 First edition cover | |
| Author | Ian McEwan |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Bill Botten |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
Publication date | 1975 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 165 |
| ISBN | 0-224-01095-6 |
First Love, Last Rites is a collection of short stories by Ian McEwan. It was first published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape, with cover designed by Bill Botten, and re-issued in 1997 by Vintage.
The collection is McEwan's first published work and was regarded by the author (along with his second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets) as an opportunity to experiment and find his voice as a writer. In an interview with Christopher Ricks in 1979, McEwan commented, "They were a kind of laboratory for me. They allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer." As a piece of work that portrays McEwan, the writer, at his youngest, it is perhaps fitting that the dominant theme is that of adolescence, of the blurry and perilous divide between childhood and adulthood; in addition themes of sex, perversion, and the grotesque in its many forms feature throughout.
The book is composed of eight short stories, with the title story coming seventh:
It has been suggested by any critics that as well as adolescence, the stories revolve around the difficulty of becoming a 'man,' whatever society deems a man to be. McEwan has described adolescents as "the perfect strangers," and through his use of first person narratives in this collection focuses on that difficult and often shocking transitional period.
First Love, Last Rites received the Somerset Maugham Award for 1976; coincidentally, McEwan's friend Martin Amis[2][3] had been the previous author to receive the honour.
The collection was well received by critics.[4] In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, John Fletcher wrote, "Such writing would be merely sensational if it were not, like Kafka's, pointed, so accurate, so incapable indeed of being appalled. In contemporary writing one has to turn to French literature to encounter a similar contrast between the elegance of the language and the disturbing quality of the material; in writing in English McEwan is wholly unique."[5] Critic Robert Towers described McEwan's England in The New York Review of Books as a "flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect, sickening detail"; Towers called the collection "possibly the most brilliantly perverse and sinister batch of short stories to come out of England since Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set."[6]
In The New York Times, Michael Mewshaw stated that "even the most measured plot synopsis may make these stories sound sensational or slightly psychopathic [...] But what sounds lurid and macabre in summary comes across on the page as poignant and often appealing. This is a tribute to Ian McEwan, a young British writer who has an extraordinary talent for humanizing potentially unpalatable characters." While Mewshaw argued that central characters in "Homemade" and "Conversation with a Cupboard Man" were literary and sophisticated to an extent that was incompatible with their situations, Mewshaw also wrote that the stories “indicate at once that [McEwan] is a writer of wit, imagination and incisiveness.”[7] An unfavorable write-up appeared in Kirkus Reviews, however, where the reviewer complained, "There are no elements of fine drawn invention and surprise here--only too literally does he manage to soil his hands. [...] Provocation of a sort, but is it really justified by such an overwhelming fetor?"[8]
David Malcolm stated in 2002 that "Cocker at the Theatre" is "perhaps the weakest of the stories"[9] but referred to the others as "rather detailed and painstaking evocations of mood and feeling, of desire, shame, uncertainty, distaste, and confusion."[10] Lucas Wittmann of The Daily Beast listed the collection in 2010 as one of McEwan's stronger pre-Atonement works along with his other short story collection, arguing, "In all of these stories lie the essence of McEwan's fictional vision, and for any fan of his work this is the place to start to understand how he has evolved as a writer even while he's never quite given up on finding humanity and dark humor in our collective foibles."[11] Conversely, Sandra Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail that McEwan had evolved as an artist since his early works and that First Love, Last Rites is among the books in which the author is a "literary shocker" rather than an "innovative and compassionate novelist", likening it to punk rock.[12]
The title story was adapted for a 1997 film of the same name. The film stars Natasha Gregson Wagner as Sissel and Giovanni Ribisi as Joey. It was directed by Jesse Peretz.
"Butterflies" has been adapted twice for cinema. In 1988 by Wolfgang Becker under the German title Schmetterlinge and in 2005 by Max Jacoby under its original English title.
"Solid Geometry" was also adapted by Channel 4 in 2002 into a short film of the same name. This adaptation was directed by Denis Lawson and stars Ewan McGregor as Phil and Ruth Millar as Maisie.
