He would rather trash politicians than watch trashy TV. But how does our greatest living novelist unwind? Not easily…
As well as the hundreds of books on the shelves there are, on various other tables and surfaces in this high-ceilinged drawing room, further neat piles of books. It is as if Ian McEwan, the man who lives here, needs them to be within reach at all times, lifebuoys to a nervous swimmer.
But there are also hints of a life beyond books, a hinterland: the Bridget Riley paintings that frame the fireplace, the electric guitar on a stand and the drinks, a collection of bottles on a lacquered Chinese cabinet. One of them is Johnnie Walker Black Label, the favoured poison of his friend Christopher Hitchens. It is half empty, or half full, depending. “That? Yes, that’s his. No one else drinks it. I hope he will one day come back to finish it.”
The Hitch has cancer, a subject he has written about with great poignancy, wit and grace for Vanity Fair. “He still drinks, but more wine than Scotch. Because he’s so oxlike in his strength I don’t think he knew how to be ill. I’m going over to Washington to see him next week.”
You imagine that Martin Amis will also have a half full bottle of Black Label somewhere in his house, also keeping vigil. There are other members of this gang, such as Salman Rushdie and Richard Dawkins, but McEwan, Amis and the Hitch form the unholy trinity, as reflected in a photograph taken about five years ago in Uruguay. McEwan has a brotherly arm around Hitchens’ shoulder.
There must have been many philosophical discussions among these friends over the years about the nature of mortality, but now that one of them is having to confront his own, does that change the terms of the debate, from the abstract to the concrete?
“Well we’re all getting to that age, late fifties and early sixties, when people get ill. It all begins to feel horribly finite. But I don’t think it becomes harder to talk or write about. If anything it becomes harder to avoid. It becomes an inevitable subject, as it became for Roth and Bellow and Updike.”
At 62, Ian McEwan at least has the consolation of being described as our greatest living novelist, thanks to his having pulled off the unusual feat of writing literary novels that sell like commercial ones, by the million, most notably with Atonement in 2001.
He began as a writer of short stories, having his first collection, First Love, Last Rites, published in his mid twenties. It won the Somerset Maugham award in 1976 and, since then, his books have won just about every award going, including the Whitbread for The Child in Time (1987) and the Booker for Amsterdam (1998). His latest, Solar, is a little about global warming and a lot about a womanising Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.
More typical of his oeuvre is Saturday (2005), a meditation on the post-9/11 world, one that is far from comic. Its protagonist, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, lives in a large Georgian town house that is based on this one, overlooking the same square in central London. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
McEwan’s is an idiosyncratic literary voice, but if he can be compared to anyone it is the American novelist John Updike. They were friends and Updike’s death two years ago affected McEwan deeply.
“I did feel something really dropped out of my world. It was the death of an irreplaceable consciousness. He was such a great namer of things. From the time I read Rabbit Run at the age of 18, he had always been there. Always more essays, more poetry, more stories. I went to stay with him with my wife in 2008 and had a really nice time and we were making arrangements to go again.”
At least with Updike McEwan has three shelves of his books. “Yes, in that sense he is still a living presence for me. But like this idea of living on in the memories of others, that’s no real life for a fellow, is it?”
So it’s no consolation for him to think he might live on through his work? “Not really.”
What about through his genes, his two sons? “Yes, but you get watered down with each generation. Your grandchildren will have a quarter of your genes and their children an eighth. It’s a fade out.”
McEwan of course, like The Hitch and Dawkins, is an avowed atheist and when we talk about the Christian belief in an afterlife he says: “Do you think they really believe it? I’ve been to funerals where I was pretty sure the majority were atheists and they listened to the vicar say that the deceased had gone to a better place and everyone’s toes curled.
“We can’t prove it’s not so, but the chances that it is are rather meagre. If they did believe you all meet up again in this big theme park in the sky why were they crying? How can you say you believe in the afterlife and weep at the finality of death?”
There may be no immortality through books, but does he ever feel the urge to account for his life in a memoir, as several of his friends have done? “I would love to write a book as good as Experience, or Hitch-22, but I keep drifting into another novel. I’ve got notes.”
