Ian McEwan should stick to what he’s good at

Being a superior genre writer is no small thing for the Booker nominee, says nicholas clee

The Man Booker Prize judges have given us many surprises this year, including discarding novels by six previous winners. But they stopped short of producing what would have been the biggest shock of all: leaving Ian McEwan off the shortlist. McEwan's short novel On Chesil Beach, already the favourite for the prize, has contracted in price to 6-4 at the bookies.

Any jury that ignores McEwan is going against a general consensus, which is that he is the finest living British author. Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie once vied for this position, but they have lost their invulnerability, and critics are no longer afraid to attack them. They have been supplanted by their friend, who was once regarded as essentially a superior genre writer.

The qualities that have elevated McEwan to his current status are, paradoxically, his weakest, in my view. He is a creator of

It is the thinking part of McEwan, the one that wants his novels to be significant, that compromises them

brilliant set pieces: the disappearance of the child in The Child in Time, and the balloon accident in Enduring Love, are unforgettable. So, too, is the long opening section, languid yet tension-filled, of Atonement; and, in the same novel, the retreat to Dunkirk.

But the third section of Atonement, the one that should provide resolution, is a let-down. This turns out to be just another novel about writing.

It is the thinking part of McEwan, the one that wants his novels to be significant, that compromises them. Too many pages in his last novel, Saturday, reeked of self-conscious labour. The villain, Baxter, came from McEwan's imaginative world, somewhere near that of Grand Guignol; but Baxter was preposterous in a novel that purported to be realistic.

On Chesil Beach is much stronger when it is showing us a doomed relationship than when it is telling us about the early 1960s. A superior genre writer, one wishes McEwan would realise, is no small thing to be.