Customer Reviews

First Love, Last Rites

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Approaching Ian McEwan for the first time, it seemed only natural that I begin with this collection of eight short stories, his first published work. I must say that McEwan leaves quite an impression on the reader. In fact, these stories are quite unlike anything I have ever read. One is hard pressed to determine just how to feel about the stories told here, attempting to integrate shock, sympathy, understanding, depression, ennui, enlightenment, and all manner of other reactions into some sort of vision of enlightenment. The first thing that becomes apparent is McEwan's boldness and unique vision; he uses some words that never find themselves into the published works of most other writers, but his employment of them seems to be a matter of craft rather than an act of gratuitousness. The very first story, Homemade, is a somewhat disturbing and surreal account of incest, with a lad seeking to understand the type of world his adventurous friend lives in engaging his younger sister in an act of sexual exploration. The story ends quite suddenly, leaving me to interpret the deeper meaning completely on my own. Solid Geometry is sort of the odd duck in this collection, with its theoretical mathematics feel distinguishing it from its counterparts. The story works quite well in describing the protagonist's uneasy relationship with his wife, but the kicker at the end comes off as just a little too esoteric. Cocker at the Theatre is the most outré (and short) story in the collection; personally, I didn't get a lot out of it, but it does demand attention.

For the most part, the reader stays on morbid ground. Some have described these tales as having a definite aspect of horror to them, but I would not equate them with horror at all. Each story seems to bear the weight of an imperfect world on its shoulders, and the visions of reality that pour forth throughout the book are maudlin and disturbing without being horrifying in the normal sense of the word. Last Day of Summer is a perfect example, and as such it is clearly my favorite of the bunch. We gain insight into the lives of ordinary people in a setting that is slightly out of the ordinary, and the story seems to me to bristle with a few soft strokes of existentialism, particularly at the end. Butterflies is an almost equally atmospheric offering, creating an atmosphere of moral decay and slight madness around the drowning of a young girl and the unfolding account of the protagonist's insight into that death. Conversation With a Cupboard Man is quite impressive, telling the story of a man so over-protected by his mother for the first two decades of his life that he cannot adjust to modern life on his own, longing to return to a childhood in which his needs are met and he is sheltered. The title story is a relatively weak piece compared to its companions here, failing to provide me with the insight I was expecting from it. Finally, there is Disguises, yet another disturbing story of over-protection and sexual innuendo, covering a boy's desire to break away from the significantly odd atmosphere of his home life and his struggle to adjust at the crossroads of his public and private worlds.

McEwan exhibits what I consider something of a singular style in his writing. Oftentimes throwing together a string of fairly short sentences, he nevertheless avoids any sign of choppiness and proves amazingly efficient at making even the shortest sentences say a great deal. The subject matter of a few of these stories might bother some readers, particularly the incestuous relationships that are implied if not laid out in a few of the stories, but McEwan unwinds his short dramas in an impressively literary style, granting even the most controversial of subjects a lofty plane on which to evolve. The most disturbing aspects of this collection actually have nothing to do with any overt acts themselves but rather with an evocation of the psychological depths of a number of quite interesting characters. First Love, Last Rites won't pick you up when you're feeling down, as it can cast quite a maudlin spell over the sensitive soul, yet it offers quite a uniquely illuminating study of human nature and the loss of innocence.

I would begin my review by saying that if you are going to begin a journey into the wonderful world of McEwan, don't begin here. Then I would say that he is one of my favorite writers, EVER. He is incredibly good, but I am afraid that none of these eight stories really resonated with me. I would say that they don't represent how well he can write. If you began here, you might assume that McEwan is somewhat fixated with sexual rites of passage themes, when really he isn't.
From a pickled penis, in the first story; to childhood incestuous rape, in the second; to a third story (perhaps the best of all) with the least amount of sexual innuendo; to the fourth, depicting uncontrollable on-stage public sexual intercourse; to the fifth, sexually motivated murder; to the sixth, about a masturbatory recluse; to the seventh, the "art" of which, eluded me almost entirely; to the eighth, involving what I consider child abuse brought on by a self-obsessed, cross-dressing caregiver.
Are the stories written well? Hell yes.
McEwan is exquisite (present tense) and this book (1975) proves that "exquisiteness" is not just a recent development with him. It is the subject matter that I find objectionable. And not so much in an "immoral" sense as much as in an "unappealing" sense. In these stories he is dealing with such grotesque imagery, that I find it difficult to find these particular stories applicable. For the most part, they are about the kind of stuff that even the newspapers omit from their most disturbing back pages.
Maybe I don't want to look that close. Perhaps I don't want to read about how some guy "tosses himself off" in the closet of some attic somewhere, or how in a shadowy tunnel along a river, a young girl is sexually victimized and then slid into the river, like a fish that no one wanted, because it was too small for a good meal.
They are fairly brutal stories, I'm not kidding.
But McEwan is SUCH a great writer. If I have caught you in time, read him elsewhere, and then come back here when you are in love with him. And trust him.

