Psychopolis

26/12/2025

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Ian McEwan began as a fine writer of malaise, aware that it needn’t be a state of unequivocal despair but of productive lassitude. It allowed both subject matter for his work and also a lifestyle choice. When asked about the troubled era he started writing in, “the chaos? The piles of rubbish, the power cuts, the bodies left unburied?”, McEwan replied, “oh, the crises didn't trouble me at all. I didn't own anything” (Guardian) He was living off £3, a week, didn’t have a job and wrote the odd article for extra cash. He was living a little like the characters he was creating and, for a while, nobody was capturing England in the 1970s better than McEwan. In stories like 'First Love, Last Rites' and 'The Last Day of Summer', and, too, the novella The Cement Garden, McEwan knew how to conjure up an atmosphere as though aware there was little place for plot. If he wished to show people whose lives weren’t going anywhere in a hurry, then better to concentrate on describing the micro-milieu, on using place as the basis for setting in motion the story, or replacing it. Later, McEwan would become much more focused on storytelling in Atonement, Saturday, and  Enduring Love. However, in the earlier work, McEwan wished to depict change not in narrative force, but in societal transformation. What did the seventies look and feel like, and how did it differ from the sort of England in which McEwan had been brought up, the son of an army man and living in Aldershot?

    Yet 'Psychopolis' is an LA-set story of an Englishman abroad, who finds in the city a more sophisticated despair than the one he left behind in England. “Is it really true that England is in a state of total collapse?”, a manager he befriends asks, and the story ignores the question in this instance to concentrate on the disquiet of a metropolis as a psychopolis, as a city that might be doing ok materially but is populated by the lost and lonely. Perhaps inevitably, as nobody lives near each other, and the urban sprawl leads to solitary desperation. As his fellow Englishman in the city, Terrence, says: “People here…live so far from each other. Your neighbour is some forty minutes’ car ride away, and when you finally get together you’re out to wreck each other with the frenzy of having been alone.” Though shalt not live only by bread, and though the shop manager, George, earns $40,000 a year and claims still to be in his twenties, money isn’t everything - even if George proposes it can at least be made if that is your ambition. George says he arrived from New York penniless and talks LA up as everyone is inclined to talk it down. George “…felt responsible for the city and my experience in it,” the narrator says. 

    While it may be George who shows him the town, it is Terrence who can offer the jaundiced perspective that the narrator seeks. One tale Terrence tells is of a date with a woman who builds up and sells health food restaurants. During their meeting, she asks him to urinate in his pants after he agrees to a dare, no matter how extreme. He goes ahead, and what he doesn’t know is that she makes the request immediately after seeing her parents enter the premises. There, Terrence is, getting introduced to them moments after he has peed his pants. If meeting the folks might have people figuratively wetting themselves, then Terrence does so without even knowing these are the people that he is about to meet. Perversity meets pervert-city, a place where companionship segues into sadism, and hell really is other people. 

     The story concludes with the story's four leading characters visiting George’s home. The narrator’s sometime lover, Mary, Terrence, George and the narrator get into a heated and hectic argument on God. “More evil perpetrated in the name of Christ than…propping up tyrants, accumulating wealth at the altars…look at Galileo…” The narrator isn’t doing a good job relaying what is being said, and no wonder. “I heard little else because now I was shouting my own piece about Christianity.” Everybody was having their say, and nobody was listening. If in LA, a one-on-one results in at best offloading your solitude onto someone else, and at worst finding yourself at the masochistic mercy of the most whimsical of wishes, then get four people in a room and expect a cacophony of misunderstanding. 

   In a nation that boasts on a sign, “God, Guts, Guns made America great. Let’s keep all three”, then nothing like bringing out a weapon focuses people’s minds. If folks’ attention spans are so limited that the only way to get them to concentrate is a gun at their forehead, then so be it. When a recent report by CBS noted that Texan republicans “urged schools to arm up and 'harden the target'”, this was to take out any intruder found on campus. But a facetious argument could be made for saying that arming up in the classroom would certainly stop the kids from causing havoc. This isn’t about bringing corporate punishment back into schools; it is the threat of capital punishment if children haven’t been listening and offer the wrong answer. As Terrence says, “It’s OK for the British. You see everything here as a bizarre comedy of extremes, but that’s because you’re out of it. The truth is it’s psychotic, totally psychotic.” 

