Towards the end of this overly-long and self-reverential novel, the central character Roland Baines says to himself: “Make a choice, act. That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago.” A shame, too, for the reader that McEwan himself didn’t act more ruthlessly on his own prose, cutting out not just sentences that lead nowhere except up themselves, but also the plot lines that go nowhere and, perhaps most exhaustingly of all, the endless socio-political contexts that often reduce his characters to faint outlines against a crowded historical backdrop.
