Ian McEwen

Audio

Transcript about Solar

Ramona Koval: Ian McEwan is in our ABC London studio. Good to be speaking with you again, Ian.

Ian McEwan: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Well I'd say yes in a flash to the offer of a trip like this. Why did you say yes?

Ian McEwan: Well, I was interested in climate change and had been for a long time, and I have another interest in life which is hiking in remote places, and this was the Norwegian Arctic, and Spitsbergen was particularly beautiful. And yes, I accepted to go on this trip. And there were a lot of very good artists: Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, and various others. We were living for a week on a boat that was frozen into a fjord. The best kind of boat, really, one you could walk off onto the ice. And that was an extraordinary week, because we were very passionate about our discussions and there was a lot of humour in the air. We were very much struck by the paradox that to get into this beautiful place not only did we have to fly there, but ride these noisy, stinking, oil-burning snowmobiles into this pristine wilderness. And that gave us some pause for thought. So these kinds of things were very much in the air. But meanwhile next door was our kit room where we kept all our snowmobile suits and helmets and goggles and as the week progressed this rather cramped, ill-lit space got more and more chaotic, and I was rather struck, in a humorous way at this sort of divergence between our passionate talk and the state of this boot room, as I came to call it, which was so much larger than the earth that we were trying to straighten out at that point. So that was one prompt.

Ramona Koval: In the book, the people on this particular trip that write about in your fictional account are warned, basically, look, no matter what you do, you've got to make sure that the boot room remains in order, that nobody takes wet things to the other parts of the ship. And this is really the only rule. But it just becomes impossible for the people to actually carry out this rule. And one has to think, as a reader, that you're saying we are maddening apes at heart.

Ian McEwan: Well we're a great mixture of things, and if this novel has one subject I would say it's human nature, rather than climate change. Climate change posing particular problems to human nature. So we're extremely clever but we can be slobs and lazy and self-interested, and there were times I found myself out on the ice with two left boots, simply because it was very difficult to keep this thing under control.

So it was just a prompt at that point. I was nowhere near starting this novel at that time. I was about to write On Chesil Beach, in fact, and went off in a completely different direction. But the memory of that week stayed with me. I wrote about it in The Guardian newspaper. And then I found myself at a climate change conference in Germany, and all the main speakers were Nobel prize winners. And they were so grand—and also rather tragic in a sense that when you win a prize in science, at Stockholm, you generally get it for work you did in your youth, and you're now head of some department and in charge of giant budgets and grants and so on. And there's a great discrepancy there, too, between the man you are now—these were all men, in fact—and the man you once were, the bright, slim 27-year-old who saw his way through to this or that.

So it was at that point I thought the figure of Michael Beard began to loom. I thought yes, he's got a Nobel prize but he hasn't done a scrap of original science since, and this was really the formation of the novel. It was character-led, as this personage began to form out of the mist I began to think yes, he's all those things you said he was, but he's also very greedy, and he's going to get heavier and heavier through the novel, despite all his resolutions. And that will be a sort of parallel to our predicament.

Ramona Koval: This is a digression but do you think Nobel prizes for literature result in the same kind of conundrum?

Ian McEwan: Well I've only met two, and they've been amazingly modest men, given their talents. One is Seamus Heaney and the other is JM Coetzee. So I think it's very different in literature. Writers, poets, novelists don't run big departments and aren't in charge of colossal budgets; don't quite have that kind of weight in the public world that some of these scientists do.

Ramona Koval: You've been very interested in science for many years, and this book required of you more than a passing interest—indeed knowledge of quite a few complex areas of science: alternative energy projects, the possibilities of artificial photosynthesis, high end mathematics, the physics of string theory and then M theory, which is an extension of string theory in which 11 dimensions are identified. But we all knew that, of course. It must chuff you to read, but a New Scientist review of the book says, 'The science is excellent and bang up to date.'

Ian McEwan: Well, you probably remember the way that the Romantic poets used to list exotic countries, or a poet like Keats would write about great feasts of candied apples and quince and plum and gourds. There's something about the terms of science that attracts me. So string and super string and M and so on...you don't actually, as a novelist, have a chance of getting your mind around these things. What you have to do with smoke and mirrors is to persuade your reader that your central character does. So I wouldn't like to give the impression that there's no point reading this book unless you're bang up to date on your cutting edge mathematics. It's really a matter of getting a sense of these things. And the excitement of them, as well as the professional jealousies and so on that are around. Because scientists love to be first, there's something very basic about that. Even a decent, humble man like Darwin was distraught when he received the letter and paper from Wallace. Darwin felt he was not going to be first...

Ramona Koval: But Darwin hung on to that book for years and years and years and didn't publish it.

Ian McEwan: I know. And suddenly Wallace's letter pushed him over the edge and in 11 months he put together On the Origin of Species—largely panicked by the thought that what he called his priority had been ruined. So if Darwin was subject to those feelings, imagine lesser beings...

Ramona Koval: Like Michael beard...

Ian McEwan: Like Michael Beard. I mean James Watson and Francis Crick were very open about the fact that the wanted to be the first to describe DNA. If they hadn't done it they were quite clear, too, that someone else would have. So there was very strong, basic human, or even child-like element to science, this race for originality and being first.

Ramona Koval: And of course scientists and labs and institutes can be seen as figures of fun, and you have a lot of fun with them: the nerds, the rows of ballpoints in the top pockets of jackets. But then again, you do admire them, too.

Ian McEwan: I love them. Well, I admire them in the way I admire great artists. I think this just one aspect of human ingenuity and it's great to celebrate it and adore it, and also see that it's all too human, as well, with all the jealousies that novelists and great painters are prone to.

Ramona Koval: Can we speak about a particular example of comedy in the book. How did you come to find yourself writing this satire?

Ian McEwan: My favourite kind of reader is always the reader who finds humour in my work. Many readers don't, but I think slightly more readers have. So this was really a matter of turning the volume up under something. And also if you've got to persuade a reader to travel for 100,000 in the company of a rather unsympathetic character, it's best to have a grain of humour running through this—of comedy. Otherwise I think you begin to tire of this person and you wouldn't want to be around him.

