Ian+McEwan+Interview

Interview

//Upon the American release of// Atonement//, British author Ian McEwan spent a few moments answering our questions about the book, his research, and his life as a writer. Here's what he said.//


 * After its having received such praise in England, we're delighted to have //Atonement// finally released here in the U.S. Congratulations. Have you noticed a large difference between British and American audiences in the reception of your books?**

Not really. I mean, I suppose I'm far better known here [in England] than in the States, and [my books are] studied at school here, and have been for many years. Kids doing their high school reading exams often end up writing about //The Child in Time//, and more recently, //Enduring Love//, and I think, apparently, //Atonement// is going to be absorbed into the school curriculum as well. [In England], I meet people who had to read me at school 12 years ago and have then remained faithful ever since. But my readership in the States as I experience it through giving readings in bookshops -- it always surprises me that the people I'm reading to have been reading me for so long. But not because they were made to at school. And they actually know my stuff in ways that I find incredibly flattering. But it's not a mass audience. It's a sort of educated, book-loving ... bookstore-haunting kind of readership.


 * Your last book was //Amsterdam//, and that was very different in style. Could you compare the experiences of writing these books?**

I was a little cautious after //Amsterdam// because I had read in so many places that anyone who wins the Booker Prize never goes on to write a decent novel. So, there was a bit of "Watch me, you bastards ..." about this. I was very careful. //Amsterdam// itself was much more like a holiday written straight after the intensity of finishing //Enduring Love//, and it was really kind of a jeu d'esprit. It was a novel that I sketched out on the back of an envelope around about the time I was halfway through //Enduring Love//, and it's the only time I've only started a novel with one just finished behind me. Usually I have to let some life go by, I have to live through my own changes, become slightly a different person. This was very much the case with finishing //Amsterdam// and starting //Atonement//. I spent a year just writing little sketches, going for long walks, sitting with my feet up on the radiator staring out the window, writing random pretend-openings of books I knew I'd never continue. Turning down loads of writing commissions, and yet actually not producing anything, and feeling vaguely guilty for it -- just waiting. After about 15 months, I found I'd written a couple of paragraphs which I knew had taken me into the novel I was going to write. And it was just this girl stepping into the room with a bunch of wildflowers. The room has a certain kind of elegance, there's a young man outside she wants to see -- but doesn't want to see -- and there is a vase that she is looking for on a low table by a french window. And I don't know why, really, and I certainly didn't know why at the time, but I thought, This is a toehold for me. This is the beginning of whatever it is I'm going to write.


 * From this first idea, how did //Atonement// evolve?**

Well, I'd had a number of separate ambitions and thoughts about possible novels. Graham Greene has a rather good phrase for things that you carry around in your mind. He used to call them "pools" -- like a swimming pool, or like a spring. And the work of starting or even continuing a novel was like digging trenches between these pools. The pools were, in his terms, sort of the inspired scenes. Well, I'm not sure that I'd call mine so much as "inspired;" they were just sort of vague ambitions. One of them was to write a love story. I had this thought as to whether it was possible, at the end of the 20th century, for the literary novel to explore the subject of love in quite the way it was automatically a subject in the 19th century. I mean, have we wrapped ourselves in so much irony and self-reference that we can no longer simply tell a love story? I'd also, for many years, been very drawn to the underlying idea of Jane Austen's novel //Northanger Abbey// in which a young woman's reading of gothic novels causes her to misunderstand everything around her. And I've often thought that I would rather like someone with imagination to cause some sort of havoc. I suppose, too -- people often say to me, well, you've written about children so much in your fiction. And I would say, have I //really//? There's a disappeared child in //A Child in Time//, and there are some grotesques in my short stories, and //The Cement Garden// is many, many years ago. I thought I'd never really seriously immersed myself properly in trying to make a fully rounded character out of a child, allowing myself all the resources of a complex adult vocabulary to describe a child's feelings. Which is what James does in //What Maisie Knew//. But having all those sort of vague ambitions -- I didn't even know that those various thoughts belonged in the same novel. I mean, I didn't know it until I finished, really.


 * What are you reading now?**

Well, I read //Embers//, that Hungarian novel, by Marai, which I really loved. I'm rereading, because my son is doing it for his exams, //The Lord of the Flies//. I'm reading a book about scientific equations, which makes a case that their power is in their beauty, not only in their predictive qualities. //It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science//. I'm reading some poetry, I'm about to reread //Henry IV, Part One//, again, just to be able to engage my son, who is a somewhat reluctant reader and has got to do some exams on these subjects.


 * You said you usually take some time to become a slightly different person between novels. Looking through your earlier books, this personal evolution is evident -- you're definitely not an author who repeats himself. Where do you find yourself now?**

Well, I mean, I'm back in that stage, now. I'm not writing. I've written a couple of lectures, one on Edmund Wilson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You sort of have to pretend each novel is your first. And there is always an element of rebirth about it. You can't go back, you can't do the same thing again. It often takes a while -- and I know many novelists say this -- for the echoes to die away of the thing you started. Often you find in the early months other ideas come, and you realize they're just other unwritten chapters to the book you've just finished, really.

//(Elise Vogel)//