The McEwan problem

He's too popular, obviously; and too rich, too succinct, too soft. We should celebrate 'Atonement', yet we do not. What, for the love of Keira, has Ian McEwan done to deserve us? By John Sutherland

If literature had its gold medals, Ian McEwan would be on the podium at Parnassus, festooned with them - he's the Mark Spitz of novelists. His latest novel, On Chesil Beach, has been in the best- seller list since publication: jostling shoulders with Danielle Steel.

For the past week, every newspaper, billboard and empty space in the country has been plastered with advertisements for the movie Atonement "based on the best-selling novel by Ian McEwan". Closely based, apparently. McEwan's been advising during production, and is reported as approving Christopher Hampton's script.

If the early reviews are anything to go by McEwan should shake the mothballs out of his tux. He'll be a guest of honour at the Oscars next April. He'll also need that monkey suit this October at the Guildhall. If you go into William Hill to lay a couple of quid on this year's Man Booker, the shortest odds are for On Chesil Beach. A dead cert, the bookies think.

This is the year of McEwan. Bestseller, box-office triumph, Booker favourite. It should make us proud. It doesn't. For mysterious reasons, it makes us uneasy.

The British do some things supremely well. Novels - the writing and making of them - is one such thing. If we did cars as well, we'd be Japan. If we did sport as well, we'd be the old communist German Democratic Republic with its drugs and all. If we did three-course meals as well, we'd be France.

The long and short of it is, we're world-beaters when it comes to fiction. And McEwan is the best novelist we've got. Or have had for decades.

It creates the inevitable anxious backwash. That chronic British uncertainty. If he's that successful, there must be a catch. The higher McEwan rides, the more insistent the doubt. It's not that he's not good: it's that he's not that good. Or is he?

Our McEwan problem, so to call it, can be broken down into 10 specific issues.

Objection one

"His reputation is clique-driven." The current Private Eye has a spoof about those newspaper features in which the great and the good inform us what book they'll be reading on the beach this summer. Craig Raine is depicted as shamelessly puffing his pal Ian. Raine got prominent mention in McEwan's Saturday, and returned the compliment later the same year in the TLS Christmas books round-up with the angry comment: "Ian McEwan's Saturday should have won this year's Booker Prize. It was harmed by two things. Envy and envy", (as the chair of the committee that year, I think Raine rather overstates - but let that pass).

The allegation that McEwan has been puffed up outrageously by a crew of London-based cronies was scathingly asserted a few months earlier in The New York Review of Books by John Banville (who, ironically, did win the Man Booker).

An alternative version is that it's not London cronies, but the UEA mafia which has overblown the McEwan cause. He served his apprenticeship in the country's most prestigious creative writing school - founded in the 1960s by Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. The course has trained an impressive stable of distinguished writers of whom McEwan and Rose Tremain are among the most distinguished. But most of the hundreds of less distinguished UEA graduates are not, in later professional life, creative writers. They are in publishing, in journalism, in the broadcasting world. They have cultural power, and - it is alleged - a Masonic loyalty to McEwan as one of their own. It's nonsense, I think, but one hears it time and again.

Objection two

"A novelist can't be consistently great and a consistent best- seller." The two are chalk and cheese. Doubtless Shakespeare encountered the same prejudice when, night after night, it was standing room only at the Globe.

Dickens certainly did: "All very well, but damned low," grumbled Fitzjames Stephen. By which he meant that the author of Oliver Twist might sell more, but he wasn't in the same class as, say, Bulwer- Lytton. Posterity thinks otherwise.

When we look round the carriage in the Tube, and see people reading Atonement or Enduring Love our opinion of those passengers doesn't go up. Our opinion of the novel goes down. Call it the Oyster-card effect. It's hit McEwan hard.

Objection three

"Writers really shouldn't be given too much money." It's bad for them. Makes them fat and lazy. Like working dogs, they should be kept just this side of starvation, straining hungrily at the leash.

We're happy for soft-faced chief executives to rake in multimillion-pound bonuses and tell us (as one did the other day on the Today programme) that we should be humbly grateful to them as "wealth creators". But if an author earns some real wealth (and very few do) we shake our heads. "There's another one sold out," we think.

Martin Amis's reputation has never recovered from his agent securing him a multi-book deal for 500,000. At the rate Amis writes it would, over the years, bring him in less than the dentist who was doing his teeth at the time. But it was too much for a mere novelist.