First Love, Last Rites: Stories

"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.

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-pr

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.

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.

Yet they still churn your stomach and question your own thoughts on the matters raised. I was only 13 when i first read this book and it did quite honestly (cliche) change my life.