A review by siria
First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan

2.0

Absolutely not a pick-me-up read, First Love, Last Rites is a collection of some of McEwan's earliest works. He dwells here mostly on the morbid and the macabre and the disturbing, and for a developing author, doesn't do too badly on pulling it off—one or two of the stories are genuinely effective. He often tries too hard for a Shocking Denouement, however, which for me had the opposite effect to that which he no doubt intended (and I found his Oh So Daring explorations of incest and child abuse less disturbing than I did his framing of women/femininity). The dialogue (even in the best of the collection, 'Strange Geometry') was also dreadfully clunky at times. So-so.