Ian McEwan’s voice, as is always necessary in short fiction, is distinctive, and his technique is controlled. If, after two collections of stories and one brief novel, McEwan is not yet a major writer, he gives every indication that he could become one. His flaws are those of youth, self-indulgence, and subject matter, rather than of craft or intelligence. In Between the Sheets and Other Stories is an intriguing, sometimes challenging, and generally superior collection of stories, the work of a craftsman on his way to becoming an artist.

McEwan’s subject matter is not enticing. He often indulges a fascination for the squalid and the sickening; his imagination tends to dwell on freaks, sexual aberrations, and bizarre fantasies. Nevertheless, other writers have created literature from such subject matter. The question which the reader must ask (and which McEwan must ask himself) is: do these preferences of subject matter add up to an authentic vision of life and of the world, or are they a quirk of youth or of the desire to be different?

As V. S. Pritchett has pointed out, McEwan is a master of styles and structures who is able to muster a variety of feelings through his strange tales. He possesses intellectual resources sufficient to enable him to open up his claustrophobic stories and suggest worlds beyond them. Perhaps the underworld in these stories is the first view we are experiencing of a new artist’s unique perceptive faculties.

McEwan’s strength lies in his ability to create a scene or a character out of precise, perfectly chosen details. Even his more fanciful or bizarre stories are rooted in concrete, meticulously described details. He also possesses invention and humor, a flair for irony, and a gift for satirical parody, but without the well-chosen details which make us believe his stories—at least while we are reading them—these other gifts would be futile. McEwan has been compared to Kafka and Beckett. He is not yet in their league, but he does possess their understanding that it is necessary in direct proportion to the degree of fantasy in a tale to tie the fantasy to reality with homely, immediately comprehensible details.

McEwan’s novel, The Cement Garden, a short, bizarre work which tells the humorous and terrifying story of a most unusual London family, is successful largely because of the dryness of its tone and its ironic attention to detail. The stories in In Between the Sheets and Other Stories lead the reader into a world still more bizarre, violent, and filled with sexual fantasies and erotic dreams; in these stories, the deformed and maimed play major roles, deliberately perverse and disgusting images abound, and an audacious black humor runs throughout. Often strange images and shocking scenes are used to symbolize McEwan’s themes; for example, the Americanization of Britain is represented in the story “Pornography” by the shifting of the pornography shop to entirely American stock, because it is “better” and more salable. It is unclear, however, what is being symbolized by O’Byrne’s contradictory relationships with Pauline, whom he dominates, and Lucy, who dominates him.

Pathetic, lost, frightened individuals swarm through McEwan’s stories, struggling to survive, to find a moment of happiness, to achieve some kind of satisfaction in their existence, however brief or tenuous. These characters are often portrayed humorously, but a shift in plot or tone inevitably provides the thrust which carries the story into the grim, bizarre literary realm which McEwan seems determined to carve out for himself. The Ape in “Reflections of a Kept Ape,” five-foot-tall Harold with his built-up shoes and thick-lensed glasses in “Pornography,” and ugly and precocious little Charmian in the title story are three examples of these bizarre yet ultimately meaningful characters, and there are many others.

The first story in the collection, “Pornography,” veers from what promises to be a comical account of the lives of two brothers running a Soho pornography shop, in which nervous customers try to get as many free glances of the pornography as they can before they are asked to buy or vacate, to a sickening tale of sexual revenge. The precise observation of the Soho grubbiness, the cheap lodgings and filthy baths, the nasty smells and cheap drink, develops into a story of the archetypal fear of the sexual adventurer: castration. But does this sordid tale possess a larger significance? The implications are there in the pornography store, O’Byrne’s venereal disease, the infiltration of the influence of America, and the final act of emasculation. Is it the British male who is being castrated, or even the entire British nation? While the symbolism in the story is insistent, it is not entirely clear.

