Ian McEwan on Imagining the World After Disaster

This 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. Early 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. When 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.

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 is like being back at school. It's 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.

So 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 catalog

and 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 on 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 the note, and 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.

Why 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. I 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 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.

I 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.

And 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 moralizing as well as entertaining and other do you have other motives in mind

no I don't I I myself don't like moralizing novels I think they really do take the heart out of them but there are things that you want to do even even even novels like George Eliot or Tolstoy that have moralizing or

philosophizing dimensions to them you you find boring well I 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. Do 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 rather too many novels hiding their poor prose behind a character,

for example.

Whereas, I mean,

I like something declarative, boldness,

naming things.

And I think that a younger generation rather lost its ability to to do that but i think it's coming back but of course the pursuit i mean we must never lose sight in 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

um did you know

was very good at it john updy was it tony morrison but i mean they were 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

the sort of

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 was not communicating to myself even all the things that

else, the other things of my life, the music, the history, the science.

What 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

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,

I wasn't interesting 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 we 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 Potsdamer Planck 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.

They 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.

So 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.

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, or absolutely lost to it, to time, to memory, just this task.

Those are the moments I still live with. So 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

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.

Because 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. No 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'd go arrive at the hospital each morning, six o'clock, go and scrub up with the rest of them. I'd put on a green gown.
We'd sweep down corridors,

and then we'd go into the operating theatre 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.

And, 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

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

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This 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.

Ian, 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 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?

I 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

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 read a serious novel. Very depressing poll came out recently in the States.

In 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 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 through life.

One of the experiences that's come to you and found its way into fiction is that your mother suffered from mascular dementia, which you described as, and everybody would describe as harrowing.

But artists are magpies. They make use of what's in front of them.
How do you make use of that experience?

Well,

in this novel, there is long account. I mean,

it's a very important part of the novel.

The poet's

wife, Vivian Blundy, before she's married to the poet, looks after her first husband.

He's a violin maker, a 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. And 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 hundred 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. They'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 are 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.

And 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.

Well, here's the thing, is I've 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 realize

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 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 utre or verboten,

that you shouldn't do it for moral reasons or political reasons. And 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.

I'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? I mean...

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.
And that's the only, I think as readers, And

one can only be sort of 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 the stages and had that discussion with Richard Dawkins and engage with that very thoroughly.

When you're dead, you're dead, I think, is part of that theology.

Do 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.

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 types of things.

I look at John Updike

for one. He's very close to the New Yorker.

And I think about,

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 Robbitt novels, and much else.

And 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.

So don't die.

Good advice for me and McEwen. Thank you very much, and thank you all.

Author 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.

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

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Botine 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 Torina Endowment Fund.

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