Ramona Koval: I wonder whether you learned some of that from Malcolm Bradbury, your esteemed teacher when you were beginning to write, because he did those satires about the postmoderns, who were just beginning to emerge at that stage.

Ian McEwan: Well when I was at UEA (University of East Anglia) I think maybe spent three or four occasions in Malcolm's presence of ten minutes at a stretch. there was never much teaching. But I think he was a great comic novelist and I've read all his novels and I loved, especially those novels with the marvellous title: Eating People is Wrong, a novel of inquiry into what is the basis of our moral code. So yes, I'm sure that without being conscious of it that an element of that has passed on into me.

Ramona Koval: I'm always on the lookout for survival tips when I read anything, and in the section early on in the book where Michael Beard has taken a trip like the one you took, and is in fact on this machine going across the ice, he has to have a call of nature and he...I mean I'm not quite sure, not being a man, and everything, but it seems pretty convincing to me that if you're a man and you have to have a pee in the middle of a very, very cold environment, it is a bad idea to get your penis stuck on your zipper.

Ian McEwan: Yeah. I don't this is a survival tip of much use for girls.

Ramona Koval: No, but you never know what company you're in. There might be just the need for a very bright woman on a trip like this. And how he gets his penis off the zipper is that he takes some alcohol and...can you explain how that works, because I was thinking, now how is this going to work?

Ian McEwan: Oh, he makes a simple calculation, having panicked, thinking that he's going to have to spend the rest of his life in a monastery without a penis, he makes a quick calculation that the freezing point of methyl alcohol is such and such and brandy is 40% methyl alcohol, so that would bring him to such and such a figure, which is slightly higher than the temperature he's in, so he pours his libation, and in one bound he's free.

Ramona Koval: So the libation gets between the penis and the metal. Somehow.

Ian McEwan: Yes. I'm glad you're asking me this. No-one else has. Yes. It then lowers the freezing point all around him and therefore he comes unstuck. You know how it is, sometimes you put your hand in the deep freeze and you might touch by accident a bit of metal, and you find your finger is freezing to it. Or if you're messing around with your bindings if you're skiing in really extreme temperatures and you've taken your glove off, your finger can stick to metal. It's basically that that happened.

Ramona Koval: This didn't happen to you, did it?

Ian McEwan: No. It's never happened to me. I'm completely whole. You can rely on me.

Ramona Koval: I'd like you to read now from Solar. And this just shows you what sort of a guy Beard is. Can you read us a little bit?

Ian McEwan: Yes. This is Beard and his attitude to employment. [Reads from Beard was always on the lookout for an official role with a stipend attached... to ...one of the post-docs proposed sorting the ideas according to which of the laws they violated: first, second, or both.]

Ramona Koval: Ian McEwan, reading from his new novel Solar on The Book Show here on ABC Radio National with me, Ramona Koval.

Well just in case anyone thinks that you're hard on the scientists, there's quite a satire of the artists, as well. Especially artists who try to use ideas of physics and quantum mechanics to apply to their own political and moral positions. You write: 'Quantum mechanics, what a repository, a dump of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigour defeated commonsense and reason and fantasy irrationally merged.' And it's true, isn't it, about quantum mechanics and how you have to make all kinds of wild assumptions. But you have a scene where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is used by the artists on that trip to argue about the loss of the moral compass. I wondered where you thought the two cultures debate was these days—the two cultures of art and science?

Ian McEwan: Well the artist who proposes that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle dissolves moral absolutes is actually the only novelist on the ship. And I'm taking maybe a little side-swipe at my younger self. And he's very, very heavily put down by Beard, who's furious at this gross abuse of physics for the purpose of moral relativism. And it's Beard who thumps the table, somewhat drunk at the time, and destroys this poor fellow's position. So for those who's tried to make out the case that I'm tough on my fellow artists on the boat who are painters and sculptors, actually it's the novelist who comes off worst.

Where does it leave the two cultures? Well, you wander in to quantum mechanics and derive any ethical positions from it at your peril.

Ramona Koval: So the other implication of the novel is that it's easier for scientists to have a bit of a play in the fields of art and get some understanding—in a way it's a one-way street. It's not possible for an artist to have a bit of a play in the field of science because it assumes too much knowledge.

Ian McEwan: When Michael Beard woos his first wife, when he's an undergraduate at Oxford, he hears on the grapevine that her special subject is John Milton. He's never heard of John Milton, but he just goes away for a week, reads all of Milton, reads all the essays about Milton, and comes back and sweet-talks her into believing that he's one of those scientists who's just amazingly literate and can quote chunks of John Milton, and he talks his way into her bed in that manner. And I suppose what I'm wanting to say here is that actually it's an old suspicion of mine that myself and probably you, we studied in the humanities, a lot of us picked up a degree over three years with an occasional panic about an essay. But we probably tumbled out of bed at midday, partied hard, and it was a rather marvellous finishing school. It's nothing like the tough three years that mathematicians and physicists have to go through as undergraduates just getting their minds round Einstein's special and general theories, or Dirac's law. These are really heavy weights to lift, and it's perfectly possible for any averagely intelligent humanities undergraduate to—as long as they're psychiatrically stable—to pick up a good degree with not too much work. And yet still we look down on the scientists as geeks and nerds and that little satirical passage of seduction is really coming from that assumption.

Ramona Koval: Now I was a geek and a nerd, actually, while you were sleeping till midday.

Ian McEwan: You mean you studied physics?

Ramona Koval: I did some physics, yes I did. I ended up as a geneticist. But I was very amused by this other part of the book where you're going to have a go as well as those history and philosophy of science types and the social construction of science people. You've got a woman resigning from a committee over Beard's comments about women in science, and she's described as 'a postmodern blank-slater, a strong social constructivist.'