“Reflections of a Kept Ape” is a story at once more subtle and more bizarre. A first-person narration by a pet monkey which has been seduced by a young woman who has written a best-selling novel, the story presents a picture of faded lust and broken promises. The varied style of the prose, the flexibility of the tone, and the pathetic irony all indicate a craftsman in control of a strange but effective tale. The Ape is a Romantic, but his mistress, Sally Klee, is an opportunist, a “modern” woman. Even her name, a combination of Sally Bowles and the painter Klee, indicates her sleek, modern, ruthless incompetence. Perhaps the significance of this story lies in the fact that the Ape is capable of feeling more genuine and complicated emotions than is his mistress (mistress in both senses of the word). Some kind of relationship seems to be implied between Sally’s sterility as an author and her affair with the ape, but he is a much more appealing character than she is, as well as a more noble individual. The reader cannot help feeling—despite a natural reluctance to accept an ape as a “lover”—that the beast has come out the worst in this affair. The world of Ian McEwan is a world in which conventional morality and sentiments have been turned on their heads.

The basic fable in the story “Dead as They Come” has been told before by other writers, but McEwan twists it so that it fits into his own fictional universe. The story of the rich man who falls in love with a beautiful female mannequin in a shop window is made believable and pathetic by McEwan’s half-vulgar, half-elegant rendering of detail. The protagonist of this story is a man with an obsession, as are most of McEwan’s characters. The first-person narration adds verisimilitude to an improbable story. When the protagonist speaks of his dummy (and to her) as if she were a human woman (even naming her Helen, after the most famous beauty of all time), the tone of his voice manages to make a ridiculous and unbelievable situation touching and almost tragic. The reader is drawn into his passion, sympathizing as he attributes human emotions to a wooden dummy.

The narrator/protagonist of “Dead as They Come” is searching for peace and tranquility, even if only, at last, in death. He is not the only character in this collection to be engaged in such a quest. He mistakenly thinks that he has found peace and happiness with this silent, beautiful female, and he does not allow for the intrusion of the outside world. There is no peace in the real world, McEwan seems to imply; there is no rest, no permanent happiness for the living.

The title story draws an uneasy comparison between a nine-year-old girl grimly working in a cheap restaurant and the spoiled daughter of the protagonist and her perverse young friend. One child is forced to labor to stay alive, but Miranda and Charmian (again McEwan’s names, both from Shakespeare, are not accidental) are free to indulge in secret vices. Miranda’s father, separated from her mother, assuages his guilt by sending her money. The story is about fear and what it can do to human relationships. In some ways, the tone of the narration is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories about his relationship with his daughter (such as “Babylon Revisited”), but McEwan’s tone takes a perverse turn and adds a different, unique shape to his story. In a McEwan story, children are no longer sexual innocents and are as likely as the adults to be deformed, perverse, and evil.

“Two Fragments: March 199-” is an evocation of a half-destroyed London on the eve of the next century. The narration does not make clear whether the scene of destruction is the result of war or revolution, but it deliberately avoids the conventional melodramatic portrait of catastrophe, preferring to concentrate on the dull, ordinary events in people’s lives within this altered world. We see government offices smoldering in a deteriorating wilderness and witness the scrounging for food and shelter. We see people eating polluted fish from a polluted Thames and traipsing on pointless journeys across a desertlike city landscape. This is a world in which lovers find rest by recalling the bygone era before the catastrophe, remembering such commonplace events as visits to the old zoo, now a closed ruin, and football matches.

Again, the traditional image of childhood and innocence is shattered in this story. The protagonist’s daughter asks about sex, but her innocence is only theoretical. What she already has witnessed, what she witnesses during the course of the story, and what she is sure to witness in the future, have deprived her of innocence in any real sense of the word. No one living amid the violence and devastation portrayed in this story could long remain innocent. Even this story set in the future is rich in closely observed details, in precisely drawn vignettes, scenes, and actions which anchor the fantasy in a constructed reality. This quality of a concrete fairy tale also pervades the story called “Psychopolis,” which presents the British view of Southern California as a land of narcissists, beaches, and Doggie Diners.

Ian McEwan is a storyteller to watch, a writer who relishes the interplay of reality and fancy, who is intrigued by the banal as well as by the grotesque, and who compulsively studies inner realities hidden beneath façades. His voice is distinctive, his craft controlled, as seen in this collection of unusual, impressive stories indicative of an original talent.