   Yet it is Terrence who pulls out the gun to get people to calm down, or more especially to get George to pipe down, to see how seriously he takes the god, guts and gun spiel when the weapon is pointed at him, after George says, “when you have kids you begin to have a different attitude towards life and death. I never kept a gun before the kids were around. Now I think I’d shoot anyone who threatened their existence.” Terrence asks to see the gun, and George tells him it is loaded. After playing around with it for a while, Terrence insists: “Raise your hands Christian”, as he curls his finger aound the trigger. It turns out the gun isn’t loaded, with George and Terrence having fun at Mary and the narrator’s expense. Unsurprisingly, the conversation becomes tepid after this, with the evening collapsing into “conventional, labyrinthine politeness at which Americans, when they wish, quite outstrip the English.” Mary and the narrator are at least united for a while, in “a state of mild but prolonged shock” — as though the only complicity a couple can hope to achieve is in a state of fear. What else could one expect in a psychopolis? And haven’t George and Terrence achieved this complicity too in generating it at the expense of the narrator and Mary? It is a strange place indeed where a good night in is a parlour game based on scaring the living daylights out of your guests.   

    The game with the gun has its correlative at the beginning of the story, with the narrator chaining Mary to the bed, as a common enough idiom is given actual meaning: she really is tied up for the weekend. It seems this is what Mary wishes, saying it was something she had to go into to come out of. She is soon enough screaming to be released, but the narrator’s word is his bond, and Mary must remain bound. He closes “…his eyes and concentrates on being blameless.” It is as though extreme situations become the only feelings in town when one’s sensibility is so deadened. It finds an echo, too, in performance art meeting stand-up, which might just be life. George and the narrator are at a club, and a man comes on stage looking terrible, as if he is going to cry. After saying nothing for a while, he finally admits that “I’m such a godammn mess!” and the audience loves it. A little while after, he tells a story about his ex-girlfriend and how he couldn’t find a call box to phone her.  Then, when he does, they both end up crying, but there was nothing that could be done about it. He says he walked along the streets contemplating his life, “and bummed fifty cents off a bum.” The audience is no longer interested, and by the time he leaves the stage, most haven’t noticed that he has left. Terrence should probably have taken his place, telling people of his tale with the health store owner. 

     We might wonder what the point of McEwan’s story is. It is well-written, with a nice use of the occasional simile. Speaking of the music he is playing, the narrator says he played “…the two minutes at the end…with dry rigid persistence, like a mechanical organ turned by a monkey.” When on the beach, he notices “…how beautiful the women were, their brown limbs spread like starfish…” He offers at the beginning an amusing, promiscuous irony: “I met her [Mary] on my second day in Los Angeles. That same evening we were lovers, and not so long after that, friends.” But unlike friends and contemporaries, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, McEwan was never really an Anglo-American writer; more an Anglo-European one, evident in his lamentation the moment we left Europe with a hard Brexit. “There is much that is historically unjust about the British state, but very little of that injustice derives from the EU”, he said. “Brussels didn’t insist that we neglect the post-industrial towns of the Midlands and the north; or demand that we let wages stagnate, or permit multimillion handouts to the CEOs of failing companies…” (Guardian) 

      Much of his work has shown an interest in the continent, including in quite different ways The Comfort of Strangers(an unnamed Venice), Black Dogs (cold-war Berlin) and Atonement (WWII France) and thus his English sensibility (despite a Scottish father) seems as much pan-European. It is as though he wanted to see how far his purview was from an American one by setting a story there, and quickly realised he wanted very little to do with what Amis, via Saul Bellow, via Wyndham Lewis, called the “moronic inferno”. A psychopolis, we can assume, is a megalopolis of the mind, a cranial catastrophe that turns community into a garbage dump, where one person offloads their thoughts on the other and the other does likewise with them. It is what Terrence proposes when he talks about wrecking each other, where the fevered solitude of the self, of the individual who dividualises without care or concern for others, creates cities where fear might understandably be the only thing people have in common. 

   It was as if McEwan admired American writing, but hardly as a model for how society should function. Speaking of his time studying in East Anglia with Malcom Bradbury, McEwan said: “the American novel seemed so vibrant compared to its English counterpart at the time. Such ambition, and power, and barely concealed craziness. I tried to respond to this crazed quality in my own small way, and write against what I saw as the prevailing grayness of English style and subject matter. I looked for extreme situations, deranged narrators, obscenity, and shock…” (Paris Review) 'Psychopolis' is a fine and funny story, but it seems like McEwan on an away day, taking a trip to the other side of hell when his main interest at this stage was the state of England, as if a young man sharing the growing pains of a place that wished to become more egalitarian but looked like it was just going to become dirtier, messier, morally truncated and sexually dysfunctional. When Georges wonders if England is on the point of collapse, we might wish McEwan were back there doing what he does best in his shorter fiction: offering detrital delineations that he would never quite leave behind as he explored the lives of stalkers (Enduring Love), intruders (Saturday) and the incestuous (The Cement Garden) in work that became more and more acceptable at its middle-class centre, but never quite rejected the periphery altogether. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Psychopolis