Ian McEwan: Yes. This was the tease, really, of the wilder shores of postmodernism, and I did come across a textbook that said that 'genes don't actually exist, they're socially entexted.' And I thought, well I've got to have some fun with this. I phoned up my son, who's a geneticist at Cambridge and said, 'Have you heard this idea?' And I read it out to him. I could hear his jaw dropping, because his whole life works around the fact that genes are discrete stretches of code, and can be snipped and so on—as you know better than me. And so I thought I wanted to get a bit of the mutual incomprehension of a hard scientist meeting someone from 'science studies' as they're now called, who is taking the view that these things actually are a kind of projection of ours, and replete with all kinds of notions and assumptions of the ideology of power. That seems to be the shtick of postmodern science studies.

Ramona Koval: Yes. Projections and perceptions are important in this book, too. Because you've got another scene where—of course Michael Beard is getting bigger and bigger with each chapter—he just doesn't know where to stop: he's obsessed with salt and vinegar crisps. You describe a scene on the train where he's convinced that this character is eating his crisps and there's where the two of them are almost head to head, but the other character backs off and...well, I think I have to say, for the purposes of this conversation, that he discovers that actually he's eaten the other man's crisps, and his crisps are still in his bag, or just under his coat. And he suddenly realises, he has a sort of epiphany I suppose, about perception. About what we think we're seeing and what's really happening.

Ian McEwan: Yes. He tries to draw some moral conclusions from this, although it's all rather difficult, and it's all undermined when he runs into a professor of folk lore who says, 'Oh, this story of the crisps on the train...you get it with biscuits, you get it with fruit, it's appeared in a novel by Douglas Adams, it's been the plot of two movies—it's an urban legend that goes the rounds and clearly it didn't happen to you. And Beard is furious. His own grip on reality is being undone by another version of the postmodern—you know, that these stories actually exist rather like dirty jokes, they sort of go the rounds. And in fact when I read the crisp episode where Beard thinks he's eating his own crisps but in fact is eating the crisps of a fellow passenger and then discovers when he gets off the train that his own crisps are uneaten in his pocket, people came up to me in the signing queue and said, 'That's happened to me.' That's happened to my cousin, or my brother, or a friend of mine. So it is out there in a strange, floating, easily appropriated story. And I've come across a few others, too. I put the beginning of one in to the end of that scene. It is odd when you hear people tell you something that happened to them, and you begin to suspect actually it hasn't happened to them at all; they are just actually telling a version of a joke.

Ramona Koval: Why can't folklore be based on human experience, though?

Ian McEwan: Well, this particular story is called 'The Unwitting Thief'. It's actually capitalised. And folklorists trace these things. It first emerged in the United states in the early part of the 20th century. It was not detected in Britain till the mid-70s. It appeared in a novel by Douglas Adams in the early 80s. And then it moves around, then it dies. You don't hear about it for several years and then it pops up in some other form. So it has an independent life. Independent of the people who are telling you the story. And oddly enough the claim on the story has to be that it's true, not that it's simply a story. That's bound to be a fascination, I think, to a novelist.

Ramona Koval: So how does fit in to this drive in this novel towards some magic solution for the energy problem on this planet. I think...I can't quite remember who says this, maybe Beard says this: 'An alien landing on our planet and noticing how it was bathed in radiant energy would be amazed to learn that we believe ourselves to have an energy problem.' And that sounded pretty convincing to me, too.

Ian McEwan: Yes. Well actually it's his post-doc student, Tom Aldous, who says that. But after Aldous has died, accidentally, Beard then appropriates all Aldous's work and uses it in a lecture of his own. And it is the case. We are absolutely drenched—a sweet rain of photons, the post-doc calls it. And if we could find a way of using it efficiently—more efficiently than mere solar panels—we would solve our energy problem. And Michael Beard thinks that the work of the man he's stolen from is going to do just that. He's going to imitate a stage of photosynthesis and allow water to be cracked, or split, into its constituent gases. That would give us boundless cheap hydrogen and you could run the fuel cell generator and run your power stations, generate electricity. All of this is perfectly sound physics and this work is going on on lab benches in—actually there is one in Australia. There was a breakthrough at MRIT while I was working on this novel in just this area. But it's still in the lab. It's nowhere near a prototype or an industrial scale unit.

So the novel tries to root itself in some genuine research, cutting edge stuff, but take a little leap ahead with it.

Ramona Koval: So do you think this is you creating art in order to deflect the course of a catastrophe? Is that partly what the book is? I know it's about rationality and unreason and the human position, but is it that too?

Ian McEwan: I think there is a problem really for art in relation to not only climate change but to war or every other problem that we've always faced. It's not very good at changing the way people behave. And I often say that I doubt if there's a general or an army commander in the world who has ever stayed his hand because he's seen Guernica or read All Quiet on the Western Front or The Good Soldier Svejk . And Auden famously said poetry makes nothing happen. That I don't is quite true, but our role in this is very modest. Novelists, painters, sculptors, whatever form we express ourselves in, I think mostly all we can do is reflect on the problem and reflect the problem. I don't think Solar is going to make—well I know it's not going to make one jot of difference to the rising curve of CO2 emissions. In fact it's going to add to them: trees cut down and taxis bringing me to this studio... All I can do is do what artists have always done, is try and hold a mirror up to our situation.

Ramona Koval: But you come down on the side of understanding and knowing that climate is changing. I think Beard challenges the idea that it's not, saying, 'As for those scientists who signed some contrarian document, they're in a minority of a thousand to one, Toby. Ornithologists, epidemiologists, oceanographers and glaciologists, salmon fishermen and ski-lift operators—the consensus is overwhelming. Some weak-brained journalists write against it because they think it's a sign of independent thinking, and there's plenty of attention out there for a professor who'll speak against it. There are bad scientists just like there are rotten singers and terrible cooks.