"First Love, Last Rites (FLLR)" is Ian McEwan's first short story collection and while I love virtually every novel he has written so far - "Enduring Love", "Black Dogs" and "Atonement" are truly modern classics - FLLR is very early McEwan, showing promise but lacking the assured confidence of his later works. In this Somerset Maugham Award winning book, McEwan displays all the qualities that have come to characterise his style. Unafraid to break taboos or upset social conventions, he forces the boundaries of acceptability and occasionally goes for the jugular when he employs shock tactics to awaken our natural instinct for the dark and the macabre that lies dormant beneath our consciousness.

The opening vignette "Solid Geometry" is fascinating sci-fi-cum-horror fare. I couldn't help stifling a chuckle at the inventive way in which the protagonist finally "got rid" of his wife. "Homemade" about the awakening of a boy's sexuality via the only means available to him is another winner, both terrifying and funny. "Butterflies" and "Conversations With A Cupboard Man" are more conventional stories about loners and the devastating effect of repression. "Last Day Of Summer" is a gentle reminder that "still waters run deep" with grotesques. I don't think I got the essence of "Cocker At The Theatre" though it seems to be about sexuality and control and how they don't mix. The last two stories are to me the weakest in the collection. The title story seems tame and listless, ie, it goes nowhere, while the closing vignette "Disguises" is too befuddling to make any sense of. Is the aunt just mad or is she a closet cross dresser and a dominatrix in her little mad house ? Too much of a mindbender for me.

"First Love, Last Rites" is a qualified success. The highs are truly excellent but be prepared for a couple of disappointments.

Reading McEwan's first collection of short stories is like stepping into the mind of a pervert, and finding yourself right at home. In these grim tales, McEwan explores the cusp of sex and death - a zone less adventurous writers might dismiss as pornographic or even sick. But this isn't pornography; it isn't even erotica. It's psycho-sexual reconnaissance and, as that, quite impressive. McEwan's talent here is to make his monsters human - to reveal the pain and suffering and morbid loneliness which drive these characters to do the things they do. Highly original.

McEwan is a master of the strange, odd, and peculiar. Of the eight stories in this collection of his early work, the best are the infamous "Homemade," which is rather humorous and only partly about incest, and "Last Day of Summer," which is very well told and displays the author's outstanding ability to develop characters with no wasted effort, and which has a dreadful ending. Not bad, merely dreadful. "Butterflies" is a spooky bit of psychopathology. "Conversations with a Cupboard Man" is another excursion into a warped personality, and you can understand exactly how this poor guy ended up the way he is. The title story, "First Love, Last Rites," is not the best, being an aimless sort of tale about being young and poor and semi-in-love, with eel-trapping and rat-catching thrown in. "Disguises" was a bit hard to read at first, being written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style, but it gets better -- much better. McEwan obviously has a thing for aberrant mental and social development. "Solid Geometry" is probably the weakest piece here, a sort-of science fiction story that telegraphs its ending in about the third paragraph. "Cocker at the Theatre," on the other hand, is a truly hilarious short-short.

Like other reviewers, I marvel at the genius (a term I rarely use) of Mr. McEwan, in works such as "Atonement," "Amsterdam," and "Saturday." I believe that he is the finest writer of fiction living today. However "First Love, Last Rites," written albeit very early in his career, while offering us snippets of dark humor and polished prose, are for the most part one-dimensional tales of sexual rites of passage. And bizarre rites they are! One is exposed to incest, child abuse and other peculiar tales from a writer who was obviously groping his way onto the literary landscape. Concentrate on his later works and forget this compilation. He is so much better than these stories.

First I feel I should list the stories included in this collection, something almost all reviewers seem to forget to do, leaving those who are looking for specific stories in outer cyber-space:

1. "Homemade" 2. "Solid geometry" 3. "Last day of summer" 4. "Cocker at the theatre" 5. "Butterflies" 6. "Conversations with a cupboard man" 7. "First love, last rites" 8. "Disguises"

These stories are about weird people on the margins of society. Most of them have been written in the first person, in a way turning them into a kind of confession. Though it is written as if the 'subject' of the story is a unique scientific specimen set free in order to observe its behaviour, sometimes one identifies with ("Homemade" ?), or is repelled by the charachter ("Butterflies"). Often one may like and disklike the subject as the story goes along. What makes these stories interesting are the characters, the crazy people making their sometimes funny, sometimes abysmally pathetic confessions.They are only alike in that the subjects are all men. My favorites are "Homemade", full of black humor and irony, and "Disguises" where a boy, forced to dress at home like a girl by the aunt that has adopted him, begins to <think> as a girl, and goes on to see himeself as his own girlfriend. Complex? Read the story. "Coker" is special in that it is written in the third person, and it seems like a joke on modern theater: a narration about a group of down-and-out actors in the rehersal of a play that recreates the sexual act under the direction of a cynic homosexual. Though funny, its quite short. It originally appeared in Time Out.

