Stagnation of Belief

I have read a collection of short stories by Ian McEwan titled ‘In Between the Sheets’. They are brilliant. For two of them his mastery of reader expectation is breathtaking. The last story however was the one that got me thinking the most. One of the characters talks about the Bible in what I personally deem to be the only sensible way: psychoanalysis of the original writers. Citing the fact that men are portrayed as in God’s image, and the laughable suggestion that women are more in control of a man’s sexual desires than a man is, she sums it up as “pretty suspicious...a real male fantasy.” The guy with whom she is arguing defends it on account of the fact that for most people the Bible serves as “a coherent set of values that are as good as any other.” But I think McEwan disagrees with this way of thinking. The whole story has themes of boredom and stagnation. Through what I would interpret as a musical metaphor: “I was weary of the music and of myself for playing it...am I still playing this?”, McEwan highlights that there are much better moral codes out there, and much better ways of collating these codes by avoiding the sense of dogmatic exclusivity to one particular text which is endemic in religious thought. There are thousands of novels like this one that teach good lessons, the quality of the prose and how well it rings true being a kind of proof of the author’s worth, and their sensitivity to the truth of life. In this way the study of English Literature is like a more enlightened branch of theology.