Ian McEwan: Absolutely true. There are some terrible scientists around. Now in the humanities, if you had a professor of Greek pronouncing on Etruscan poetry, you can get a hearing. But we lazily assume that someone from one branch of science is qualified to speak on all branches of science, because we lazily say to ourselves, well he's a scientist. Where in fact science is vast, and many, many rooms, as you know better than anyone. So I always put the challenge the other way around. We know what a molecule of CO2 does to the long-wave end of the spectrum. We know we're putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. We expect therefore the temperature to rise. We go out and look, we find it is rising. Let the deniers—they seem to have a lot of money and a lot of influence—let them put up their own satellite, let them crawl across the earth's surface and gather some empirical data and let them put it up for peer review, and reassure that it's all a big mistake. We'd be delighted if we had no climate change problem. Wonderful! But let it come from empirical data.

Ramona Koval: Well Michael Beard, this character of yours, I said at the beginning that he's got quite a few drawbacks, I suppose, as a human being, and he just doesn't seem to be able to help himself. He seems to always go for the immediate gratification, both sexually and also he's got a bit of an oral fixation. The meal that you describe towards the end of it where he's in America and he's having something really disgusting and it's only entrée and it seems like it could have fed five people and then he's going to go on to the main course. And there's a lot of cheese and a lot of melted stuff and a lot of meat.

Ian McEwan: A lot of meat and chicken...

Ramona Koval: Yes, that's right. Meat and chicken in layers.

Ian McEwan: In layers, wrapped in bacon, and smothered in molten cheese and honey.

Ramona Koval: That's straight off a menu, isn't it?

Ian McEwan: No, I had that meal. Well, I didn't have it. It was put in front of me, anyway. He finds it hard. He makes resolutions that he's going to get thinner and he's going to get fitter. But as soon as the meal is put before him or the runway champagne is put on his tray on the aeroplane his hand simply conveys it to his mouth, and I think that's part of our predicament. It's very hard saying no when we're surrounded by plenty. And we in what we call the west are relatively surrounded by riches. It's hard to stop consuming, hard to stop the lifestyle we have. It's delicious.

Ramona Koval: Is that what you think it's going to take, because there's a feeling in the book that all of that stuff, and going back to hair shirts and being conservative about the way we live really isn't going to make much difference. We're going to have to do something big, rather than a lot of small things.

Ian McEwan: I think we are going to have to do something big. And actually something very simple. We're just going to have to power our civilisation in a different way. In other words cleanly and safely. But we've got something else to do at the same time, and I'm with Beard on this, that you cannot separate out a solution to climate change from a solution to poverty. And the great success of coal and oil and gas has been that it has brought millions, tens, hundreds of millions of people out of the mental prison of rural subsistence. We have got to accelerate that process, at the same time as finding different sources of energy. It's simply stated, but it's jolly hard to achieve. And I was standing at the top of the Post Office Tower, a big telecom tower in the centre of London at the end of last year. It was a freezing December night, very still, and there was London twinkling and sparkling with lights, right to the horizon, 360 degrees of it. How do you power that? Not with solar panels, not in our climate, and the wind wasn't blowing so wind turbines wouldn't do it, either. So it's not an easy solution, although the problem is quite simply stated.

Ramona Koval: And you've stated it very well in your novel, Solar, and you've stated a lot of very interesting ideas very well, too. Ian McEwan, thank you very much for being on The Book Show today.

Ian McEwan: A real pleasure talking to you.

Ramona Koval: And Ian McEwan's book Solar is published by Random House. He was speaking to us today from our ABC London studio.

Publications

Title: Solar

Author: Ian McEwan

Description: Jonathan Cape

Atonement

One of the finest English writers alive, Ian McEwan speaks to Ramona Koval about writing, morality, science and love. This is the third in a series of spotlight interviews recorded at the Edinburgh Festival.

McEwan's work has won him the Somerset Maugham award, the Whitbread prize and the Booker. His latest novel, Atonement, has been received as his finest work yet.

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Ian McEwan's novels and stories have won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Whitbread Prize and the Booker Prize, and he's in the happy position of having his latest book, Atonement, regarded as his finest work. The early books contained sado-masochism, feral children, murder and incest, while Atonement deals with a writer's attempts to put right a moral error that she made when on the cusp between childhood and adulthood. One reviewer said that 'One opened McEwan's earlier books safe in the knowledge that something atrocious would occur. These days, perhaps, it's imminent calamity that's in the offing. Whatever the expectation, though, there's no doubt about the delivery, and Ian McEwan is regarded as one the finest English writers alive.

And he was very much alive on a tremendously rainy summer Edinburgh day where I spoke to him about writing, morality, science and love. But we started with his book Atonement, which is a story about problems of perception, amongst other things, and attributing meanings to events-of the 'unreliable witness' of the 'unreliable narrator', perhaps. I suggested to Ian McEwan that many stories and other novels have dealt with this territory: the mistakes one makes when trying to work out what other people want or are really saying. I asked him if he was rather bewildered in the world.

Ian McEwan: Hmm-hmm. I see there's a trap looming already. If I say no, that would be very arrogant; If I say yes, I would seem terribly confounded.

Ramona Koval: So clearly you don't understand what my question really is.

Ian McEwan: Yes, I'm already bewildered. Somewhere along the way in Atonement, Briony makes what she thinks is a real discovery about fiction, which is that it doesn't simply have to be regarding life as, as she thinks, a life-long hockey match between good and evil, but a lot of the problems in life occur through misunderstanding and there are two ways to regard language I think in this respect. You could either see language as a minefield in which all kinds of social and personal calamities can occur precisely because people misunderstand each other; or-and I think these things are not mutually exclusive-you see it as this most extraordinary device whereby you blow air through a little bit of tissue in your throat and you can transfer, telepathically, thoughts from your mind to another person's.

Now I want to hold faith with that second, miraculous view of language, yet at the same time explore all the comic and tragic possibilities that occur when perfectly well-meaning people can fall apart or fall foul of each other, simply through misunderstanding. And this is really a novel, as you say, about precisely that: problems of perception. Briony witnesses an event which we've already been party to-that is Robbie and Cecilia by a fountain-she misunderstands that, her misunderstanding is very much drawn on the literary side from Katherine Moreland of Northanger Abbey and her recasting of events around her through the prism of the Gothic novel. I read Northanger Abbey when I was seventeen and it made a huge impression on me. I was just beginning to 'get' literature at that time. And for a long time I thought, there is a way into a novel or a story about someone obsessed by literature, who would get everything wrong.

