Ian McEwan's novel Atonement ... quite an achievement
'Life was clearly too interesting in the war'
Ian McEwan talked to John Sutherland at the Cheltenham festival about research and history in his latest novel, Atonement, and about his responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11. This is an edited transcript of the interview
John Sutherland: I am here solely to act as the thinnest of membranes for Ian McEwan this evening. His latest novel, Atonement, made the Booker shortlist. But also, and more seriously, like others among us I have been very impressed by Ian's contribution to the discussion in the wake of the awful events of September 11. Ian wrote a piece for the Guardian for the day after - a speed which was incredible, given the quality of the writing. I felt it was a very moving piece and on October 11 he wrote another. Both attracted a lot of attention and seem to represent a new engagement of the British creative writer with current events. These are two topics I think we should kick off with. Firstly, if he'd like to talk to us about the novel, and also if he has any thoughts about the relationship between writers like himself and, if you like, 'real-world events'. Ian, over to you.
Ian McEwan: Well, I think the events of September 11 were quite anomalous. The shock of it, everyone felt. It was really a kind of accident for me because I happen to be married to an editor at the Guardian. I called in to say "How extraordinary. How are you bearing up?" and she said "Write something for us." The whole newsroom was in turmoil. I instinctively said "Certainly not", which gave me time to think about it. Then I thought, "Well, I'm not writing a novel at the moment. The only thing on my mind is this. I am going to respond to this challenge." I sat down that very day to write a piece, like a number of fellow writers. I had a very specific brief - as someone watching this unfold on television, like so many others, how does one react? And, in a sense, it's a little easier for a novelist if your business is trying to find the fusions, the melting points, between thought and feeling. This event seemed to throw up a great explosion of scattered thoughts about what the consequences of it were, but it was still too soon. We were trapped in the unfolding of the event and the knowledge that the huge emotional dam was yet to break - the level of the human tragedy.
JS: With respect, you're not known as a very emotional writer.
IME: I dispute this. I think I have spent a long time thinking and writing about feelings.
JS: I should say, in defence of the emotional remark, that I know lots of American people who were moved to tears by what you wrote in The Guardian. With respect, your fiction doesn't moisten many eyes. Is that a fair point?
IME: That's not a very good measure of emotions.
JS: I'll come at you from another angle. There is that 'only a novel' feeling - that compared to the real events of life, novels are rather trivial things that you recreate yourself with, objects of entertainment. Atonement is about very big events - world war two, which you were too young to serve in. I was wondering if you do think novels are terribly important. There was an attack in tonight's Evening Standard about how trivial the English novel is, compared to the American novel. How the Booker should be open to titanic writers like Philip Roth - who, as far as I am concerned, just seems to write about ejaculation.
IME: There's a very good reason why the Booker is closed off to American writers - Philip Roth would have won it for his last four novels. And I certainly would be voting for The Human Stain - I thought that was an amazing novel. I don't think we have a senior figure who can write with Roth. But, yes, I do think novels are extremely important. And, like Jane Austen, I don't think their importance is measured by the amount of fizzing and popping and width of stage. Her famous remark about two inches of ivory holds.
JS: It wasn't her remark. It was Charlotte Brontë's. Hooray!
IME: Touché. But her sense that all human life could be examined by a few relationships in a village holds. I think Henry James said in The Art of Fiction that, in the relationship between reader and writer, what the reader must grant the writer is the subject matter. And what the reader must judge is the way it's treated.
JS: I think Atonement is a great novel. But, as a current literary historian, it wasn't so much Jane Austen that I was reminded of but her contemporary, Walter Scott. When Scott wrote Waverley - which began, I believe, a mainstream of British fiction that is still very strong - he subtitled it 'To 60 years since'. The historical novel for him had to be within what one might call 'the living past', which is a lifetime. It seems to me that Atonement is very much placed in that kind of dimension. I was born in the 1930s and the novel rang very true for me - not because I was conscious of the 1930s, but because I had enough apostolic connections to it, I knew people who'd been there. This is a historical novel, isn't it?
IME: Yes. But it's a history that can be held in the mind of one writer, one woman. It starts in 1935 and has a kind of epilogue written in 1999 - a crucial stone for the whole structure. A retreat from Dunkirk and another section, set in St. Thomas's Hospital in 1940, were the subject for me of very intense and particular research. I had to go and find things.
But, oddly enough, for the first half of the novel, set in an English country house in 1935, there was nothing to be done. I thought that someone like Briony Tallis, my narrator, would not fall into the usual trap - to tell you what was in the top 20 that week. And, while the top 20 may not have been formulated in 1935, you'd be able to get a fair idea of what they were listening to then, have this music floating through windows to mark it. And I thought, well, this is her time, everything in it she takes entirely for granted. So she describes virtually nothing that is specific to the time. It could therefore be done as an imaginative reconstruction rather than something that had to be located in a library, as was the case with Dunkirk.
