SOLAR By Ian McEwan 287 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26.95 According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad -- so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed -- that they're actually rather good. ''Solar,'' the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good --...
SOLAR By Ian McEwan 287 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26.95. Ian McEwan has long had a penchant for creating unsavory, disreputable characters: children who bury their mother in the basement (''The Cement Garden''), a Machiavellian sadist who preys on a pair of middle-class tourists (''The Comfort of Strangers''), a dead woman's conniving former...
THE big set piece at the heart of ''Atonement'' takes place on the beach at Dunkirk during the British evacuation in 1940. Dazed and exhausted, a wounded soldier named Robbie Turner stumbles onto the beach along with two sidekicks while a six-minute tracking shot establishes a montage of eerie, almost surreal images: a bandstand, abandoned cannons,...
Ian Russell McEwan (født 21. juni 1948) er en britisk forfatter.