Thatcherschaft

Nicholas Spice

  • The Child in Time by Ian McEwan
    Cape, 220 pp, £10.95, September 1987, ISBN 0 224 02499 X
  • The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch
    Chatto, 601 pp, £11.95, September 1987, ISBN 0 7011 3251 5

A Labour victory in the 1987 British General Election would have been a good thing for The Book and the Brotherhood and a disaster for The Child in Time. As it is, with Mrs Thatcher set to complete at least 13 years in office, Iris Murdoch may now be thought to look a little out of touch with the times, addressing herself to a danger – the destructive beauty of the fanatic left-wing soul – that we have, for the time being at least, left behind. Meanwhile McEwan, setting his novel several years into the future of the Thatcherite epoch, that timeless ‘on and on’ of which our leader herself has spoken, seems especially prescient and up-to-the-minute. Such are the risks of writing political fiction in democratic societies. In this instance, McEwan stood to lose far more than Murdoch has in fact lost.

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