On 10 June, a year after the death of his friend Martin Amis, Ian McEwan stood in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields church, off Trafalgar Square, reeling off his favourite lines for hundreds of Amis’s admirers. The narrator of the novel Money, from 1984, contemplating the far side of a street and giving up, concluding that in LA “the only way to get across the road is to be born there”. The observation about Salman Rushdie after the fatwa, that he had “vanished into the front pages”. And the man in Success overheard in a toilet stall going about his business, as if emptying a “sack of melons… down a well”. McEwan remembered much discussion about this simile with Martin: it was not to be bricks or potatoes but melons; not one or two, but a sack; not a pond but a well.
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