Interesting but not one of McEwans best works.

"This is when they give us a glimpe of what we might be, of ourselves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself".

It is not rationalism that will overcame the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all that it will entails - jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realisable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next, Rather shop than pray. p.126

The trick , as always, the key to human selection and domination, is to be selective in your mercies.