Ian McEwan began as a fine writer of malaise, aware that it needn’t be a state of unequivocal despair but of productive lassitude. It allowed both subject matter for his work and also a lifestyle choice. When asked about the troubled era he started writing in, “the chaos? The piles of rubbish, the power cuts, the bodies left unburied?”, McEwan replied, “oh, the crises didn't trouble me at all. I didn't own anything” (Guardian) He was living off £3, a week, didn’t have a job and wrote the odd article for extra cash. He was living a little like the characters he was creating and, for a while, nobody was capturing England in the 1970s better than McEwan. In stories like 'First Love, Last Rites' and 'The Last Day of Summer', and, too, the novella The Cement Garden, McEwan knew how to conjure up an atmosphere as though aware there was little place for plot. If he wished to show people whose lives weren’t going anywhere in a hurry, then better to concentrate on describing the micro-milieu, on using place as the basis for setting in motion the story, or replacing it. Later, McEwan would become much more focused on storytelling in Atonement, Saturday, and  Enduring Love. However, in the earlier work, McEwan wished to depict change not in narrative force, but in societal transformation. What did the seventies look and feel like, and how did it differ from the sort of England in which McEwan had been brought up, the son of an army man and living in Aldershot?

    Yet 'Psychopolis' is an LA-set story of an Englishman abroad, who finds in the city a more sophisticated despair than the one he left behind in England. “Is it really true that England is in a state of total collapse?”, a manager he befriends asks, and the story ignores the question in this instance to concentrate on the disquiet of a metropolis as a psychopolis, as a city that might be doing ok materially but is populated by the lost and lonely. Perhaps inevitably, as nobody lives near each other, and the urban sprawl leads to solitary desperation. As his fellow Englishman in the city, Terrence, says: “People here…live so far from each other. Your neighbour is some forty minutes’ car ride away, and when you finally get together you’re out to wreck each other with the frenzy of having been alone.” Though shalt not live only by bread, and though the shop manager, George, earns $40,000 a year and claims still to be in his twenties, money isn’t everything - even if George proposes it can at least be made if that is your ambition. George says he arrived from New York penniless and talks LA up as everyone is inclined to talk it down. George “…felt responsible for the city and my experience in it,” the narrator says. 

    While it may be George who shows him the town, it is Terrence who can offer the jaundiced perspective that the narrator seeks. One tale Terrence tells is of a date with a woman who builds up and sells health food restaurants. During their meeting, she asks him to urinate in his pants after he agrees to a dare, no matter how extreme. He goes ahead, and what he doesn’t know is that she makes the request immediately after seeing her parents enter the premises. There, Terrence is, getting introduced to them moments after he has peed his pants. If meeting the folks might have people figuratively wetting themselves, then Terrence does so without even knowing these are the people that he is about to meet. Perversity meets pervert-city, a place where companionship segues into sadism, and hell really is other people. 

     The story concludes with the story's four leading characters visiting George’s home. The narrator’s sometime lover, Mary, Terrence, George and the narrator get into a heated and hectic argument on God. “More evil perpetrated in the name of Christ than…propping up tyrants, accumulating wealth at the altars…look at Galileo…” The narrator isn’t doing a good job relaying what is being said, and no wonder. “I heard little else because now I was shouting my own piece about Christianity.” Everybody was having their say, and nobody was listening. If in LA, a one-on-one results in at best offloading your solitude onto someone else, and at worst finding yourself at the masochistic mercy of the most whimsical of wishes, then get four people in a room and expect a cacophony of misunderstanding. 

   In a nation that boasts on a sign, “God, Guts, Guns made America great. Let’s keep all three”, then nothing like bringing out a weapon focuses people’s minds. If folks’ attention spans are so limited that the only way to get them to concentrate is a gun at their forehead, then so be it. When a recent report by CBS noted that Texan republicans “urged schools to arm up and 'harden the target'”, this was to take out any intruder found on campus. But a facetious argument could be made for saying that arming up in the classroom would certainly stop the kids from causing havoc. This isn’t about bringing corporate punishment back into schools; it is the threat of capital punishment if children haven’t been listening and offer the wrong answer. As Terrence says, “It’s OK for the British. You see everything here as a bizarre comedy of extremes, but that’s because you’re out of it. The truth is it’s psychotic, totally psychotic.” 

