Besides Hamilton, there is probably no one more closely associated with the New Review than Ian McEwan. First appearing in Issue 4 with his story ‘Solid Geometry’, he would contribute six stories in total (more than any other writer), as well as serve as an occasional reviewer, interviewee and, when his first books began to come out, subject for review.
All six stories are exemplary and would be worth discussing here. I have chosen ‘Pornography’ for its mise-en-scène. Set in and around a Soho pornography shop, the story plays out a stone’s throw from where it was published, in the New Review’s offices in Greek Street, a reminder to those who only know the area as it is now that high literary culture wasn’t exactly what it was known for back then.
Not that we are given much cause to mourn Soho’s gentrification in ‘Pornography’. Bleak, sordid and, in its final pages, leg-crossingly uncomfortable, it is Ian McEwan at his most Ian Macabre.
First published in the New Review, February 1976. Collected in In Between the Sheets, Jonathan Cape, 1978
A Personal Anthology 