Is his “Ian McEwan shelf” an extended memoir, the story of his literary life in several volumes? “It’s a metafiction, I suppose. The row of books an author ends up with. It is not something you could have plotted, one leading to the other. Knowing that it’s finite, knowing that you might be two thirds of the way through, or even that you might be at the end now because you may run out of time and fall ill, or be knocked down by a bus, that’s a strange feeling.”
Like Hitchens and Amis, McEwan has had episodes in his life that have been stranger than fiction. In 2003, he discovered he had a long lost brother.
“Yes, and he wrote a book about it called Complete Surrender which was what the advert in the paper had said when he was put up for adoption. That had my father’s fingerprints all over it. ‘Complete surrender’ being a military term.” (His father, a domineering man, had been an army major who had been commissioned from the ranks.)
But would there also, I ask, be episodes in his life which he found too painful to write about? He is happily married now to the journalist Annalena McAfee, but there was an earlier marriage to Penny Allen which ended acrimoniously. The acrimony indeed made headlines in 1999 when Allen absconded with their youngest son to France, McEwan having been given sole custody of both their sons.
In the ensuing proceedings at the High Court in London, Allen was criticised by the judge for having conducted a “vitriolic campaign” against McEwan, and was barred from speaking publicly about their relationship. McEwan, for his part, was commended as “a model of courtesy and restraint”.
“Yeah well that would have to be dealt with if I were to write a memoir,” he says now. “I don’t think it would be too painful personally, it’s just I feel that since I’m the one who has access to all the channels of communication it would be unbalanced and unfair to use them. Also I don’t like reading people moaning on about their divorces. Funny how you always hear the version of the good person. Yet there are always two sides.”
One event I’d like to read about in his memoir, I say, is the fatwa; when it was issued Salman Rushdie took refuge in McEwan’s cottage in the Cotswolds. “Well it wasn’t my cottage. We were borrowing it from friends. I don’t think I ever admired a man more than him that night because it was so fresh and frightening as it was unfolding. We listened to the news together over breakfast the next morning and he was the lead item. Salman’s writing a memoir of the fatwa now.”
I guess for his generation that was when they were forced to face up to the meaning of Islamofascism. “Yes, that was why we fell out with parts of the Left. Salman’s experience was chapter one and 9/11 was chapter two.
“We had already seen the difficulties of reconciling freedom of expression with inclusivity and pluralism. The Left, or at least the SWP, were aligning themselves with Islamism because they saw them as the shock troops of anti-Americanism.”
Rattling the cage of the unreconstructed Left does seem to have become a hobby of McEwan’s. When I meet him he has just stepped off a plane from Israel where he has been accepting the Jerusalem Prize, much to the annoyance of the pro-Palestinian Left in this country.
As it turned out, he wanted to use the platform to have a go at his hosts, the Israelis. “I’m not a very political person actually. I found myself standing with this speech burning a hole in my pocket, talking to the mayor who I know is quite a tough guy and Shimon Peres. I thought how did I get myself into this? Not looking forward to this at all.”
When you go to a place like Israel though, he adds, it does affect your writing. “There’s only one subject in Israel. It’s a place fatally lacking in small talk, and I mean that as a compliment. I re-read the thing I am working on on the plane last night and it left me cold. Suddenly it didn’t look as interesting.”
Can he say what it’s about? “It’s too fragile to talk about. I might talk it out of existence. But it’s historical. Set in the Seventies.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if, before he gets to work properly on that, he feels the urge to write about the Arab Spring. His fiction, after all, often inhabits the space where public events overlap with private lives. And he is gripped by the rolling news coverage at the moment, not least because part of his childhood was spent in Libya.
“My expertise on Libya is limited by the fact that I haven’t been there since 1960,” he says. “But what a brute. I always thought Gaddafi was a vicious, crazy person. That footage of him making his long, rambling speech as he stands by the ruins left from the American bombing, that’s my old primary school. That’s where I went to school from six to 11 and he’s made it his headquarters.”
It is understandable that he doesn’t like talking about a book that is in its embryonic stages, but what about books that are finished? In his preface to A Move Abroad (1983) he wrote about the sense of betrayal he felt towards his books when he talked about them on publicity tours, becoming “practised at a certain kind of wind storm of words, a self-protecting blather”.
