by Ian McEwan, 2012
This is a book with a flaw. It purports to be about propaganda and literature: both literature as a form of propaganda and propaganda in other forms. Our protagonist, Serena (!) is first educated about ruling class propaganda in The Times of London and elsewhere by her left-leaning tutor, who turns out to be a Russian agent. Characters spin their stories in their own way and have their favoured versions of the truth. Serena gradually learns to doubt the surface messages. She is brought into MI5, and becomes part of a low-level propaganda campaign, providing a disguised income to Tom, a promising novelist who writes about freedom and creativity. Part of Serena’s indoctrination is a review of the efforts of the Comintern and CIA propaganda branches to support their own literary favourites. In the end, the whole scheme comes apart, and as readers we have to re-evaluate the story of Serena.
Serena is more than a bit naïve, a shallow but voluminous
reader who slowly learns to appreciate more literary writing. She is taken with
Tom’s creative stories, sometimes quite moved by them, although the summaries
she recounts seem rather bizarre, more like academic writing exercises than actually
convincing stories. Serena falls for Tom and they have an affair, although she
worries about how to tell him that she is a fraud who has been undermining his
professional credibility. When Serena’s ex-lover brings Tom a different story
that undermines her credibility, Tom turns the tables on her and makes up his
own story. In the end, we see how creative story-telling is more successful
than bureaucratically inspired propaganda, even in the hands of a literary
writer.
All this is very post-modern, questioning the meaning of
storytelling and point-of-view, which could be an interesting twist, although hardly
a new idea.
The flaw, which I felt before reaching the various plot
turns, is that it’s just not that interesting. The characters are sketched with
little detail or depth, and their crises are not engaging. The plot seems to
have so little at stake that it’s not interesting. The occasional background
details of the social unrest of Britain in the early 1970s actually sparked
more interest for me than the central story line. So it undermines the message
that creative fiction is better than government propaganda when the creative
fiction that I’m reading feels flat and boring.
On a side note, the story line seems to challenge the notion
of artificial limitations on writers and that writers can’t appropriate someone
else’s voice. McEwan writes in the voice of a woman as if to show that it can
be done successfully. In fact, the voice of Serena seems convincing enough as a
young woman in 1970s London, but the fact that the story she is describing isn’t
very successful actually seems to support the notion that writing in the voice
of another is inherently limiting and incomplete.
My reaction to the book is totally subjective, and perhaps
others would react more deeply to the intensity of the love affair and the
inherent conflict and loss that threaten it. But in the end, it seems to me to
be another thought experiment that doesn’t really work rather than a successful
novel. (For a thought experiment that does work even though much wilder than
this one, I both enjoyed and bought into Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union.)
