This is a beautiful novel. I read it because someone told me that it uses the same device as Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. It turns out that, while it owes something to the 18th-century novel of sensibility, stylistically, it owes much more to Virginia Woolf. Towards the end, as gets all meta and begins to think aloud about these literary debts, the writing brushes up against the gimmicky, but McEwan is such a controlled writer that it never quite goes over the edge.