Book Review: First Love, Last Rites is a workshop in eight stories. Ian McEwan exploring, testing, experimenting. Trying to see what the work should look like, how will it fit -- is it a play, is it a novel, a story? What's a given throughout that he is a magnificent writer and every story is written with confidence and mastery that few writers have in their first published book. Perhaps because First Love, Last Rites was his first book, he still has a youthful (read: adolescent) obsession with the twisted, perverse, sexual, the macabre. Incest, murder, pedophilia, obscenity -- all on offer. People who are just barely people, without normal emotions or feelings. Either McEwan simply had an unhealthy interest in these subjects, or he was feeling insecure: he knew he could write but had not yet developed the belief that people would be interested in his own subjects, so he went for the grotesque. In one story a character asks a question applicable to every story here: "Was she very wicked or very mad?" Later another character provides the proper description for this collection: "It will be formidable, fantastical, awful, but never nice, nothing we ever do will be nice ... we'll have the time of our lives, aren't you excited?" Like Spielberg, McEwan makes the fantastical seem normal, in his careful everyday, deadpan writing. First Love, Last Rites has eight great stories, not a clunker, but it's also a historical insight into Ian McEwan himself. [4★]
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