Ramona Koval: Briony is thinking about whether other people feel as she does; if they seem as real to themselves as the way she does to herself. She's playing with that idea that other people really do exist, and that you can actually put yourself in their position. Is writing a novel a way to make people empathetic towards each other?

Ian McEwan: I think of all the artforms, the novel is supreme in giving us the possibility of inhabiting other minds. I think it does it better than drama; better than cinema. It's developed these elaborate conventions over three or four hundred years of representing not only mental states, but change, over time. So in that sense, yes, I think that 'other minds' is partly what the novel is about. If you saw the novel as I do in terms of being an exploration of human nature-an investigation of the human condition-then the main tool of that investigation has to be to demonstrate, to somehow give you, on the page, the sensual 'felt' feeling of what it is to be someone else.

Surely everyone in childhood makes this slow recognition-in stages, in little leaps and starts and two steps forward, one back-that other people are as alive to themselves as you are to yourself. It's quite a startling discovery. I remember thinking, round about the age of ten, having my first real moment of really being rather dismayed by the idea on the one hand that everyone was as real as I was.

Ramona Koval: What happened at ten?

Ian McEwan: My mother dropped me at the beach on her way to work. I was in North Africa. It was early in the morning. It was the Mediterranean spring and I had the day to myself. No friends-I don't know why, that day-and I had one of those little epiphanies of 'I'm me,' and at the same time thinking, well, everyone must feel this. Everyone must think, 'I'm me.' It's a terrifying idea, I think, for a child, and yet that sense that other people exist is the basis of our morality. You cannot be cruel to someone, I think, if you are fully aware of what it's like to be them. In other words, you could see cruelty as a failure of the imagination, as a failure of empathy. And to come back to the novel as a form, I think that's where it is supreme in giving us that sense of other minds.

Ramona Koval: You've got inside that little girl's head really well. I was absolutely marvelling at it. Her writing of the excruciating play, her use of big, clumsy words-

Ian McEwan: It wasn't such a bad play. [laughter]

Ramona Koval: This is an example. 'This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella, who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.'

Ian McEwan: Fella...

Ramona Koval: Sorry. Fella. I was trying to be more English. Oh, Arabella...fella. I get it now. [laughter] 'A taste for the miniature and a passion for secrets, and a need to control small worlds completely.' Is that what happens in a grown-up writer's head too?

Ian McEwan: Yes, in a sense. Grown up writers I think don't assault-abuse-the dictionary in quite the same way. But part of the pleasures of writing-which I think are under-emphasised by novelists who in the Romantic tradition want generally to persuade people that they compose in agony-I think that what's not often said, or not said enough, is that many writers, like many artists, are involved in a delicious form of self-pleasuring. When things go well, there's nothing quite like it, and I think if more people knew how close to ecstasy one comes once you've learned how to write this particular novel, then I think everyone would be doing it, and we'd all be suffering a deluge of even more novels than people are suffering from already.

And part of that pleasure is that it's a secret pleasure. It's quite difficult to share this secret; I have a real problem. In my daily life, I'm married to an editor and journalist, she works at the Guardian, and like all people who work in newspaper offices, there is the fabulous warp and weave and intrigue of office life, and her daily life seems-you know, at the end of the day, 'How was it?'-a thousand things have happened, and of my day, there is nothing to report. [laughter]

So to get around this, every few months, when I'm writing a book, when we find time-it's usually on holiday or at a weekend-we have a very large Knoll sofa, the sort of sofa you can climb into, take your shoes off with a glass of wine-and I read to her five, six, seven thousand words of where I've got to so far. It's the only way-and the absolute rule is, I'm not looking for praise, I don't want encouragement, I certainly don't want criticism [laughter]. All I want is to say, well this is what I'm about. Every now and then. This is my office life. But the secrecy is part of the pleasure.

And it's very odd, I think all writers experience this strange feeling that never quite wears off that characters you've lived with, for two or three or four years and you've given names to, and mostly one's trying to choose names that don't seem too significant, unless you're writing some kind of morality play-and then I have a conversation with you and you're talking about Briony as if she was a real person. And that transition from privacy to public space for characters, I've never quite lost my pleasure in that moment. I remember being on a radio program-I wonder if anyone here has heard it-where you meet your reading group. They come from various towns and I was on for Enduring Love and there were two or three reading groups from the North of England. The conversation largely proceeded by people saying, 'Well I didn't like that Clarissa.' And someone else would say, 'Well I didn't think she was so bad, but that Joe, I think he was a ...' And I couldn't help feeling-although I felt this was no way to talk about a novel-I couldn't help feeling great pleasure in it, too, that these people finally existed independently of me.

Ramona Koval: Your description of Briony's reaction when she loses control of her play, of the casting amongst her cousins, of her impulse-and I quote here-'to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no-one and to be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead and barefoot-or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbons strapped.' A wonderful evocation of girlhood tantrums. Where did that spring from?

Ian McEwan: Well boys have tantrums too, and although they don't-in public-wear ballet pumps with pink straps, It's not difficult to remember-I find it difficult to forget-the sort of pain/pleasure, sour/sweet feeling of assault. That sort of annihilating, delicious but hellish feeling. It was fun to evoke that.

Ramona Koval: You have to be found and observed, don't you. People have to see this life.

Ian McEwan: There's no point going into this annihalation without-I mean the point is to make someone feel bad, and that's what holds Briony back, the feeling that actually Lola is so ruthless in her domination, that it's not going to work; that she could rush out of the room and Lola wouldn't even notice, so assault there would fail. But it just seemed like another little corner of experience to give a shape to, give a voice to, and certainly my pleasure in reading is not necessarily the witnessing of something new, but of something familiar which I haven't seen described. I think the novel that does that best of all, still, for me, is Ulysses, full of moments from ordinary life: Bloom buying some kidneys, the coldness of those kidneys through the paper; things you think, yes, yes, I want that given shape to. That's a real pleasure.

