A re-read occasioned by a reference in James Wood’s new book, and a reminder of Wood’s observation that McEwan creates a story that “is a long string or fuse of heaped improbabilities, and he delights in the way that, retrospectively all these improbabilities have been nearly made sense of, have been made hermeneutically legible, turned into necessities; that we are forced to say to ourselves: ‘It could not have been any other way.’” In this tale Joe Rose (we only learn his name midway through the book and then from other characters, not from the narrator), Clarissa, Jed Parry (the one with de Clerambault’s syndrome), John Logan and his family and the Don and his girlfriend (not the dog!) are all tossed together in such an inevitable tale. Didn’t need re-reading!