McEwan and Plagiarism

You probably heard about the recent kerfuffle in which someone suggested that in his novel "Atonement" the great Ian McEwan, possibly the best novelist in the world, plagiarized passages from the autobiography of romance novelist Lucilla Andrews. McEwan answered the allegation in The Guardian, noting that he cited Andrews in his Author's Note at the end of the novel. The New York Times tells us that heavyweight authors are coming to McEwan's defense, saying McEwan didn't plagiarize, but did what everyone does all the time. Thomas Keneally in a letter in support of McEwan writes, "Fiction depends on a certain value-added quality created on top of the raw material, and that McEwan has added value beyond the original will, I believe, be richly demonstrated."

Here's Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times of London: "We have perhaps lost this sense of literature as a conversation....The myth of originality? There's no such thing."

Jack Shafer says that's balderdash. And Shafer is exactly right.

No one objects to adding value to someone else's work. Research is good. And yes, McEwan acknowledged his debt to Andrews. The problem is that he duplicated her language in certain passages with little or no revision. You can compare the passages here. You make the call. [The Post's Jabari Asim views it as benign, more like "sampling" than theft.]

The best that can be said is that it's not very MUCH copying, that it's a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and thus might not merit so dramatic a label as "plagiarism." It's more like literary sloppiness. Atonement is a creative triumph, and scale matters in these things. My guess is that McEwan lost track of who wrote what, and some of Andrews' sentences wound up in his novel without the amount of revision that he had intended. That's a forgivable mistake.

But it's obnoxious when the pals of the bigshot author say it's not a mistake at all, that everyone does it, that this is how creative people create. That's absurd. Inspiration is fine, copying isn't. The fact that McEwan is a fabulous, Bookered novelist does not somehow excuse the behavior. If anything he should set the highest possible standard. He's a great writer and a literary treasure and doesn't need to cut and paste from anyone else.