Film producers cannot resist Ian McEwan’s novels. This week an adaptation of his 2014 novel The Children Act was released in cinemas, starring Emma Thompson as the high court judge Fiona Maye, who makes impossible decisions about family disputes while facing up to the apparent breakdown of her own long marriage. In the last 12 months we have also seen a BBC dramatisation of The Child in Time, and a film adaptation of On Chesil Beach. No living British novelist has more allured film-makers. In the past we have had screen versions of The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Enduring Love and Atonement. The prominence of McEwan’s stories on film is striking when his stock elsewhere seems to have fallen. Reviewers enjoy finding fault with his latest work. Not one of his last four novels made it on to the Man Booker longlist. In a recent Times Literary Supplement poll of the “best British and Irish novelists today”, based on the verdicts of “200 or so critics, academics and writers of fiction”, McEwan’s name was nowhere to be seen. A strange thing, given his public presence and, in one way, his canonical status: Enduring Love, and in recent years Atonement, have been staples of A-level syllabuses.

The film-makers and the exam boards know something. No living British novelist has more expertly or more teasingly exposed the machinery of narrative – and made this exposure the essence of the entertainment. For many a bookish teenager, Atonement has been the approved exemplum of the way in which a novel’s narrative viewpoint determines our experience of the truth. McEwan’s sin is to have opened the box of narrative tricks to the general reader. If he were more difficult, critics would perhaps treat him more respectfully.

You suspect that even reviewers who find things not to like when a McEwan novel is finished have been gripped as they read. The bite of his plots is extraordinary. This has something to do, certainly, with those throttling crises that every reader remembers: the panicky attempt to dispose of the body in The Innocent; the escalating confrontation after a minor traffic accident in Saturday; the loss of the child in a supermarket in The Child in Time; the balloon in Enduring Love. Even the novelist’s detractors admit that he does these slow-motion catastrophes, where terror erupts into the ordinary world, brilliantly.

So the moans about the smugness of many of McEwan’s leading characters, with their bourgeois sensibilities and unfailing good taste, are like complaints about Emma Woodhouse’s self-satisfaction. McEwan’s novels establish wellbeing only as a precarious condition – a safe life on the way to becoming unsafe. Often there is a killing or attempted killing. But then there are other accomplished novelists who like to have a murder in a novel. Hilary Mantel’s non-historical fiction has many a homicide. The doyenne of narrational sang froid Muriel Spark provides an equally high body count.

McEwan has in common with Spark a gift for chilly narrative control that compels attention yet repels sympathy. (Sweet Tooth even includes an argument between the novel-reading heroine and her novel-writing lover about how much to admire Spark’s more postmodern experiments.) They are the two novelists of the last 50 years who most cunningly use the trick of prolepsis – letting the reader glimpse the narrative future before it has arrived. What seizes us in the famous opening chapter of Enduring Love is the drama not just of those men trying to hold down the untethered balloon with a child in the basket, but also of the narrator’s attempts to make sense of his memories. “Knowing what I now know … ,” Joe says. It is a classic McEwan opening to a sentence. The outcome precedes the telling. You are always to realise that the author knows where he is leading you – that it has all been planned, before the first sentence is ever set down. Apprehension takes the place of surprise. You are asked to enjoy being manipulated.

Thus Amsterdam, a brilliantly acid little fable that suffered in the eyes of critics because it did win the Booker prize. “Why the title?” the first-time reader wonders. Only on page 149 of this short novel do we find out that our two main characters, male friends who are becoming bitter enemies, are both heading to Amsterdam, and realise that their story is somehow entangled with “the medical scandal in Holland” that has been mentioned in passing before and the easy use of euthanasia and the joint wish of both men to avoid any lingering death-in-life. Their mutual resentment, disguised as comradeship, is their joint narrative doom.

The shape of the story is the point. McEwan’s much underrated achievement is to have made accessible, and pleasurable, the narrative self-consciousness of postmodernism. Here is a characteristic sentence from Enduring Love. We are in a noisy restaurant, where Joe is celebrating his wife’s birthday with her and her uncle. “When I later remembered how we had leaned in and shouted, I seemed to be remembering an underwater event.” The narrator remembers remembering events. We only reach experience through the business of making it into a narrative. The rawer, the more shocking the experience, the truer this is. Joe is trying to narrate one of those eruptions of violence into his life, trying to see a past unavoidably refracted by hindsight: “Perhaps that was when I glanced to my left … Perhaps I noticed them later … ”

McEwan encodes suspicion of this trickery within the novels themselves. “People who kept on about narrative tended to have a squiffy view of reality, believing all versions of it to be of equal value,” thinks the libidinous theoretical physicist Michael Beard in Solar. Yet the anti-fictionalists are storymakers, too. Some have dismissively supposed that McEwan features so many scientists in his novels because science dazzles him. In fact, it is not science that interests him so much as narrativisation. Most of his protagonists are in some business of explanation. The fiction makers (Stephen in The Child in Time, Briony in Atonement) and the scientific rationalists (Joe in Enduring Love, Henry Perowne in Saturday, Michael in Solar) are all professionally dedicated to turning experience into narrative. Fiona in The Children Act, seasoned interpreter of “special pleading, intimate half-truths, exotic accusation”, is another such.

Above all, in their unpacking of narrative McEwan’s novels have brilliantly demonstrated how time is the novelist’s element. (“The allegiance to time is imperative … in a novel there is always a clock,” wrote EM Forster.) No novelist is more adept at manipulating the tricks and jumps of chronology. Think of the last pages of On Chesil Beach where the protagonist’s life after the disaster of his wedding night is narrated in bleakly contracting time: a paragraph for a week, then for a year, then for a decade. Or the first and longest section of Atonement, in which Briony’s “crime” of misidentifying Lola’s rapist is staged. It is fastidiously divided into numbered chapters, the gaps between these chapters involving a series of slight, almost unnoticeable shifts backwards in time. We keep seeing or hearing the same events from different points of view. It is a bravura fracturing of narrative truth.

Film-makers are beguiled but also doomed by these elegant tricks. Even with McEwan’s scriptwriting help, the film of On Chesil Beach could not do justice to the accelerating chronology of the novel’s final pages. Atonement managed to replicate one of the novel’s time-jolts (the scene in which Cecilia plunges into the fountain is given twice, first from Briony’s mystified perspective, then with the accompanying explanation of Robbie and Cecilia’s dialogue). All the other chronological shifts were beyond it.

It is not surprising that the narrative hunger of film should tempt McEwan himself into screen writing. Yet his own fiction is a severe challenge. For, above all, his novels do justice to the weird ways in which individuals make narratives in their heads. Briony Tallis confusedly making up a story of her sister’s lover as “a maniac”. Joe Rose building the case history of his stalker without seeing that it is just this story-making that is alienating his wife. This is also the key to the sheer tug on your attention of The Children Act. What grips the reader is not what confronts Fiona – the husband who wants to have an affair, the Jehovah’s Witness who refuses a blood transfusion – but the character’s overactive, over-knowing mind as she makes a narrative of what she does. How can you film it?