics, and still, McEwan manages to entertain.
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Conclusion
Comparing the three novels, we have realized that there are many similarities. Even if they differ in the topic, the meeting points of the analyzed novels are mainly demanding life situations the characters are faced to, such as death, the difficulties connected with the social involvement, sexual desire and relationships. Another matching connecting the main heroes is their transformation because all of them are transformed negatively.
After the novels’ analysis it is certain that the male characters from The Cement Garden and The Innocent have many things in common. As mentioned in previous chapters, both Jack and Leonard have problems with their involvement into the real world of an adult man. Despite Leonard is an adult who works and has a girlfriend, he has to face many demanding matters connected with his life in a foreign country. Jack, on the other hand, is a teenager who has to solve problems connected with this difficult life era. Another meeting point of both novels is a dead body placement. In The Cement Garden Jack and his sister Julie have to decide where to put their dead mother. In the novel The Innocent it is Leonard who has to dispose of the remains of his girlfriend’s ex husband. The author gives us a unique psychological insight to the young men’s mind and informs the reader how far is a person able to go in order to protect him or herself. Nightmares also connect both novels protagonists. Not only Jack but also Leonard suffer under all the circumstances and it is their consciousness that reminds them of their bad behaviour and deeds.
The last novel introduced in this thesis, Amsterdam , also solves demanding theme of death but mainly it opens the questions of euthanasia and its misuse, human’s right to life and the man’s vulnerability. It also deploys the topic of the nowadays importance of the body, its degradation and the degradation’s influence to the society. Though the story is full of moral aspects the author does not tend to moralize.
Ian McEwan is the author who is able to employ all the human’s senses by his writing. Even if his novels have many things in common each of his work has its unique style and attractiveness for the readers. Despite the fact that the characters often solve demanding themes, reading his books is a joy for everybody. Well build plot, characters
56 and narratives make his books readable and interesting and, therefore, popular. Predominantly, it is the novels’ atmosphere which catches attention of the readers. He delicately describes the lives of ordinary people as well as of the British ascendancy which conveys the change of not only fables’ behaviour but also of their language. Despite the fact that McEwan acts an important role in the British literary world for more than thirty years and in spite of all the demanding themes he writes about, he has many admirers not only among public but also among literary critics.
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List of sources:
Books: McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden (1978). London: Vintage, 1988 edition. 138 pages, ISBN 0 099 75511 4
McEWAN, Ian. The Innocent (1990). London: Vintage, 2005 edition. 227 pages. ISBN 0 099 27709 3
McEWAN, Ian. Amsterdam . 1 st printing. London: Vintage, 1998. 178 pages. ISBN 0 224 05170 9
HILSKÝ, Martin. Současný britský román . 1.vyd. Praha: H&H, 1992. 191 pages ISBN 80 85467 00 3
Chalupský, Petr. Atonement – Continuity and Change in Ian McEwan’s Work. Continuity and Change in Culture and Literature . 1 st printing. Univerzita Pardubice, Filosofická Fakulta, listopad 2006, 162 pages. ISBN 80 7194 908 6
Čačka, Otto. Psychologie duševního vývoje dětí a dospívajících s faktory optimalizace . 1st printing. Brno: Doplněk, 2000. 387 pages. ISBN 80 7239 060 0
Nakonečný, Milan. Úvod do psychologie . 1st printing. Praha, 2003. 507 pages. ISBN 80 200 0993 0
Halperin, John. The Theory of the Novel New Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.396 pages. 73 90348
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Resumé
Tato práce je zaměřena na proměny charakterů v díle Iana McEwana, konkrétně ve třech jeho románech Betonová zahrada , Nevinný a Amsterodam . Převážně se zaměřuje na okolnosti, které ovlivňují chování hlavních hrdinů, jako například nepředvídané životní události, skutky, psychické zvraty, vítězství a prohry. Každá kniha je v samostatných kapitolách analyzována ze všech zmíněných hledisek.
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is focus on the characters’ transformations in Ian McEwan’s work, namely in his three novels The Cement Garden , The Innocent and Amsterdam . There are mainly emphasized all the circumstances which influenced the fables and their behaviour, such as unexpected life events, deeds, psychical twists, victories and defeats. Each novel is analyzed from all mentioned points in separate chapters.
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