The new McEwan overcame a number of possible objections, for me. While I would usually these days buy any new title by him, this one's theme, the provision of welfare for children, sounded unprepossessing and so I didn't order it. But when someone offers to lend it to you, that is a different matter. There have been any number of titles to buy in recent months and one simply can't buy them all.
Next, it seems to use as its premise a set piece moral dilemma between respecting religious belief and the sanctity of life. And then it almost becomes a case study masquerading as fiction, or vice versa. Fiona May is a high court judge presented with a case of a young Jehovah's Witness who needs a blood transfusion or he will die. His parents and thus the teenager himself are both convinced that the blood transfusion trangresses a commandment.
But we start with the sub-plot in which Fiona's husband wants permission to have one last fling with a younger woman, will that be alright. Well, no, it won't. And so he leaves her in peremptory fashion, presumably to pursue his infatuation.
Adam, the patient in question, turns out to be a bright lad just short of the age of majority but very much convinced that he must die. Fiona suspends court proceedings to go and talk with him to establish his point of view, and she is impressed. But she inevitably provides a beautifully phrased judgement in favour of the hospital and saving the life against its owner's apparent will. Unfortunately, she kisses the boy, almost accidentally but nonetheless significantly.
With 40 pages to go, I will still in doubt about the worth of the book despite McEwan's elegant writing, and thought I'd guessed the ending and that it might turn into Notes on a Scandal. But it didn't and how on earth did I ever imagine I could foresee the end of such a book. McEwan has pulled off some tremendous finishes before now. Not that this one is what you might want it to be or hope for but it has a certain truth about it.
In the first pages of Chapter 4, McEwan provides a view of the state of Britain through Fiona's reflections on her work,
The new coinage was half-truth and special pleading . Greedy husbands versus greedy wives, manoeuvring like nations at the end of a war, grabbing from the ruins what spoils they could before the final withdrawal.
and it gets far worse,
gruesome young stepfathers breaking toddlers' bones while dim compliant mothers looked on, and drugs, drink, extteme household squalor, indifferent neighbours selectively deaf to the screaming
and 'social workers failing to intervene', etc.
It is something of a test of the limits of liberalism, whether that is McEwan using his character as a vehicle for his view or not.
As previously, when a recital of Dover Beach seemed to provide an unlikely resolution to crisis point in a novel, McEwan depends upon the redemptive power of art when music unites Fiona and Adam through his violin study and her singing. And where, in Sweet Tooth, we were treated to a glimpse of the 1970's London pub rock scene and a reference to Roogalator, here, perhaps on a slightly higher level, Fiona and her errant husband had a Keith Jarrett album as one of 'their' records. You can't fault anyone's taste.
It is difficult to find a flaw in Fiona, beleaguered though she seems to be, but dutiful, profound and with a dignity of her own. and yet, look what happens. It is not satisfactory, as the end of Chesil Beach (which was about musicians, too) wasn't, either, and yet it was so resoundingly true. And that is how we are left here, having had so many doubts about the novel, it rode over them all and if it isn't quite another Atonement, Chesil Beach or Sweet Tooth then it is surely a fine novel by most standards and just a good one by his own.