PanThe London Review of BooksMcEwan’s deployment of odd nuggets of information in order to make the fictional reality seem real is undermined by his slightly recondite game-playing, which keeps drawing attention to the confected nature of the reality he’s creating ... McEwan has made quite a study of intractable ethical issues in his novels, and lately they tend to lie inert at the heart of them, refusing his best efforts to give them real intellectual and emotional life. This is a pity because he is a writer of great skill ... a showily literary book ... The politics in the book – as in the books before it – are spectacle, the stuff of newspapers and TV news channels, with no attempt to integrate the reasons behind the conflicts, or their possible bearing on the world ... This is a cautionary tale, and being based as it is on extensive research carries discursive weight, but like others of his recent novels, it remains divided, emotion and information unconnected, while off to one side a chorus underlines the moral issues, sets essay titles and suggests model answers, without ever questioning what human longings are all about.
