When I get to college, I'm gonna get me a white Nissan Sentra.

It’s the opposite technique to that of McEwan’s narrator, who explicitly sets out his world, overexplains the historical context and never turns down a chance to offer an essayistic digression. To my taste, this is a flat-footed way of doing sci-fi.

In Germany, I had heard little of this terrible gang, and I had paid no greater heed to the stories related once or twice about them in Carlsruhe than one does to tales about ogres.

ill-founded criticism