Review of the novel The Clock by Ian McEwan

Roland, as the man’s name is, cannot resist the force of the moment. He raises his hand and extends his index and middle fingers in a victory symbol. In previous pages, he argued with Western leftists who considered communism a lesser evil than capitalism. He even threw friends out of his apartment after one dinner because of the claim that Soviet troops really came to Czechoslovakia in 1968 at the request of the workers.

Now the protagonist gets into a high mood. And he will remain in it for years to come, convinced that history ended at this moment. “Liberal democratic Russia will bloom like a flower in spring,” he imagines, just as he later has no doubt that the communists will disappear in China with the development of capitalism.

Previously, novels ended with this triumphant moment. Ian McEwan extends his novel called Hodiny, which has just been published by Odeon in the Czech translation of Ladislav Šenkyřík, to the present day, including the coronavirus pandemic. To show not only everything nice that his generation experienced, but also its mistakes. “I thought, like many of us, that 1989 was opening the door to a new future. It turned out to be only a temporary peak,” he admitted this year to the Independent newspaper, why he chose the passage about the Berlin Wall for a special evening in London’s Barbican hall, where read samples of his work accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

The very existence of such an evening confirms that the 75-year-old Englishman belongs to Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro among the best-known contemporary British novelists. He became famous in the late 1970s with the outrageous novel The Concrete Garden. He later won the Booker Prize for the precise Amsterdam and sold over two million copies of the wartime romance Repentance, which was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Keira Knightley.

Although McEwan continued to maintain a high bar, his latest prose on artificial intelligence or Brexit were weaker. An even stronger return to form is now heralded by Hodiny, a huge work depicting an ordinary, not primarily interesting life. Nevertheless, it ranks among the author’s best. And also the longest: the range of almost 600 pages was made possible by the pandemic. “I was completely immersed in the text, writing seven days a week, often twelve hours a day, with breaks only to walk the dog,” he said the Guardian newspaper.

It is a portrait of a life, a generation and a time. First the life: the protagonist Roland seems like an average, unfulfilled man, a “not very brilliant” poet, a tennis teacher and a pianist who plays in second-rate restaurants. We follow him from his childhood in a foreign country through his adolescence at a boarding school to the death of those closest to him in old age.

While she juggles relationships, work and friends, she processes two traumas. As a fourteen-year-old, he was sexually abused by a piano teacher. After which, as an adult, his wife left him and left a seven-month-old child on his neck so that she could become a writer. This makes the reader sympathize with Roland at first, before realizing that McEwan is telling his story to question to what extent man is a victim and what he himself is to blame.

Then there is the generational aspect. The novelist compares the suffering of those who experienced the war with their children, the “boomers” like Roland, who were favored by history if they were born in the West. Where “they talked on the spread apron of history, nestling in a tiny fold of time, where they licked all the cream”. They did not die in the trenches, did not have to face totalitarianism, on the contrary, they grew up under an economic miracle and enjoyed the sexual revolution, consumerism and technological development, while the world around them improved year by year. “Being born in peaceful Hampshire in 1948, and not in the Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not being knocked down the steps of a synagogue in 1941,” McEwan lists some of the deciding factors.

Even the Western “boomerism” does not beautify. Using the hero’s example, he shows that even if history was in a man’s favor, he could still fail and end up like Roland. Of course, his time also had a flip side: people didn’t think about their mental health. Some men routinely beat their wives. Certain parents ignored the children. Many women could not paint or become scientists because they were raising children. And of course, topics such as sexual abuse did not resonate in society, and many did not even know that they could name their experiences in this way.

McEwan connects all of this with history, starting with the anti-Nazi resistance through the Caribbean crisis, perestroika, Chernobyl and the fall of the Iron Curtain to the pandemic or current debates about great writers, who in no way detract from possible cruelty in their personal lives if they also wrote a brilliant novel.

Eight-time grandfather Ian McEwan writes about the joy of his grandchildren in a new novel, among other things. | Photo: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Even by the standards of the author, whose previous novella Šváb was political, such a degree of social and historical context is unusual. As if McEwan wanted to tell the story of the entire post-war West at the same time.

In the text, “big” history sometimes believably intervenes in the actions of the protagonists and questions who is responsible for what – if it weren’t for the events of 1962, when he expected the third world war, Roland might not have ended up abused and traumatized. Other times, on the other hand, his personal indecisiveness has almost historical consequences, when he closes one career path for good.

Sometimes history in the book only plays the role of an attractive backdrop, especially in the meeting at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall: the scene is almost Hollywood-like, balancing on the edge of kitsch. At other times, McEwan seems to be ticking off what he has to mention rather than working with it. Why is there so much context? Today, when the pandemic has been replaced by wars, is the writer trying to reassure the reader that the world was also hectic before?

In any case, the watch is remarkable precisely because of the effort to stretch the web of all those historical events, coincidences, conscious decisions and ordinary luck that shape a person. When someone like Roland moves at times and stagnates at other times. He has stronger and weaker periods, after which he awkwardly looks back at everything at the end in a vain attempt to see the meaning, to deduce something from the ambiguity. Determine if and where the error occurred. To say what it was for. And whether it will be put together in retrospect into a more coherent whole than when he lived it. When, for example, he slept with someone for a long time, but it did not lead to anything. He worked somewhere for years, but had to start over. He wrote something for decades, but did not publish it.

The Soviets deploy missiles in Cuba, the US reacts with a blockade. An image from the Caribbean crisis, a key moment in the novel The Hours, shows an American helicopter over a Russian submarine. | Photo: Profimedia.cz

It’s all life, as McEwan would say. It includes ups and downs, misunderstandings between people, the inadequacy of man, the shadow cast on him by his parents, calm and undignified fights in old age, when vanity has no other choice.

At the same time, we are reading a novel about forgiveness. When does a person come to terms with the fact that he will no longer find more freedom than he had. That after the best sex, there is no better one waiting for him. When will he learn to rejoice in such an ordinary thing as having a granddaughter. He stops looking for mistakes in his memories, thinking what if. And she just remembers what this love felt like or tasted like until it’s over.

These are the lessons from the English title of the novel Lessons: not just piano lessons with the hero’s first love and German lessons with his later wife, but life lessons. The effect of which is enhanced by how wonderfully written they are. Sometimes almost thriller, other times sentimental. All the time aiming for a confrontation between the two fateful women, and at the same time continuously portraying characters on a scale from clearly sympathetic to antagonistic. At the same time, McEwan leaves enough space to sufficiently develop the hero’s inner life over the span of several decades and to show his trauma in all its consequences.

The relatively plainly told story occasionally jumps sharply in time, when in the middle of reminiscing the character stops and forty years later throws clothes into the laundry basket, after which something flashes in her head that connects the past with the present. Or the hero arrives at the funeral, but the author makes us wonder who died for several pages.

Even around page 500, the writer stages an unexpected encounter that makes you scream out loud with excitement as you read. The fact that even after one of the expected dramatic climaxes, McEwan can maintain the tension for the next dozen pages, testifies to his complete control over the form.

Long-time readers of Ian McEwan will find a lot of familiar themes in The Hours, and the chapter itself is characterized by a high degree of autobiography, which is brilliantly unraveled in the afterword by the philosopher Tereza Matějčková. At the same time, Hodiny is quite different, intentionally freer and less constructed than the author’s shorter prose. That is why it hits the reader with such force. It is the prerogative of the best novels to capture life on such a large surface in such completeness. The clock belongs to them.

Ian McEwan: Hours
(Translated by Ladislav Šenkyřík)
Odeon Publishing House 2023, 592 pages, 699 crowns