Men with knives …

… Finger-Steepling and Sharks: Ian McEwan Reconsidered. (Hat tip, Ed Champion.)

Things that were overrated tend to end up being underrated, and vice versa. It's not unfashionable to deride McEwan these days, but it tends to be for the wrong reasons. An inept piece in the New Statesman by Ziauddin Sardar lamented the rise of "Blitcon", by which he meant the supposedly conservative politics of the three leading British novelists, McEwan, Amis and Rushdie (which amounted to their opposition to the invasion of Iraq being accompanied by reservations). Like the (admittedly not unfounded) attacks on Amis by Ronan Bennett and Terry Eagleton, and the attacks on McEwan for not boycotting Israel, they invite one's sympathy for the beseiged novelist to some extent, because they seem to demand a rigid, orthodox political and social outlook which is anathema to literature. Would Evelyn Waugh, had he lived in this age, have established himself as one of the greatest craftsmen of English prose, or would he have been hounded away from it because he said nasty things? The extraordinary writer and prose stylist James Ellroy is on record as saying he loves Bill O'Reilly, believes the Rodney King incident was blown out of proportion by the liberal media and that he shook Kenneth Starr by the hand to congratulate him on his role in exposing Clinton; while Ben Elton describes himself as a believer in the politics of Clement Attlee. Obviously Elton's politics are greatly preferable to me, while Ellroy's comments make my teeth grind, but whose novels have we truly benefited from? Do we really require nice, calm, sensible orthodox beliefs from novelists?