LONDON, Jan. 17 — He is known as an author of dark and tangled tales in which love sometimes endures and sometimes does not. But Ian McEwan, one of Britain’s best-known novelists, has now found himself as a player in a true story that might have sprung from his own imagination.
The tale, first disclosed in The Oxford Mail, relates the anguish of a wartime mother in 1942, handing over her newborn baby to strangers on a railroad station platform to hide the evidence of a clandestine affair while her husband was fighting overseas.
The woman, it turns out, was Mr. McEwan’s mother. The baby was his older brother, David Sharp, now 64, whose existence the writer had not suspected. …
As told by Mr. Sharp to British reporters, the story began in 1942, when a want ad appeared in a small-town newspaper, The Reading Mercury, west of London. “Wanted,” it said, “home for baby boy, age 1 month; complete surrender.” Printed between other ads for musical instruments and secondhand furniture, it gave an address for applicants to write to.

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As McEwan had been the subject of the last two posts, I thought it fit to provide a link to this story. The Times reporter has got things a bit wrong when he speculates that this is a tale that McEwan himself could have written. Because there is such sweetness here. The elder brother doesn’t, at least in this public presentation, bear any recrimination; the mother, slipping into oblivion due to Alzheimer’s, isn’t reported mixing up the names and the memory of her sons. We get complete surrender, and not an emotional whacking. The other day I had opposed Banville’s characterization of McEwan’s novel as “mellow,” and it was because I believe what is more dominant in the latter’s writing is the vivid play of oppositions. Even within the space of a single sentence, fates collide as often as nouns and verbs.