JS: So you did go to The Imperial War Museum?
IME: Absolutely. And that is a wonderful resource for writers. I did all the research for both the nursing and Dunkirk up in the dome of the Imperial War Museum, now a library but once a chapel. Boxes are brought to you. You open them up and out spills a rather tea-stained letter written by a young lieutenant to his fiancee. It's the last delivery of post as the British soldiers are falling back. All hell is breaking loose around him. He guesses that France has fallen, and that all mainland Europe has gone, and he has only one thing he wants to say to her: "Go and get the money from our account and buy that bungalow." He wants an ordinary life - that came across in so many of the letters that I read. Less about the disposition of the troops - obviously the mail would be censored anyway. Just longing to be out of this and back into a life of dull routines. Life was clearly too interesting. These letters are a fabulous resource of intimate human detail that you don't really find in the history books.
JS: Where did you find out about the nursing practices of the 1940s?
IME: Lots of the girls who nursed were well educated, often from upper-middle-class families, and they wrote home every week. They had never been away from home and the letters were filled with homesickness.
JS: That very beautiful scene, where Briony consoles the dying French boy, was that based on anything?
IME: I drew that from a memoir by a woman called Andrews, who was a nurse during the war. It was a heavily changed account, but the idea that these women had to be the comfort in the dying moments of these men is what triggered the writing of this scene.
JS: I found the war section extraordinarily powerful, but it really is anti-war, isn't it? You don't like officers and you choose what used to be called the biggest cock-up since Mons as your pivotal moment in the book.
IME: I didn't actually approach it with any anti-war notion, although I don't see how anyone could be for war.
JS: You should read the Daily Telegraph. Read Jan Daley.
IME: OK. But within the human community. My emotional relationship with this is that my father was at Dunkirk along with 320,000 other soldiers, making his way to the beach. I am not sure if I have any specific feelings about the officer class, except that I have read the accounts of exhausted men, who've been walking for two days; they turn a corner, and there is a mad-keen captain, with a revolver strapped to his shoulder, wanting to take out a machine-gun nest in a wood. And you just know that the whole thing is over. The Germans have control of the skies and you are all on your way out. And to take out a machine-gun nest for a bit of derring-do...
JS: There is a scene where a jumped-up pipsqueak officer tells someone who has been through hell: "Your shoelaces are undone. You're a bloody disgrace." It seems to me that moments like that embody a critique.
IME: Well, perhaps there is something slightly patricidal about that. My father, who was a regular soldier and remained in the army all his life, was a terrible one for spit and polish. He was a regimental sergeant major with one of those sticks to measure a man's pace and a very fierce moustache.
In 1942 the German army decided to dispense with all this drilling and concentrate instead on actual physical fitness. I read a memo from a high-ranking British officer saying, "Perhaps we are wasting a lot of time with new recruits, making them march up and down and scrub the parade ground with toothbrushes." But this was completely demolished as an idea. Part of the absurdity of reading about war is this adherence to forms - the white-painted rocks, the importance of marching in time. On the other hand, when I came to write the nursing section of the novel, the Florence Nightingale school of nursing, embedded in St Thomas's Hospital, had absorbed a great deal of military thinking into its practices, so that the nurses were subjected to a parallel regime.
JS: But Nurse Drummond comes out as a very good figure for qualities which, you say, are bull and the parade square ...
IME: There is a very crude psychology behind all this - unending, unthinking obedience. It helps in moments of crisis to be able to do as you've been trained to do and to do it even though it might seem absurd. You are so used to carrying out absurd actions for so long that when, for example, a young recruit nurse with only 12 weeks' experience is required to do quite advanced things, unthinking obedience becomes a resource. So it's balanced out throughout the novel.
JS: I was wrong-footed - you are very good at wrong-footing readers - because I thought she was just a terrible battleaxe, but it turns out that she is very humane.
IME: She's the one who sends Briony to the bedside of a young French soldier, and Briony automatically assumes it's because she is looking tired and begins to protest. But, of course, just half a word from the sister cuts her off; she knows she has to obey. So, yes, the sister actually has a large humane side, but the prevailing practice in those days was that you must never show it. In fact, one of the great sins for a nurse to commit is to let a patient know her Christian name. And of course, in this dying moment, Briony wants to communicate her name to this boy, because he thinks her surname is her Christian name and she can't bear the idea of him dying with that thought.
JS: Amazing for a modern novelist to do a deathbed scene. One gets them everywhere in Victorian literature. How does this scene fit into the pattern of the novel?