So when people say, how can a male novelist describe a girlie sulk, it seems to me an extraordinary question, because sulking is a human issue, not a girlie issue at all.

Ramona Koval: What sort of a child were you, were you like Briony, did you have an active imagination and ambition to write?

Ian McEwan: I was very secretive. I was a bit like Briony in that I used to borrow my-there was a typewriter in the house, I was going to say my mother's typewriter, I don't think I ever saw her typing on it-and I loved threading the paper in and then I'd be stuck, because I wanted to be writing, but I didn't have anything to write, so I kept secret journals, sometimes for days on end and then would forget about them. As a child I was very freckly like Briony's cousins, pale and very, very shy; very close to my mother, much to my father's annoyance. He thought I was too much of a mother's boy. Very mediocre in class, never spoke, hated speaking in public-you see what it's cost me, to do this. [laughter] No-one told me I was clever till I was about sixteen. And then when someone told me I was clever, I started coming on as clever.

Ramona Koval: Who told you?

Ian McEwan: I'm one of those writers with a marvellous English teacher who fed me all the books at the right age.

Ramona Koval: Which books at that age?

Ian McEwan: First generation Romantic poets were my first big thrill. Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge. The other big excitement was to read The Wasteland. He having persuaded us that it was simply a very accessible jazz age poem and that you needn't bother yourself too much about what any of it meant. So he had us learn great chunks of it off by heart. Can't do it now. But still I hear in my head, 'Now the lilacs are in bloom / She has a bowl of lilacs in her room.' Which always seemed to me still to have a slightly syncopated feel to it. So I think the trick was, as with many good English teachers-that whole race of men and women who turn on young minds-is to say this is not about being solemn, this is about pleasure. And don't be intimidated, you can own it too. You're allowed in. And that was the thrill.

Ramona Koval: You're listening to Books and Writing on Radio National, Radio Australia and the Web; and a conversation with Ian McEwan at Edinburgh International Book Festival. As you'll hear in a moment, the summer rain was about to come down in bucket-loads. I asked Ian about his time in the orbit of the famous novelist, critic and creative writing teacher, Malcolm Bradbury. He was Bradbury's first student, in fact for a time his only student.

Ian McEwan: Yes, there was no class. I was twenty-one, I'd just finished a degree in English at Sussex University. I was looking around to go and do an MA somewhere. I'd been hitchhiking round Italy. It was late, it was already September and I hadn't found a university to go to, and I was thumbing through a pile of brochures and saw that you could do an MA in contemporary literature and literary theory-which wasn't such a prickly subject in 1970 as it is now-and that you could also hand in a bit of fiction. I phoned the university, at East Anglia, and amazingly got through to Malcolm Bradbury almost immediately, and he said, 'Well, come and see me.' So I borrowed my father's car and drove from Middle Wallop to Norwich and Bradbury said, 'Well if you come back in two weeks, I'd like to see some stories.' I drove back to Middle Wallop, wrote two stories-terrible, terrible stories.

Ramona Koval: Were they the first ones you'd ever written?

Ian McEwan: Yes. I'd written other things. I had written a radio play. I'd written those kinds of plays in which the characters know they're in a play, you know.

Ramona Koval: Like Briony's play?

Ian McEwan: Yes. Well, worse than Briony's play. Not even any rhymes. And I had a very, very lucky break, for me, that year. The course had closed down, that's what Bradbury said over the phone. He said, 'This is the first year we've run it with this component of fiction,' that you could hand in, 'No-one's applied but if you want to come, we'll try you out.'

So I was there with a dozen other students who were concentrating mostly on comparative literature and modern American literature. And I simply saw it as my year to write fiction, It was the first real choice I'd made in my young adult life. Up until that point I'd simply been processed through the education system. I took a little room in a very large house on the edge of Norwich. I wrote like crazy. I was full of a very Romantic sense. I wrote into the dawn. I'd meet Malcolm every three or four weeks, usually in a pub, for twenty minutes-he was always very busy. He would say, 'Well I like that.' He never gave any real critical comments, he simply said, 'That's fine, I think you're on the right lines, what are you doing next?' And I would say, 'Well, I think I'm going to write a story about a thirteen-year-old boy who rapes his sister.' And he'd say, 'Well when can I have it?'
[laughter]

In other words, it was morally completely neutral and at the same time he was putting me in the way of writing that really made a huge impression on me. It was in that year I read all the American writers that I still admire and keep faith with: John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow; who seem to have dominated, in my mind, for the last thirty years, fiction in English.

I also read William Burrows and Norman Mailer. I felt rather impatient with the texture of the standard mainstream English novel, which seemed to me rather grey and unambitious compared to these expressive, explosive Americans with their freedom and boldness with language.

Ramona Koval: Because they didn't have that English restraint that you had grown up with?

Ian McEwan: Yes and they also had a democratic, pluralistic sense of what the novel could be. Saul Bellow's characters were at ease on the street and yet could think, what he calls 'deep water thoughts.' And I like that. There was no sense in which you felt about Bellow's characters that they were upper-middle, lower, in between class. They were simply twentieth century human beings, and he was exploring the condition.

My stories were tiny things by comparison, but I thought that I did want to be bold. I did want bright colours, I did want something a little savage. And I think that was reactive. For years afterwards, when people would say, well you clearly write to shock, I would deny it. But I now realise that in fact it was probably the case. Not as a conscious ambition, but as a reactive-yes, it was reactive writing against that well-mannered, well-modulated, prevailing style of English fiction at the time. Quite fussily attentive to issues of class and social mobility and what the furniture looked like and how to describe the tapestries and the... I was very impatient with that.

Ramona Koval: When you say you tried to shock, did you have someone in mind?

Ian McEwan: It was not quite a conscious idea. When I showed my stories to Malcolm Bradbury-and then later Angus Wilson took over the summer term, and I also circulated stories to a handful of friends-no-one was shocked. All my friends doing literature in their early twenties, I mean obscenity was a lingua franca. Educated obscenity was how people amused themselves in the evenings. [laughter] So my stories could not have shocked anyone in that milieu.