   Yet it is Terrence who pulls out the gun to get people to calm down, or more especially to get George to pipe down, to see how seriously he takes the god, guts and gun spiel when the weapon is pointed at him, after George says, “when you have kids you begin to have a different attitude towards life and death. I never kept a gun before the kids were around. Now I think I’d shoot anyone who threatened their existence.” Terrence asks to see the gun, and George tells him it is loaded. After playing around with it for a while, Terrence insists: “Raise your hands Christian”, as he curls his finger aound the trigger. It turns out the gun isn’t loaded, with George and Terrence having fun at Mary and the narrator’s expense. Unsurprisingly, the conversation becomes tepid after this, with the evening collapsing into “conventional, labyrinthine politeness at which Americans, when they wish, quite outstrip the English.” Mary and the narrator are at least united for a while, in “a state of mild but prolonged shock” — as though the only complicity a couple can hope to achieve is in a state of fear. What else could one expect in a psychopolis? And haven’t George and Terrence achieved this complicity too in generating it at the expense of the narrator and Mary? It is a strange place indeed where a good night in is a parlour game based on scaring the living daylights out of your guests.   

    The game with the gun has its correlative at the beginning of the story, with the narrator chaining Mary to the bed, as a common enough idiom is given actual meaning: she really is tied up for the weekend. It seems this is what Mary wishes, saying it was something she had to go into to come out of. She is soon enough screaming to be released, but the narrator’s word is his bond, and Mary must remain bound. He closes “…his eyes and concentrates on being blameless.” It is as though extreme situations become the only feelings in town when one’s sensibility is so deadened. It finds an echo, too, in performance art meeting stand-up, which might just be life. George and the narrator are at a club, and a man comes on stage looking terrible, as if he is going to cry. After saying nothing for a while, he finally admits that “I’m such a godammn mess!” and the audience loves it. A little while after, he tells a story about his ex-girlfriend and how he couldn’t find a call box to phone her.  Then, when he does, they both end up crying, but there was nothing that could be done about it. He says he walked along the streets contemplating his life, “and bummed fifty cents off a bum.” The audience is no longer interested, and by the time he leaves the stage, most haven’t noticed that he has left. Terrence should probably have taken his place, telling people of his tale with the health store owner. 

     We might wonder what the point of McEwan’s story is. It is well-written, with a nice use of the occasional simile. Speaking of the music he is playing, the narrator says he played “…the two minutes at the end…with dry rigid persistence, like a mechanical organ turned by a monkey.” When on the beach, he notices “…how beautiful the women were, their brown limbs spread like starfish…” He offers at the beginning an amusing, promiscuous irony: “I met her [Mary] on my second day in Los Angeles. That same evening we were lovers, and not so long after that, friends.” But unlike friends and contemporaries, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, McEwan was never really an Anglo-American writer; more an Anglo-European one, evident in his lamentation the moment we left Europe with a hard Brexit. “There is much that is historically unjust about the British state, but very little of that injustice derives from the EU”, he said. “Brussels didn’t insist that we neglect the post-industrial towns of the Midlands and the north; or demand that we let wages stagnate, or permit multimillion handouts to the CEOs of failing companies…” (Guardian) 

      Much of his work has shown an interest in the continent, including in quite different ways The Comfort of Strangers(an unnamed Venice), Black Dogs (cold-war Berlin) and Atonement (WWII France) and thus his English sensibility (despite a Scottish father) seems as much pan-European. It is as though he wanted to see how far his purview was from an American one by setting a story there, and quickly realised he wanted very little to do with what Amis, via Saul Bellow, via Wyndham Lewis, called the “moronic inferno”. A psychopolis, we can assume, is a megalopolis of the mind, a cranial catastrophe that turns community into a garbage dump, where one person offloads their thoughts on the other and the other does likewise with them. It is what Terrence proposes when he talks about wrecking each other, where the fevered solitude of the self, of the individual who dividualises without care or concern for others, creates cities where fear might understandably be the only thing people have in common. 

   It was as if McEwan admired American writing, but hardly as a model for how society should function. Speaking of his time studying in East Anglia with Malcom Bradbury, McEwan said: “the American novel seemed so vibrant compared to its English counterpart at the time. Such ambition, and power, and barely concealed craziness. I tried to respond to this crazed quality in my own small way, and write against what I saw as the prevailing grayness of English style and subject matter. I looked for extreme situations, deranged narrators, obscenity, and shock…” (Paris Review) 'Psychopolis' is a fine and funny story, but it seems like McEwan on an away day, taking a trip to the other side of hell when his main interest at this stage was the state of England, as if a young man sharing the growing pains of a place that wished to become more egalitarian but looked like it was just going to become dirtier, messier, morally truncated and sexually dysfunctional. When Georges wonders if England is on the point of collapse, we might wish McEwan were back there doing what he does best in his shorter fiction: offering detrital delineations that he would never quite leave behind as he explored the lives of stalkers (Enduring Love), intruders (Saturday) and the incestuous (The Cement Garden) in work that became more and more acceptable at its middle-class centre, but never quite rejected the periphery altogether. 


© Tony McKibbin