Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It's not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He's never done such a thing before, but he isn't alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed—he always sleeps naked—feeling his full height, aware of his wife's patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty. He has no idea what he's doing out of bed: he has no need to relieve himself, nor is he disturbed by a dream or some element of the day before, or even by the state of the world. It's as if, standing there in the darkness, he's materialized out of nothing, fully formed, unencumbered.

Ian McEwan, Saturday

I went to my bedroom, took off my shoes and socks and lay down on the bed. Through my window I could see a clear square of pale-blue sky, not one cloud. After less than a minute I sat up and stared about me. On the floor were Coca Cola tins, dirty clothes, fish and chip wrappers, several wire coat-hangers, a box that once contained rubber bands. I stood up and looked at where I had been lying, the folds and rucks in the yellowish-grey sheets, large stains with distinct edges. I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself. I opened wide the doors of my wardrobe and threw in all the debris from the floor. I pulled the sheets, blankets and pillows off my bed and put those in too. I ripped down pictures from the wall that I had once cut out of magazines. Under the bed I found plates and cups covered in green mould. I took every loose object and put it in the wardrobe till the room was bare. I even took down the light bulb and light shade. Then I took my clothes off, threw them in and closed the doors. The room was empty like a cell. I lay down on the bed again and stared at my patch of clear sky till I fell asleep. 

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

We continued our daily round because little else seemed clear. We knew we had lost heart, we had lost our heart. We were loveless, or we had lost the trick of love, and we didn’t know how to begin talking about it. We slept in the same bed, but we didn’t embrace. We used the same bathroom, but we never saw each other naked. We were scrupulously casual because we knew that anything less, cold politeness for example, would have exposed the charade and led us into the conflict we longed to avoid. What had once seemed natural, like love-making or long talks or silent companionship, now appeared as robustly contrived as Harrison’s Fourth Sea Clock, impossible as well as anachronistic to recreate. When I looked at her, brushing her hair, or bending to retrieve a book from the floor, I remembered her beauty like some schoolbook fact got by heart. True, but not immediately relevant. And I could reconstruct myself in her own gaze as oafishly large and coarse, a biologically motivated bludgeon, a giant polyp of uninspired logic with which she was mistakenly associated. When I spoke to her my voice rang dull and flat in my skull, and not just every sentence, but every word was a lie. Muted anger, finely disseminated self-loathing, these were my elements, my colours. When our eyes met, it was as if our ghostly, meaner selves held up hands before our faces to block the possibility of understanding. But our gazes rarely met, and when they did it was only a second or two before they shrank nervously away.

Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

She was a ghostly figure, a gaunt and gentle sprite with tousled brown hair, who drifted about the house as she drifted through their childhoods, sometimes communicative and even affectionate, at others remote, absorbed in her hobbies and projects. She could be heard at any hour of the day, and even in the middle of the night, fumbling her way through the same simple piano pieces, always faltering in the same places. She was often in the garden pottering about the shapeless bed she had made right in the centre of the narrow lawn. Painting, especially watercolours – scenes of distant hills and church spire, framed by foreground trees – contributed much to the general disorder. She never washed a brush, or emptied the greenish water from the jam jars, or put away the paints and rags, or gathered up her various attempts – none of which were ever finished. She would wear her painting smock for days on end, long after a painting bout had subsided. Another activity – it may have been suggested once as a form of occupational therapy – was cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them into scrapbooks. She liked to move around the house as she worked, and discarded paper clippings were everywhere underfoot, trodden into the dirt of the bare floorboards. Paste brushes hardened in the opened pots where she left them on chairs and window ledges.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it? There was no catching herself out. It was either-or. There was no stitching, no seam, and yet she knew that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real self – was it her soul? – which took the decision to cease pretending, and gave the final command.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

'Can I come with you? Will you show me the river?' I wait for her by the door, watching her squeeze her round, pink feet into small, flat shoes and brush her very short hair with a brush which has a mirror on the back. We walk across the lawn to the kissing gate at the bottom of the garden and along the path through the high ferns. Half way down I stop to listen to a yellow-hammer, and she tells me that she doesn't know the song of one bird. Most grown-up people will never tell you that they don't know things. So farther on down the path just before it opens out on to the jetty we stop under an old oak tree so she can hear a blackbird. I know there's one up there singing this time in the morning. Just as we get there it stops and we have to wait quietly for it to begin again. Standing by the half-dead old trunk I can hear other birds in other trees and the river just round the corner washing under the jetty. But our bird is taking a rest. Something about waiting in silence makes Jenny nervous and she pinches her nose tight to stop her yelp of a laugh getting out. I want her to hear the blackbird so much I put my hand on her arm, and when I do that she takes her hand away from her nose and smiles. Just a few seconds after that the blackbird sets out on its long complicated song. It was waiting all the time for us to get settled.

Ian McEwan, « Last day of summer »