Locating the ‘Usefully Problematic’ in a Novel and a Memoir by Ian McEwan

This article looks at aspects of a novel and a memoir, written over the same period in 2001, by author Ian McEwan. In ‘Mother tongue’, his memoir, McEwan reflects on his insular upbringing on various military bases abroad. His father, a soldier, was a periodic presence whose volatile moods interrupted the home‐life otherwise exclusively spent with his mother, to whom he was strongly attached. Meanwhile McEwan's novel, Atonement , employs the perspective of an adolescent girl, antagonistic to the link forming in her sister's mind towards someone else. I look at how in the novel this situation leads to a denial of oedipal hierarchy, and ultimately to what Chasseguet–Smirgel terms ‘pseudo‐creative’ solutions. Atonement , however, lays stress on the integrating effect of the creative process itself. In writing the novel in conjunction with the memoir, particularly where one interrupted the other, I speculate that McEwan embarked on a similar process, in which the initial disruption, delivered a gain in perspective, which came to promote further psychic and creative development. I explore this from the Kleinian viewpoint of the here and now, and contrast this with that of Chasseguet–Smirgel, and with the more recursive temporality found within the French tradition.