A young woman is shaken in her understanding of who she is and what she wants. The walking holiday she and her husband have planned now seems, Ian McEwan says, 'a pointless detour from her uncertainty'. The phrase is full of trouble, of precise and elusive implications. Uncertainty is a path, a destination, a need. Of course we may not like the thought, and many of us will prefer to see our detours as chosen directions, uncertainty as something to be shaken off rather than returned to. But truths can often be measured by the urgency of our desire to avoid them, and sometimes only by that.

LRB 4 September 1997 | PDF Download