ABSTRACT
In chapter 2, we saw some of the ways in which contemporary writing engages with new thinking about time in the twentieth century and after. This chapter examines the work of Ian McEwan, and its response to this challenge. Most directly, his quasi-feminist oratorio Or Shall We Die? (1983), written at the height of the Cold War, seeks to build connections between the struggle against nuclear weapons in Britain and the insights of radical science in the form of Quantum Theory. Conventional modernistic science is aligned with masculinism and war, whilst the supposedly more ambivalent and holistic concerns of Quantum Theory signal the dawn of a different kind of ‘womanly times’. The overtly political approach of this text is just one example out of a whole range of ways in which McEwan’s writing works to destabilise the public conventions of time, history, memory and desire. More often, his work takes an intensely personal focus, on private, claustrophobic spaces in which the processes of psychological discovery can be studied in microcosm.
