|
|
Article: In the country of Doubt Ian McEwan's tale of two comfortable gentlemen; winner of Britain's 1998 Booker Prize for fiction
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- November 29, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1998 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
|
AMSTERDAM By Ian McEwan. Doubleday. 193 pp. $21. Katherine A.
Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge.
Remember, you will, Mr. Prendergast of Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and
Fall" whose "Doubts" forced him to leave the church and take up
teaching at a seedy boys' school. Those Doubts, awkward and
inopportune, exemplified the bathos and obsolescence that pervaded
that wretched place. But here's an odd thing: Doubts, consumed as
they are with the problem of design and randomness, have been
rehabilitated; no longer the affliction of mildewed, over-
punctilious
scruplers, they are at the heart of smart British fiction. Doubts
(by any other name, still Doubts) in fact threaten to replace ...