In Between the Sheets - Ian McEwan

He sets us up for some fairly rewarding glimpses into the unconscious mind.

pp.134

Published: Vintage, 2006 (1978)

In his days as a writer of short stories, Ian McEwan’s now familiar style – the restrained clarity, the sensitivity, the subtlety – was in its adolescent phase, had an altogether sinister quality to it. One can see why he was accused of merely trying to shock readers. Yet the stories in his second collection, while frequently trembling on the edge of sensationalism, are rescued again and again by some unfathomable psychological depth which will leave the reader dumbfounded.

The one story for which this last remark does not hold true is actually the first, ‘Pornography’. Comically following the day-to-day shenanigans of O’Byrne and his porn-shop-owning brother Harold, the piece deteriorates into a sexual castration fantasy when O’Byrne’s two girlfriends discover that he has been cheating. The denouement is pure over-indulgence in horror with virtually no literary ambitions.

Conversely, the other stories seem thoroughly well-crafted, and put the reader on more purposeful ground. We must therefore read the opening piece as a kind of plunge into the freezing waters of the young McEwan’s overactive and frightening imagination as he sets us up for some fairly rewarding glimpses into the unconscious mind.

The stories most worthy of mention are ‘Reflections of a Kept Ape’ and the title piece, ‘In Between the Sheets’. In the former, a pet monkey with an extraordinary level of sentience is taken as the lover of a female novelist, Sally Klee, who is struggling with the follow-up to her first-published novel. This strange narrative deals with their short sex life, where ‘the friction of our bodies brought her out in a rash, and … my alien seed … was aggravating her thrush’, through to the ape’s maddening sense of loneliness and rejection as Sally Klee struggles with her writer’s block. When the ape discovers what she has been writing all this time, interesting questions are asked about what the creative process actually means and what its purpose is. The latterly mentioned title piece has a depressed ex-husband and father, Stephen Cooke, at its core. When his daughter comes to stay with him for the holidays, she brings her friend Charmian, who is a dwarf and who has a strange allure for Stephen, though it is not clear what the nature of this is.

It has to be said that the story with the most familiar McEwan voice (familiar to us now, looking back from so late on in his career), is ‘Two Fragments: March 199-‘. In this, a politically and socially desolate future world is the setting in which Henry lives with his daughter, Marie. Marie is a very funny and realistic depiction of an inquisitive child, and together they witness a horrifying spectacle. Henry visits an old lover, Diane, in the second part to this piece, and they reminisce about ‘the old times’ and argue about the usefulness of collecting things. Henry’s oblique contact with a Chinese family at the end is difficult to place within the rest of the narrative. Nevertheless, this piece has a particularly subtle quality that sets it back from the rest of the collection, and demonstrates shades of the later, more mature McEwan.

McEwan’s second published book is largely a success, with some slightly deflating features which indicate a lack of maturity, a lack of the refined, surgeon-like skill of his later work. In Kafkaesque manner, these stories are insular, floating free of any historical or political context. It is an important collection, interesting as a retrospective look at the early part of the author’s career, and in its own right as a detailed exploration into the more depraved areas of human existence.