Does he still resent talking about his books? “I don’t resent it at all and for the first few months after publication I am a sincere double glazing salesman. I’m engaged, but inevitably repetition dulls that. On the positive side it does let you let go of a book, somewhere among all those explanations lies a useful death.”
In the film A Ploughman’s Lunch, written by McEwan, there is a scene in which two characters at a poetry reading mock a member of the audience for asking the poet where he gets his ideas. I tell McEwan I remember him giving a reading in 1986 and the first question afterwards was… where do you get your ideas? He answered politely on that occasion, but does he feel vague contempt for such questions?
“No, I feel very protective of anyone who asks a stupid question. I can’t bear it when other people laugh at them. We were in Dublin about five years ago and a girl stood up and said ‘What’s it like to be you?’ Everyone laughed at her and she blushed. I said it’s a very good question for a novelist because what it’s like to be someone is at the heart of what we do. Actually I don’t remember this happening, but Annalena does and now the memory has been planted as if it is my own.”
He says that when you agree to do a book tour you enter an agreement. “You have to give yourself to it and it is a self-selected group. You are animated by the good will. The people who loathe you aren’t there.”
Speaking of which, there was a rather bitchy piece about him in the Evening Standard last year, about there being a McEwan backlash. “Yes I saw that.”
Was it motivated by jealousy, does he suppose? “I think they were getting people to say what were the books of the decade. So inevitably someone said the worst book was Atonement and then they found some other examples of people saying that online and ran them all together, very kindly. An example of the road rage you get on the internet. Do you ever read the comment threads under your articles on the web?”
“God no! Never go below.”
Zadie Smith, among others, has referred to a certain writing style as being McEwanesque. What does he take that to mean? “I suppose it once would have meant weird, psychotic violence and the macabre. What do you think it means?”
An accumulation of detail. A certain realism. A belief that anything has the potential to become interesting if you examine it closely enough.
And there’s often a random event that acts as a pivotal moment for the characters, and they have to live with its consequences.
“But doesn’t all fiction have that? If you inhabit your own mind you feel free to do anything. We know what we mean by Pinteresque and Kafkaesque but I don’t really know what McEwanesque means. Perhaps it just means I have a name ending in an open vowel sound.”
He heads off to make us both mugs of tea and when he comes back he is holding something he has just opened in the post. It is a card with a black-and-white photograph on it of a child pushing a pram. Beside the child is a man in African dress. “Your starter for 10. Who’s that?”
I examine it. “You? As a child in Libya?”
“Richard Dawkins. It’s him as a child in Kenya. It’s an invitation to his 70th birthday party. Such a strange picture.”
It occurs to me that the term McEwanesque might apply to his life as much as to his work. He seems to regard the world with a mixture of wry amusement and bird-like curiosity. He also seems to be a methodical man, deliberate and unhurried. Indeed he tells me, rather surprisingly, that he is a slow reader, 30 pages an hour.
One imagines he’s not much given to frivolity. In fact, I say, I have an image of him gliding from one Hampstead dinner party to another, all fine wine and cerebral conversation.
Does he ever slum it intellectually? Watch My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding on telly while eating a Big Mac? “Er, I don’t eat Big Macs. Where do I let my hair down? Walking in the country with friends is where I feel completely free. I’ve never had a great taste, as Martin and Hitch have, for seeking out low culture. Violent films and so on.”
Or trying out a brothel in the name of research? “Yes, but they did that a long time ago. I occasionally watch a football match on television, but I cannot bear the commercials. I watch The Wire but I suppose that is considered high culture. I can never knuckle down to reading all the way through The Sun, as Martin can. That for me would be such an effort.”
He stares unseeingly out of the window. “I like the picture you paint of my life of cerebral conversation and fine wine but it’s not quite like that. I do like to go to a bar and listen to bands play the blues. That is an intense pleasure for me. I like to be 12 feet from the band, not in a seat, near the bar, beer in hand.”
So that’s what the electric guitar is for, the one in the corner of this room? “Actually it was a 50th birthday present from my wife. I had every intention of learning how to play it but I never seem to have had the time.”
Ah yes, time. In his early novels, it was often presented as something elusive and protean, a McEwanesque conceit. As he gets older he seems to be more accepting of the idea that time is also linear, that it can “wind polish” your life, and that, for your friends as well as for yourself, it can, and must, run out.