The stories in "First Love, Last Rites" are very uneven. The best of the lot - "Homemade" and "Disguises" - are dazzling in their detail and careful construction of character. Both are...perverted? twisted?...tales of misplaced sexuality. In "Homemade," a boy rapes his prepubescent sister in order to experience sex for the first time; in "Disguises," a boy is dressed in eccentric and sexually ambiguous costumes by his aunt, a former star of the stage. McEwan builds marvelous tension; each of these stories feels dangerous and vital.

The other stories vary from decent ("First Love, Last Rites") to downright terrible ("Cocker at the Theater"). In fact, "Cocker..." was so bad I laughed out loud when I finished it. The piece contains the usual public naked hijinks penned by literary-minded frat boys and submitted to undergraduate poetry mags and is just as poorly written. The rest of the stories are technically proficient but lack any sort of moral, human, or artistic depth. They are concept pieces combing self-loathing and sex. Perhaps utterly necessary to write, but equally difficult to read.

Still, I might recommend the collection - especially a used or borrowed copy - for the stories bookending the drivel in the middle.

Anyone who wants to write stories about the complexity of the human condition should read this book. Ian knows how to capture the pain of the human condition and he makes erotic horror out of seemingly mundane scenes. You want sick, perverted parenting and a cute love story between kids rolled up in one? Check out Disguises. You want to dance with apathy, death, and insecurity that will slowly take the wind out of you lungs bit by bit? Check out Last Day of Summer. You want a picture perfect story of how loneliness and boredom can lead to violence in kids? Check out Butterflies. Just know that you will want to take a cold shower after reading these stories. Disturbing stuff. As for First Love, Last Rites (the story), expect the imagery in the last scene to burn in your retina for quite some time. A necessary experience.

Author of Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life

Having read much of Ian McEwan's later work in the last few years, I was intrigued to chance upon a copy of First Love, Last Rites, a set of his short stories published in 1975. I read The Cement Garden and The Comfort Of Strangers just after their publication, but I have not picked up any early McEwan since then. First Love, Last Rites proved to be an eye-opening read, not least because hindsight offers real clues as to how Ian McEwan has developed as a writer.

The stories in this set vary from Disguises which, at around 20,000 words, might even be a novella, to Cocker At The Theatre which is definitely a short story. What characterises all of these tales, however, is that they focus on characters whose behaviour or personal culture might be seen as towards the minority end of taste. I use the word minority to indicate that only a few people would admit to such proclivities, not that they might comprise only a small element of generality. It was this concentration on arguably the freakish that allowed the nickname Ian Macabre to stick.

In First Love, Last Rites, for instance, we have a touch of incest, sexual intercourse on stage, not a little child abuse seasoned with transvestism, an episode of boiling in oil, childhood games that grow prematurely adult, rats scratching at the skirts and more. I am reminded of the photographs of Diane Arbus from roughly the same period. It seemed that wherever she pointed her camera, no matter how potentially mundane the shot might appear, there would be evidence of sadomasochism, bestiality, paedophilia, even meat-eating.

It was this mix of what was understood as marginal mixed with the manifestly prosaic that caught the attention in the photographs and rendered them so disturbing. Viewing them reminded oneself of diverse aspects of humanity that - at least potentially - we all share and yet publicly try to deny. For the British, that might include all sex that cannot be advertised or sold. It certainly includes all the aspects of human behaviour listed above. I am not accusing all adults of paedophilia. I am suggesting that all of us have both privately and publicly appreciated the neat, taut beauty of a child's body. The question, and it remains an interesting one, is where is the line between `normal' appreciation of beauty and socially unacceptable `perversity'. I will never forget a trip around London's National Gallery with a relative younger than myself, someone with little previous exposure to "art". Her comment was that the paintings were pornographic, merely because they portrayed nudes.

All Ian McEwan's characters straddle this question's necessary confusion. Maybe their acts are merely imagined, leaving the individuals grappling with aspects of themselves they cannot understand, admit or control. Maybe they do what they say but, as a result of some inner drive that others do not share, cannot comprehend their own marginality. Whatever the case, these peoples' psyches must continually grapple with a conflict between a truth of what they are versus an image of what they believe themselves to be. There's a gap of communication wide enough to allow most experience to fall through.

And it is these gaps that Ian McEwan exploits. He presents people in situations that for them might seem completely mundane. For the rest of us, these are highly individual worlds that publicly we do not expect to see. But, like the images of Diane Arbus, we find we can enter into them because those aspects of humanity are within us as well, though often we don't like to admit it.

Where Ian McEwan's later work triumphs can now be seen more clearly. Whereas in the earlier work there was a need for a fundamental shift by the reader to admit a possible likeness with his characters, in his later work he presents the individual foibles of his characters in much more rounded, complex forms, forms that all of us can easily associate with. Then the contradictions emerge. Then the conflicts surface and then the gaps in communication widen. The approach is the same, but the effect is so much greater. First Love, Last Rites remains a brilliant read in its own right, but I reckon that for many readers of Ian McEwan a re-visit would shed much new light on his later work.