“You hit your sixties and seventies and there is the danger of becoming less thought-rich,” Ian McEwan said in a 2018 interview. Published in his mid-seventies, his 496-page new novel abundantly displays that this is an impoverishment he hasn’t yet experienced.
Thought — “the brief privilege of consciousness”, as the hero of his 2005 novel Saturday calls it — has long been McEwan’s signature subject. Saturday, his study of rationality and unreason, focused on a neurosurgeon, expert at repairing damage — tumors, blood clots — to the lobes and hemispheres of the brain. Placed round him were instances of minds impaired in other ways: corroded by Alzheimer’s, disabled by Huntington’s disease, warped by malignant ideologies. The thought processes of a Nobel laureate physicist, a young girl’s hyper-literary cast of mind and the legalistic reasonings of a High Court judge were central to other McEwan novels.
