While this book is mainly a portrait of the writer as a young man, I can see hints of McEwan’s later style creeping through the copious trigger warnings.
This collection of short stories was, I believe, McEwan’s first published work and you can tell. The pages are full of the macabre, the disturbed, the deranged. But perhaps the most disturbing thing is that McEwan almost makes you sympathise with the speaker. He places you inside their head, locks you within the first person pronoun, until you almost see the world through their eyes. Almost – I found that in every story there was a point of no return where I was jolted back into the depraved reality. Not exactly light reading.
I thought the first person speaker was most effective in the second story Homemade. McEwan succinctly and successfully twists the narrative to almost favour the actions of the speaker. I’m not going into specifics. Just know that all the stories are pretty grim.
In my opinion, the strongest story was The Last Day of Summer. With its pastoral, escapism themes, it strongly reminded me of Susan Hill’s I’m The King of the Castle. It had a similar prevailing sense of doom. To any other author, playing on a rowing boat in high summer would be a singularly positive activity. However, like in Hill’s novel, the reader is certain that this can’t end well. When the plot ran into more than one day, you begin to wonder if last in the title was taking on another meaning than simply the onset of autumn. McEwan can make the mundane monstrous. Especially when prefaced by the depravity of Homemade and Solid Geometry (which was a just weird more than anything), I was wincing every time I turned the page.
I thought the eponymous story, First Love, Last Rites was a bit disappointing. The beginning stories seemed keen to shock but McEwan had pretty much ticked all the boxes of grim and grimmer by this point. It was a bizarre, well written story, but I don’t think it deserved to be the titular work – although it is a cool name. Maybe that was his thinking. However, I was impressed with the setting description – one of my favourite things about his novel Atonement is that you genuinely smell the smells, taste the tastes. The settings are visceral.
In this collection, you can already see the power of McEwan’s writing, even if in some places it appears youthfully uncontained, almost hedonistically violent. Read this book knowing what you’re getting yourself into.
It’s fair to say that McEwan achieves impressive gut-punches from such truly short stories.
Hundreds & Thousands of Books 