Ian McEwan on Imagining the World After Disaster

0:02This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The British author Ian McEwen has spent the last half century creating memorable characters who seem ordinary at first until their lives and maybe their minds start to unravel after some fateful event. In McEwen's early novel The Comfort of Strangers, a couple whose relationship has grown stale are befriended by another couple who turn out to be psychopaths of the highest order. In Atonement from 2001, a man is falsely accused of rape, and that sets him on a path to prison and eventually a lonely death.

0:48Early on, reviewers had nicknamed McEwen Ian Macabre. Unfair, perhaps, but these are not books that usually end happily. McEwen has done something a little different in his latest book, What We Can Know. It's a kind of speculative fiction set around a century in the future, and things are certainly looking dystopian. And in the wrecked world, the plot follows a scholar searching for a long-lost poem, an artifact from the time that we're living in now. I spoke with Ian McEwen at an event for the 92nd Street Y in New York City. So if I were interviewing a songwriter, the idiot question would be, what comes first, the lyrics or the music.

1:32When you're writing a novel, what generally comes first in this, and in this case, the thematic concerns that you want to get at or some version of the music or the voice of the book? It varies. I've got awfully good over the years at not writing. And I quite like an extended period between books and keeping alive a notebook which offers the liberation of longhand. To have a pen in your hand as being back at school is wonderful. And I sort of dreamily write into that with the special freedom of knowing that no one will ever see it. And things that have been on my mind that seem completely disparate might suddenly converge.

2:24So what would that notebook look like for this novel? What were the concerns that were running through it? This novel is an example. I read a wonderful long poem by an English poet called John Fuller in a difficult form called a corona. It's 15 sonnets. I won't go into all the rules, but it swept me away. But I didn't think I was ever going to be writing about such a poem. And also I was interested in discussions taking place in philosophy about what are our moral duties to the future. And I was also following a rather wonderful outfit, the Long Now Foundation, started up by Stuart Brand, who wrote years back, The Whole Earth Catalogue.

3:08And it was about sending basic information to the future in case civilization collapsed. And how many of these things could you do yourself? How to make soap? How to make a three-crop rotation? Germ theory of disease? How to make glass? And further on from that, and suddenly these two things began to merge, the poem and then the issue about the future. So different things float together. Now, what looms over the book immediately is, although it dawns on us slowly in its accretion of details, is that the world has just about avoided the fate of ending entirely. Yeah, that's my optimism. Yeah. It's what brings us out on an evening.

4:06Why would you have anything else other than pessimism at this moment? Have you been feeling gloomy, gloomier than usual? My guess about the future, so I mean I'm drawing a line from the first 25, because this is a history of the 21st century in part. So if I look at the first 25 years, my guess is that we will limp from crisis to crisis with a couple of catastrophes thrown in. Assuming we don't have an all-out nuclear exchange, a nuclear winter and civilization at an end, My assumption is with a lot of trouble and pain and heartache, we will scrape through somehow. I mean, one of the things that happens in 2036 is a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.

4:56I love this word, limited nuclear war. Only 10 million people die. Diplomacy rushes in, both sides pull back in horror. and then somewhat later Israel and Saudi Arabia gang up on Iran hoping to annihilate it before it could develop a nuclear weapon only to discover that it actually has a couple. So there's another nuclear exchange. Now the good thing about all this is that so much dust is put up in the air that the earth cools by about two degrees and we get another shot at doing something serious about climate change. So this is what I call nuanced optimism.

5:45I think it's fair to say that in certainly the first half of your career, I would never have thought of you as a particularly overtly political novelist, much less a didactic novelist. But in this work and in some ones of more recent vintage as well, things like climate change, global catastrophe, politics loom very, very present and large. Do you feel, and I think a lot of novelists run away from this, and they think it's for all kinds of reasons, do you feel that you're instructing or moralizing as well as entertaining and other, do you have other motives in mind? No, I don't. I myself don't like moralizing novels.

