McEwan treated literary art as a weapon that reaches and subjugates the culturally savage

Evidence

Whereas McEwan in particular invests in the power of literary art as a going concern and as a means to confront the immediate threats to his protagonist’s world in the early years of the war on terror, in Updike art as a mode of self-expression is treated ambiguously, almost as a mode of passing the time, on a par with shopping or sex. In McEwan, art and canonical poetry in particular can reach and subjugate the savage and the culturally “heathen.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast class: this reads as the pole against which Morey can set Naqvi’s and Hamid’s ambivalent references to Western art.