Ramona Koval: What about your parents?

Ian McEwan: When I sent my parents a copy of First Love Last Rights, my father was still a serving officer in the British Army, and his sense of propriety was at war with his paternal pride. And it was paternal pride that won. My father ordered dozens of copies of First Love Last Rights and gave them to his Commanding Officer ...[laughter] So when I visited my parents, and I'd go and have a drink in the Officers' Mess, I could tell by the sort of glazed look of sick contempt from Colonel Blenkinsop that they'd not only read and decided that I was not for them, but they'd rather heard enough of my father going on about it. [laughter]

Anyway, he stuck to his guns. He was fiercely proud. I think it was tough for him.

Ramona Koval: You said that you didn't want to write with that sensibility about class and description; but in a sense Atonement has got a lot of that in it. What happened?

Ian McEwan: Yes. I got old and grey. [laughter] By the time I'd written The Comfort of Strangers and The Cement Garden and In Between the Sheets, I think I was writing myself into a corner. There was only so far one could go with that and I was desperate to begin to enlarge. And I came to something of a crisis in writing by the end of 1981 or 1982, and I'd written The Comfort of Strangers. I felt I'd written myself into a corner and I was desperate to get out. So instead of writing any more fiction, I did other things. I wrote a television play, The Imitation Game, which was set in the Second World War. I wrote a movie for Richard Eyre to direct, called The Ploughman's Lunch. I wrote an oratorio with Michael Berkeley which was really a response to the new shift in the arms race in the early eighties. And allowed a lot more light and breadth into my work.

So all those issues, whether one's talking about class or social concerns, came back into the fiction. Suddenly history seemed-I'd always felt, for example, up until that point, that I should never reveal where any of my characters were, or when. I was very much in the tutelage of the existential novel, and I knew that that was like walking on crutches. It was really difficult to go very far if you came back to this notion of investigation of human experience. So by the time I got back to writing a novel, which was The Child in Time, it was then very much located in a place, in a time which was a sort of a future but also very much the present. And from then on, I suppose, history became the major concern to me.

So all the things that I'd discarded, stripped down as a twenty-one-year-old writer, I was anxious to reclaim in a different way.

Ramona Koval: You've always been interested in turning points, moments beyond which there's no going back. The moment when the character in Enduring Love decides to let go of the rope that's attached to that runaway basket held aloft by a balloon. In Amsterdam, should the newspaper editor print compromising photographs of a family values cabinet minister, especially when he's motivated by spite. Moral choices that open the story up-are these moments the ones that necessarily start you on the trail of a novel, or do they arise?

Ian McEwan: It never happens in the same way. If only it did, I think I'd write more novels. I find it always difficult to get into my material. The ballooning incident in Enduring Love I wrote when I was half-way through the novel. Someone told me that they'd seen in a newspaper an account of a balloon and people trying to tether it and the balloon lifting and these people falling. And I thought, that suggests something very rich to me about cooperation and selfishness; altruism and selfishness. And since that was right in the heart of my interest at that point in evolutionary psychology and in moral decisions, I then went on a search for this newspaper item. I could not find it. And it was in the early days of the internet. And Annalena was then working at the Financial Times. She had access to this amazing press database, into which we put 'balloon death, Germany,' because my friend had told me this incident had happened in Germany. We found absolutely nothing. But 'balloon death': sixty tightly typed pages. Don't ever be persuaded that going up in one of those things is safe. [laughter] In fact one of the worst incidents in a balloon happened over Alice Springs. I had booked a trip in a hot air balloon for myself and my two sons, because I thought I'd like to see what it's like. But when I read this, I just knew that I would just have to invent. It's mostly power lines and other balloons. Hell is other balloons.

Ramona Koval: But that opening chapter-everybody I know says that it's the most stunning opening chapter in books that they've read. That was a masterpiece, wasn't it. And to find it in the middle of your writing of the book.

Ian McEwan: I think there's a lot of luck involved. It's a very simple idea. When my friend, my hiking friend, was telling me about this thing he'd read in the paper, he was only halfway through his account and I knew straight away how to use that. And actually that was relatively easy to write. And also, because I'd already written a fair amount of the novel, I knew now I had my real beginning. That would now serve as my beginning and the chapter that was the beginning is now chapter eighteen of the novel, and that could move forward.

But there is a fair amount of luck. Had he not thought to tell me that story, I would not have had that beginning.

Ramona Koval: Once again, they're going on a picnic; they haven't seen each other for a little while, and this extraordinary event happens, which takes them off somewhere else completely, that they wouldn't have been if they hadn't been at that grassy place at that time.

Ian McEwan: Well I don't believe in fate. Partly because I don't believe in God, so I do think life is a matter of tragic and happy accident. I mean the number of times one drives along the road, and you pass the scene of a recent car accident, and you know that-well for a start, the first thought I'm sure all of us have is, it could have been me. And if it had happened ten minutes before and there are dazed people standing beside a road and the police car has not yet come and passers by are already helping, you think, well if I'd not taken that phone call, it could have been my car. And you know the lives right at the roadside have been transformed in an instant. Some have been ended, but others have been transformed in an instant.

And this was not preordained. It's just an accident of where you are, what someone else did; a thousand things contribute. And that randomness-in a sense you could say, well it adds to the meaninglessness of life-but at the same time I think it offers to the novelist enormous opportunities-as it does to the filmmaker-the ways in which lives can be transformed in a moment, and the ways in which, too-and these are the opportunities for the novelist-personality, character, can be explored. It does become the means by which personality is investigated.

Ramona Koval: You're listening to Books and Writing on Radio National, and a conversation with Ian McEwan at Edinburgh International Book Festival. McEwan's novel, Enduring Love also concerns itself with the ideas of rationality and science versus more intuitive ways of thinking. It was a defence of rationality in a way, at least from one protagonist's point of view. Delusional beliefs like the erotic delusion of Jed Parry in the book were explored, and the question raised about, how do you know if you're in love or just simply off your head. I asked Ian McEwan if he believed in falling in love.

