He went to a state-run boarding school in England, a common occurrence with children of military personnel serving overseas, and from there to the University of Sussex in Brighton, perhaps the best-known of the "new" universities, where he took an honors degree in English in 1970. During and after his M.A. year at East Anglia, he plunged briefly into the then flourishing post-1968 counter-culture. He even made the required pilgrimage to Afghanistan in the days before the Russian invasion made that country less than hospitable to western hippies, but he soon grew bored with their irrationality and anti-intellectualism. In 1974 he settled in London and now lives in Clapham.
In one of his term papers at East Anglia, McEwan noted that Thomas Mann's character Tonio Kroger recognizes in the ordinary the most vital source for art. The more perceptive of McEwan's critics have seen that behind the morbid, even repellent imagery and the sense of impending evil that characterize his writing, there lies a transfiguration of the ordinary which creates a remarkable impact. Fellow-novelist Paul Ableman, for example, felt that McEwan's "spare, rather grey prose" succeeds in engendering the sensory experience he describes.
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