The problem lies elsewhere: tales of repression in recent fiction.

One of Slavoj Zizek's favourite jokes tells of the village drunkard who has lost his keys and searches for them under a street lamp. When it is suggested that he might want to expand his search into other areas, the drunk replies that he is searching under the light because he is better able to see. This joke is often used to illustrate the strategy of displacement that occurs in political and social analysis, situations where rational solutions are offered to problems that actually lie elsewhere. The revival of militant atheism is a case in point. The bestseller list is full of texts by Dawkins, Hitchens, Onfrey and the like, whose critiques of religion rarely contain any form of social analysis. Here words like 'reason' and 'science' have an aura that enables them to function like the streetlight, confusing commentators who take the illuminated part for the whole and remain unwilling to venture into the darkness.

The actual politics of the religion debate have generally remained muted. The degree to which a society can function purely around abstract principles of reason and science has generally escaped scrutiny. Where there is a politics, it concerns the question of Islam and the role of the West in the war on terror. In the United Kingdom especially, this question has generated heated discussion and allowed the religion debate to go beyond the simple question of what it means to believe in God or not. The most public critic of atheist politics has been Terry Eagleton, whose excoriating review of Dawkins' The God Delusionhas become legendry. More recently, Eagleton took novelist Martin Amis to task for his Islamaphobic remarks. In an extended interview with the Observer, Eagleton attacked the 'smug liberal rationalist opinion of Dawkins and Hitchens', but also novelists Amis and Ian McEwan, who have become prominent critics of religion and what they see as Islamic extremism. With regard to the last two, Eagleton concluded: 'I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters'.

While this can be read as a measure of Eagleton's frustration, it is still worthwhile to explore the fiction of novelists like Amis and McEwan to trace where their politics map onto their fiction. While Amis has been quite overt in his stance on Islam and religion, McEwan has been more cautious in his approach, publicly defending Amis against Eagleton, supporting the atheism of Dawkins, but avoiding the rhetorical excesses of his colleagues. What might be the effect of all this on any new fiction?

Both Amis and McEwan gained their reputations in the 1980s as the 'bad boys' of contemporary lit. Both concerned themselves with the seamier parts of our culture--pornography, sexual deviance, crime, murder and the like--successfully blending literary style with the more outreelements of contemporary life. They relished the subversive and fringe elements of contemporary society, so it has been something of a surprise to see them defending the traditions and moral decency of Western culture. In terms of new fiction, Amis has retained his earlier obsessions but has directed them towards depicting the excesses of totalitarian regimes. Rather than focusing on the perverse tendencies of individuals in liberal societies, he writes of perversity writ large within the repressive structures of the Soviet empire and contemporary Islamic regimes. His latest novel, House of Meetings, merely repeats the cataloguing of horrors of his 'non-fictional' account of Stalin in Koba the Dread. Housetells of the Stalinist gulag but, unlike the former Amis, here the content is all obsession: a protracted list of violence, torture and repression with none of the irony or humour that marked the earlier work.

Content-wise, McEwan has moved in the other direction. His latest novella, On Chesil Beach, set in the United Kingdom in 1962, tells the story of a nervous and inexperienced young couple on their wedding night struggling to consummate their marriage. After a dismal meal their clumsy attempt to have sex ends in Edward's premature ejaculation and Florence's abject horror. Later, on the beach, they find it impossible to come to terms with what has happened. Failing to communicate, it is clear the marriage is over. McEwan is very careful in relating these events, avoiding any attempt at cheap humour or irony--playing it straight in order to reveal the devastating results of such naivety.

For a writer who once revelled in sexual perversity, the glories of masturbation, the frisson of incest, it is significant that he has chosen to narrate a highly restrained tale of sexual innocence. Given McEwan's status as spokesperson for liberal atheism, and his defence of Dawkins and Amis on both questions of religion and politics, it is surprising that nobody at all has asked why he would suddenly choose to write, given his public concerns, a novella about sexual and social repression set in 1962. The book itself struggles to convincingly tie Edward and Florence's struggle to the larger social context, something McEwan is clearly at pains to do.

Reading On Chesil Beach, it is obvious how keen McEwan is to situate this tale of repression historically. From the opening sentence, 'They were young, educated and both virgins on their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible', we are subject to a highly intrusive and insistent narrator who repeatedly informs us about the insular society of which Florence and Edward were a part. Statements like 'this was the age when ... ', or 'this was still the era ... ', or 'in a few years time ... but for now the times held them', dominate the opening section of the book. Time and again the narrator interrupts to tell us about how 'history itself' stood in the way of any successful sexual relation; that 'the age' was to blame for the marginalisation of youth, the bad food, the failure of communication. The sheer number of these statements ought to make anyone suspicious that the narrator 'doth protest too much'.

Moreover, this level of repression seems more suited to the Victorian era than to 1962. While pre the sexual revolution, it is hardly the case that sexual ignorance was as widespread as this book makes out. Yet reviewers have seemed so affected by the tragedy of Edward and Florence's wedding night that they have not questioned the historical context. One notable exception is Al Avarez who (in the New York Review of Books) noted that the period was 'nothing like as inhibited as McEwan makes out' and that such 'sexual ignorance ... seems hard to credit in an era when most college students ... worshipped D. H. Lawrence, believed in his cult of orgasm and measured themselves accordingly'.

McEwan's insistence in providing a grand narrative of sexual and social repression sits at odds with other aspects of the book. There is plenty of evidence within the text indicating that class differences, rather than sexual innocence, underpin the couple's misunderstanding. There is also the suggestion that Florence suffered abuse by her father (perhaps the old McEwan cannot be entirely banished). Either way, Florence is depicted as a textbook case of frigidity. Her pathological fear of sex is presented by McEwan as just that--fear, not socially produced ignorance, even if the narrator steps in to tell us otherwise.

What are we to make of this? We have a critically praised novella set in 1962 that uses an intrusive narrator to insist that the repressive period is to blame for Edward and Florence's disastrous wedding night. A closer look finds that this is wide of the mark both externally (it was not like this at all, especially for the educated classes) and internally (the content of the novel reveals class differences and sexual abuse as a cause of Florence's frigidity). Why then is McEwan so keen to mark, and awkwardly at that, the end of an epoch of repression with a grand narrative about 1962?

One can only speculate. But given the unwillingness of liberal atheists who defend civilisation against 'Islamofascism' to question their own taken-for-granted assumptions, it is not surprising that McEwan would want to tell us a tale of repression and insist that the times made it so. 1962 lies on the cusp of large social and cultural changes, also marking the beginning of widespread consumer capitalism. The heightened individualism that stems from the fusion of culture with the market leads to our own contradictory, politically debilitating and environmentally damaging form of freedom. How much easier it is then to create a myth of repression just prior to late capitalism, so we are all able to nostalgically glance back at the pathos of failed encounters and uncritically celebrate our own progress under the glare of the ideological streetlight.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications Editor.