Ian McEwan: Yes. And I know that those evolutionary psychology accounts have that quality of 'just so,' but they are intriguing. If we could choose who we could fall in love with, we'd never get around to it.

Ramona Koval: Why?

Ian McEwan: Well, because if it became the slave to our rationality, we'd always think, well is she the wealthiest, more genetically endowed, etcetera ... A rational choice would be there'd bound to be someone better. So much better, in evolutionary terms, if falling in love was out of our hands. Then at least we could get started on providing the next generation. So usefully, I think, there are some things that are not subject to rational choice.

Ramona Koval: That's a very rational way of thinking about falling in love, isn't it?

Ian McEwan: Yes. But look how rationality then generates a very interesting story. I think rationality gets a terrible press in literature. And I blame Mary Shelley and Keats and Blake. They always thought that rationality was sucking something essential and good out of life. And yet I know from-well we all know, surely-that in our personal lives what annoys us is when people are contradictory or inconsistent or say one thing and do another. We require a degree of rationality, even in our most intimate exchanges with people. And I've thought for a long time that I would like to write a novel in which the hero is rather super-endowed with a belief in rationality but he turns out to be right. And the reader, and the police, and his wife, are all wrong. It was something of a counter piece for Black Dogs, in which the central figure in that is someone who is deeply suspicious of the rational. I think we still live in this post-Romantic sense-especially in literature; less in life. It's literature that distorts it. So typically in a novel it's the character who trusts his or her intuition rather than the cold, abstract rationalist who wins through. But that's not my experience, actually. I think so many good moments in life are actually produced by clear thinking. By thinking things through. Those things we value, like justice, are surely products of rationality

So I thought it was time to speak up for it. I mean Frankenstein is the great anti-rational novel. It's such a marvellous novel. It's very hard to write a novel as fine as that in praise of rationality, but still I think one has to have a go.

Ramona Koval: Some of the things you said about cooperative behaviour and finding the person with the best genetic endowment, reminded me of your interest in E. O. Wilson. When I was interested in E. O. Wilson he was a socio-biologist who was studying communities of insects and trying to apply those rules to human beings. Is that what you admired him for?

Ian McEwan: Yes. I think he was much maligned and misunderstood in that book. It was about social insects. Its final chapter simply suggested that we have a nature, that we are not simply blank sheets. We're not tabula rasa. And that part of the adaptive pressures on us, of not just the millennium, but the several million years in which we've not only been hominids but also primates, have been other people, social groups. And social groups have exerted an adaptive pressure on us. We have evolved among each other and we have a social nature. And he was simply suggesting that this is something that could be usefully explored. The stick he got for suggesting that we were not simply a blank slate-he was accused of being a Nazi. The closed minds of some sections of the Left, I think, in the late seventies were pretty horrifying.

Ramona Koval: Because they accused him of saying you were kind or rescued only those people who shared some genetic connection with you.

Ian McEwan: Well there's plenty of evidence that suggests people will go a lot further to defend their child than someone far away whom they can't see. But that's not all it is. There might be that pressure, but you could describe love in evolutionary terms, but still the inside of love, and being in love and what it's like to be loved, are no less stupendous for one finding a history of antecedents for it. And I still think that comes back to this notion-and there are so many instances, that first generation of Romantics that I said I loved, they had a deep distrust of science. Wordsworth said, memorably, that a scientist was someone who would botanise on his mother's grave. A wonderful insult. But perhaps some very interesting flowers would grow on your mother's grave.

Ramona Koval: You think the achievements of scientists and their intellectual gifts rank with the work of literary genius that we often talk about. Who are your favourite scientists?

Ian McEwan: My favourite scientists...well Darwin, I guess. I mean such an interesting man, so-can you hear, through this rain? I can hardly hear myself-Darwin; I think Turing, the mathematician and computer scientist from this century. But actually it's not necessarily the personality of the scientist that interests me, it's just that science itself seems to me a great tribute to human ingenuity. It's a great mistake to exclude ourselves who are not scientists from it.

The other night I went to a most extraordinary event here, to hear Angela Hewitt play the Goldberg Variations in the Usher Hall. 10.30 at night. the place completely packed. And a really electrifying experience. As everyone streamed out, we were all talking about her playing, about Bach, about the Goldberg Variations. I'm sure ninety-nine per cent of us were neither musicians nor composers, and yet we felt perfectly entitled to discuss this fabulous, intricate monument to human ingenuity.

And I think we're entitled to embrace science in exactly the same spirit. It's part of what we've achieved. The closest I ever got to any real sense of the difficulty of science was at A-level I took half-all the arts students were encouraged to do one year's mathematics, even though we were no good at maths. I was pretty hopeless at maths. but the good teacher took us, step by step, through the calculus, and I realised I was at the very roof of my intellectual grasp of something. I've never, ever, before or since understood something so difficult as something that Newton and Leidenitz invented two hundred and fifty years ago. And the teacher was very good, he said, Is everyone with me so far? and half of us would say, No. So we'd go back, and he'd gradually take us all, finally, and you'd feel, if I sneeze, the whole thing's going to go...

And I realised what a lucky life us liberal arts know-nothings have. We never really had to understand anything very difficult. And it was at that point I thought that someone had invented this. Differential equations-the mathematics that would show you the way something changed-to examine something as it changed, seemed to me like a sort of logarithmic quantum leap of the imagination. And I think one has to take it on as part of a celebration of our own ingenuity. I take a humanist view of science.

Ramona Koval: You wouldn't be attracted to a god who was a mathematician?

Ian McEwan: I'm not attracted to any god. None of them. There are about seven thousand, at the last count, of gods around the world. They can't all be wrong-oh, they can't all be right. No I think mathematics is a-whether it describes something that's already there-and why is the physical world describable by maths is some delicious mystery.

Ramona Koval: Ian McEwan, warming up a cool summer's day in Edinburgh. His latest novel is Atonement, and it's published by Vintage.

Publications

Title: Atonement

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Vintage