6:40I think they really do take the heart out of them. but there are things that you want to speculate. Even novels like George Eliot or Tolstoy that have moralizing or philosophizing dimensions to them, you find boring? Well, I love Middlemarch, maybe one of the best novels in English out of England. There's a very good case to be made for that. But generally what draws me in now, and I suppose I want to write the novels I want to read, I want some writer to give me back something about now that we can, as it were, jointly, him writing, she writing, me reading, about who we are, human nature under the conditions of modernity.

7:27Do you find those thin on the ground in contemporary fiction? I do a bit. More writing about the self rather than the greater world? Yeah, I was about to say that there are rather too many novels hiding their poor prose behind a character. for example whereas i mean um i like something declarative boldness uh naming things i mean and i think that a younger generation rather lost its ability to do that but i think it's coming back but of course the pursuit i mean we must never lose sight in in literary fiction the pursuit has also got to be of pleasure. So the moralizing, no, but trying to understand, you know, just taking a stab of the feel of now.

8:21Saul Billow was very good at it. John Updike, Tony Morrison. Lots of people have done it in our lifetimes and I admire them profoundly. Did you feel that way as a young novelist, this dimension of the social novel or sort of a realistic compendia like something like Trollope or Dickens? No, I started off as a writer of short stories and I did a very long apprenticeship with stories and they were dark, weird, perverse, as I was constantly being told. And on my second novel, when I'd finished that, I thought I'd written myself into so dark a corner that I had to take a rest from fiction because somehow I wasn't able to, I'm not communicating to myself even all the things that else, the other things of my life, the music, the history, the science.

9:18What book represented to you the final one in that phase? Comfort of Strangers. I often wonder whether it was the novel that depressed me or whether I was so depressed I was writing a very depressing novel that made me feel even worse. So I had to get out. out into the world. And fortunately, a young director who's been a friend all my life came and asked me if I'd like to write a television play. Wonderful, to collaborate, to get out. And then we wrote a movie together. So Comfort of Strangers is the last one in that. And what then moves, propels you forward? So three years later, I went back to the novel and I wrote a novel called The Child in Time, which was overtly strayed into some politics but in an exploratory way.

10:09I wasn't interested in instructing anyone on anything. And then I wrote a novel about the Cold War which was called The Innocent and that was set in Berlin in 1955. I'm very proud of the last page of that novel because I finished in June 1989 and the last sentence is the two characters, man and woman, have to meet because he knows the wall is going to come down soon. I was ahead of the CIA and actually no one was more surprised, I have to admit, when in November the 9th I found myself, you know, at Potts Damer Plant. You're now 77. Yeah. Do you feel it's harder or easier to work now? You have the practice of 50 years of writing and at the same time, you know, God knows, you know, I'm right there behind you, things don't necessarily get easier.

11:08They got easier for me because they were so hard in the beginning. I was such a paranoid writer and I would write a sentence and stare at it and think, is it doing what I want to do? Is it laughing behind my back as it were? Is there a dangler in there somewhere? I inched forward. I was explaining, describing this process some years ago. Someone in the audience said, well, you know, how many words do you write a day? And I said, well, I'd be happy somewhere between 500 and 1 ,000 regularly. But we were in Italy somewhere, in the south, and they misheard me, and they wrote down that I wrote 15 words a day.

12:01So it's only going to get easier. This is out there in the internet. It can never be expunged. However bad it was at the beginning, I managed more than 15 words a day. But to answer that question, seriously, I've sort of got in my stride. I've got a stronger sense of flow. So those precious moments that happen with all writers, one hopes, they're very rare, but those two or three hours where you just barely know you exist, and you're neither happy, you have no emotional tone, you are completely the thing that you're doing, you're absolutely lost to it, to time, to memory, just this task. Those are the moments I still live for.

12:53So you experience writing, at least some of the time, as pleasure itself. Absolutely. Because most writers, as you know, not only experience it very often as pain, but they revel and love to talk about the pain of writing, and would they like having written, perhaps, but not writing itself. I don't believe a word of it. I think there isn't a nicer life, really, to spend. I mean, every novel is like going to university, as it were, three or four years, total absorption, and yet you're still free if someone phones you on a Monday afternoon and say, you know, come for a long walk in the woods. You can do it.

