War & Peace Quote by Ian Mcewan

McEwan’s line lands like a reprimand aimed at the most anxious parts of public life: the impulse to turn every story into a position. “Politics” here isn’t civic engagement so much as the mindset politics rewards - tribal loyalty, instrumental language, the constant sorting of people into allies and enemies. That mindset hates ambiguity, and ambiguity is the oxygen of imagination. Fiction thrives on the uncomfortable middle: mixed motives, shifting sympathies, the slow reveal that a villain can be persuasive and a hero can be petty. Politics, especially in its modern media form, pressures art to behave like messaging.

The subtext is a defense of the novel as a technology for complexity. When politics becomes the dominant lens, it flattens characters into exemplars and plots into arguments. It doesn’t just censor; it pre-edits. Writers start anticipating the courtroom of public opinion, readers start consuming books as moral certifications, and imagination shrinks from exploration to compliance. That’s why “enemy” is such a charged choice: it frames politicization as an active force, not an unfortunate side effect.

Context matters with McEwan, whose work often stages private lives under public pressures - war, ideology, class, institutional power. He isn’t naive about politics shaping reality; he’s wary of it colonizing interiority. The line is less “stay out of politics” than “don’t let politics be your only genre.” It argues for art’s right to be unruly, to risk sympathy, to refuse the neatness that slogans demand.