Apr 2004 - Issue 4

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An Interview with Ian McEwan

One of the finest English writers alive, Ian McEwan speaks to Ramona Koval about writing, morality, science and love.

Ramona Koval: Ian McEwan’s novels and stories have won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Whitbread Prize and the Booker Prize, and his latest book, Atonement, is widely 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.
His book 'Atonement', is a story about problems of perception, amongst other things, and attributing meanings to events: the mistakes one makes when trying to work out what other people want or are really saying. I asked him if he is rather bewildered in the world.
Ian McEwan: Somewhere along the way in 'Atonement', Briony makes what she thinks is a real discovery about fiction, which is that a lot of the problems in life occur through misunderstanding and I think there are two ways to regard language 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 foul of each other, simply through misunderstanding. Atonement 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. 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 gets everything wrong.

Ramona Koval: Briony is thinking about whether other people feel as real to themselves as the 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: 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 little leaps and starts— that other people are as alive to themselves as you are to yourself. It’s quite a startling discovery. I remember, round about the age of ten, having 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. 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 marveling at it. Her writing of the excruciating play, her use of big, clumsy words:

‘This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella, who ran off with an extrinsic fella.’

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 abuse the dictionary in quite the same way. But part of the pleasures of writing—which I think are under-emphasized 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 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.

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, exist independently. I have a conversation with you and you’re talking about Briony as if she were a real person. And that transition from privacy to public space for characters, I’ve never quite lost my pleasure in that moment.

Ramona Koval: Your description of Briony’s reaction when she loses control of her play, of the casting amongst her cousins, of her impulse ‘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.
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 mother’s typewriter 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. 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 marvelous 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 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. So I think the trick, as with many good English teachers, is to say this is not about being solemn, this is about pleasure. Don’t be intimidated, you can own it too. You’re allowed in. And that was the thrill.

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