13:38Because of the subject matter that you're learning, you're learning about neurosurgery for Saturday, or you're learning about, you know, global politics, or a particular poem for this novel, or is it the matter of craft? I'm not saying there aren't days when I get stuck, but I don't believe in writer's block. I believe in creative hesitation. If you just rename it, you can get off the hook of this, call it pain if you like, but it's self-inflicted, I think. It generally, as long as you can live by your writing, because an awful lot of writers have to do other things and teach and so on, but as long as you can live by writing, it is, I think, one of the most extraordinary luxuries and privileges that you could have as a working person.

14:32No office, no boss, and a lifetime exploring what you want to explore. I mean, it's not as if every book is the same. Every book is another voyage and I used to love research and attaching myself to a surgeon was probably the most intense I mean I I'd go right right with the hospital each morning six o 'clock go and scrub up with the rest of them I put on a green gown we'd sweep down corridors and then we'd go into the operating theater and work would begin the very first time I watched a brain exposed. I was close to tears. I thought, I'd rather be here seeing this than on another planet. Here it was, just over a kilo of matter.

15:27And, you know, I was already a materialist, as it were, philosophically then, but still, and in fact, maybe it was only because I was. I just thought, how amazing that this is full of desires and regrets and memories and intentions and dreams, and it's just this matter that gives rise to mind, and the mind is so extraordinarily wondrous.

15:55I'm speaking with the novelist Ian McEwen, and we'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

16:11This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick, and I'm talking with the novelist Ian McEwen. McEwen's new book, a terrific one, is called What We Can Know, and it's set in a future ravaged by climate change and nuclear war, and the characters look back at our time and wonder how we could possibly have been so complacent. The scenario is grim, and yet one reviewer in the New York Times wrote, it gave me so much pleasure, I sometimes felt like laughing. Let's return to my conversation with Ian McEwen.

16:46Ian, one of the elements of the book, and there are so many in this kind of very crowded universe of a novel, is technology. And in my job, you know, this phone, this thing, is very present, and so much so that if I'm at home trying to read a novel, I have to put it in the kitchen or something. and in modern life there are many calls on one's attention many machines and that'll only get sleeker and more discreet and more consuming at the same time is the realist novel which you've practiced for for so so long and at such an extraordinary level is it in danger of not being up to the job of describing modern life and is it up to the job of holding the attention of the modern reader?

17:38I think that the realist novel well-written is our best instrument of understanding who we are. It's worked out conventions through the giants, from Jane Austen through Flaubert, Tolstoy, and particularly Joyce and George Eliot, of representing the flow of thought and feeling and of the representing the fine print of what happens between individuals and all of those individuals to their surroundings their family their society we have not yet found a compelling replacement although i accept that it gets harder and harder to give up those 20 or 30 hours to to to read a serious novel very depressing poll came out recently in the States.

18:32In 10 years, the number of adults reading for pleasure has dropped by 40%. You know, that's dismaying. At the same time, I go to a lot of literary festivals, it's pouring with rain, it's a Wednesday morning, it's at half past 11. But those are the self-selecting... But there's a lot of them. Yes. A lot of them. You do a lot of research for certain kinds of books, and research, as it were, comes to you life, one of the experiences that's come to you and found its way into fiction is that your mother suffered from masculine dementia, which you described as, and everybody would describe as harrowing.

19:15But artists are magpies, they make use of what's in front of them. How did you make use of that experience? Well, in this novel, there is a long account. I mean, it's a very important part of the novel. The poet's wife, Vivian Blundie, before she's married to the poet, looks after her first husband. He's a violin maker, splendid person, rather the last sort of physical shape of a guy you'd expect to be doing such fiddly work. And he gets Alzheimer's and she cares for him. The central feature of the illness is the increasing loss of memory, as everyone knows. And it seemed right to be putting this in here because we're talking about history.

20:16And when someone loses their memory, they've basically lost their identity. And I wanted to explore this on the personal level, surrounded by reflections on the nature of history, because we as a society desperately need a memory. And I was very sad when history as a subject was sort of downgraded in the central curriculum in Britain. I thought we really want societies where everybody has at least some kind of thread of a narrative, if not of the last 800 years, maybe the last 100 years. and one of the reasons I think we find ourselves in dangerous political times is that those people who either were participants in the second world war or grew up in its shadow and were trying to find the peace across nations that would hold and would not allow us to do this ever again, all those people have gone.

21:29They've all gone. And the extraordinary thing about the Second World War is that far more civilians died than combatants. And estimates vary, but getting on for 90 million deaths. If you take the view, as some historians do, that the First World War and the second or really just one long war with a 20-year peace, then of course that figure goes up considerably more. That was such a shock to the generation, not only in it, but shaped by it and growing up with it at their back. So what happens when a society gets Alzheimer's, is my worry, and becomes sort of reckless and ignorant and mouthy. Power is difficult and needs its constraints.

22:30And it seems to be getting forgotten. I'm not saying it's forgotten, but it's getting sort of subdued in our political conversation or our social conversation. a question from the audience in Atonement one of your characters says that the novelist is in essence God do you agree? well I don't believe in God but I know what's meant by that

23:05well here's the thing I got involved in making movies quite a lot and when what's at issue is one of my own movies and you're sitting around a table with 12 people and they're talking about one of the characters and someone says, no, but I don't think this character would say that. And I realized that I was God and now I'm a kind of putty, a cherubim maybe. I've been really knocked off my perch because I'm having to negotiate what people say and do in a movie Finally, Atonement had a female narrator and you write from a woman's perspective in much of this book and I know that you're tuned into lots of things but maybe one of them is the academic argument that writing from a woman's perspective for a man or a white person writing from a black person's perspective is in some circles considered outré or verboten, that you shouldn't do it for moral reasons or political reasons.

24:19And others would argue that that's exactly what the novel is about, is exercise in empathy and imagination and much more. Tell me about that. Well, the reduction to absurdity of that kind of point of view is you can only write about yourself. And lots of people do that, of course. It's such a nonsense that I can hardly bring myself to address it without falling out of my chair.

24:52I'll strap you in. Okay, I mean, let's just say away with ye, you know. It's nonsense. And anyway, who are these people telling you what to write? Guardians of the Culture. Have you ever felt in your pretty long career as a writer cultural pushback, political pushback on your work? No. I seem to have dodged that one somehow. I have written lots of women or children. But I... Well, the first thing I think is if you make a list of all the differences in men and women, it would be shorter than all the similarities. Okay, so humans. There are other humans. I just try to write them as sympathetically as I can.

25:50And that's the only, I think, as readers. And one can only be critics rather than commissars in this. I hate it. It happens sometimes in France a lot. I'm sitting on stage with some other novelist, and he or she is saying, the novel today must something, something, something. I can't bear that kind of talk. It's Stalinist. You need the novel to flourish. It wants its readers, and it must have air to breathe. Ian, finally, you certainly don't believe in God. You've been on stages and had that discussion with Richard Dawkins and engaged with that very thoroughly. When you're dead, you're dead, I think is part of that theology.

26:38Do you care about the afterlife of your books or not? Well, I care about it at the same time knowing that I can't do a thing about it. So, yes, I would like to be read. but I notice you know it's quite a bad career move for novelists to die and it does seem to hurt it does and what happens is I think they sort of sink into some kind of pit and then some of them crawl out of it about 10 or 15 years later and get maybe discovered by if we can say generations are these days really shocked up I look at John Updike for one, very close to The New Yorker. And I think about, well, there are a lot of books, but those stories in the first half of his career, certainly, and then about certainly a half dozen novels, the Robert novels, and much else.

27:38And I don't see people reading them at all. And then I think maybe you're right, that something will happen at some point. With uptake, it most certainly will. And same with Saul Bellow. Norman Mailer, completely gone. And so don't die. Good advice from Ian McEwen. Thank you very much. And thank you all.

28:08Author Ian McEwen, his novel What We Can Know came out in September. We spoke at an event recently in front of a live audience organized by the 92nd Street Y.

28:22I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I hope you had a great holiday. Hope you enjoyed the show.

28:48David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May. And special thanks this week to Catherine Sterling, Amanda Miller, Julia Rothschild, Nico Brown, and Michael Etherington. And thanks also to Pat Thomas and Terry Chun at the 92nd Street Y. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

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