IME: The central love story does not concern Briony, it concerns her sister and another man. I felt that unless I had some sort of eruption of feeling from Briony - I saw it as a love scene, even though it's a dying scene - there would be something too unreliable about her account of love. There is another moment when she is standing on Westminster Bridge and two young officers go by, and she feels a sudden pang - a sense that her life has been completely closed in this hospital, with all these routines, and that something huge is missing from it. I knew that by the end of this hospital section I would be jumping forward 50, 60 years, and I needed a moment of softening in Briony at the time.
As for the earlier love scene, I thought, well, I haven't really done a love-making scene, so I had better do one. Of course, they are notoriously difficult to write. There is always the fear that you'll win not the Booker prize but the Bad Sex Award. You are aware of how other people around you have done it. I thought of John Updike, whose interest is the visual - the mucus membrane, as it were. This was an account given by a 77-year-old woman, so it had to be fundamentally different. Certainly, to write an account of love-making - of two people making love for the first time and falling in love at the same moment - seemed to me more difficult to undertake than a death-bed scene.
JS: In the opening section, it looks as though it is going to be a book about sexual molestation of children, but in fact it moves away from that very quickly. Are you particularly interested in that scene?
IME: It's a catalyst; two things were more important to me than the scene itself. One is that for Briony, who is 13 at the time - who sees it and makes a misjudgement in indicting the wrong man - this is the beginning of a life's process. The second thing has a lot to do with Jane Austen. The heroine of Northanger Abbey is a young girl whose head is stuffed with gothic novels, and she misreads the situation in a parallel way. A huge indulgence in literary models by Briony is partly what leads her to make her misjudgement.
She wants things to fit with the story she has in her head. It's not a story she has written yet. It is a story that she plans to write, but she has no idea that she is going to spend her whole life writing it and that this is going to be an atonement. But she does what I think we all do one way or another - and I was also interested in this when writing Enduring Love - 'believing is seeing'. If you have your mind set in a certain way, you will see things in a certain way. And Briony is determined that this man, not that, committed this crime. So it's not the crime itself but how it is perceived through her love of literature and her burning ambition to be a writer.
JS: Is she a great writer?
IME: Difficult one, that. I didn't want her to be too good. She's almost as good as me.
JS: Right, we're now going to have questions from the floor.
Q: Have you read a lot of literature from the second world war, and, indeed, the first?
IME: Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf make an appearance as influences.
JS: There's a terrifically good parody of Cyril Connolly.
IME: Briony submits her first bit of writing, while still a nurse, to Horizon magazine and Cyril Connolly very untypically writes a five-page rejection letter. A novel that was very important in this, and I wanted to fit in, was The Go-Between, so Connolly says, "I trust you've read The Go-Between." I was very disappointed when the copy editor informed me that it was written in 1952 and I had to take it out. But what does remain from The Go-Between is the long hot summer.
Q: There was some talk about Philip Roth earlier, and whether or not the English novel could provide a writer of similar stature. Do you think that has something to do with the inadequacy of English writing or the inadequacy of English publishing?
IME: I have nothing to say about publishing. I know nothing about it. When I started writing in the early 1970s I was struck by the ambition of American writers - William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Updike, Roth. I thought that perhaps it was something to do with class - with the free-roaming nature of American society that allows a writer like Saul Bellow to be so much of the street on one hand and yet such an unashamed intellectual on the other.
And there seemed something rather pinched about English writing that maybe had something to do with class and our education system and our inability to talk for a whole society. Since then writing in this country has got a lot bolder and has had infusions of new blood, as it were. This point is constantly made - about different kinds of Englishness coming home to roost. But I still feel that it's quite hard for a British novelist to be so engagingly intellectual, so inquisitive and awestruck about the world, and yet be down there on the street. I still feel that class is a limiting element.
JS: If I can speak up for the English novel. I thought that The Human Stain had terrific force and power but it does seem to be unstructured, happening rather than being made. One of the things that strikes me about all your novels, and Atonement in particular, is just how beautifully architectural it is - how well put together and constructed. It seems to me that that's a quality of other British writers, the famous quartet.
IME: I don't know. I haven't seen the Standard's piece tonight, but I can imagine how it was put together at the features table - you know, "Get someone to write something about what the problem is with our literary culture." But you'll get the same kind of pieces in the New York Times. I saw one a few years back saying, "We've really got no one to compare to..." with a list of 12 or so British writers. It seemed wrongheaded.
Q: If you were writing now about current events, what would be the difference?
IME: The difference is enormous. We've got no idea what is going to happen - whether or not it's going to be a blip, where the west just carries on accumulating and spending, or whether it's a vast turning point. That ignorance of the future is clearly what marks off any participatory fiction as opposed to a retrospect.
I've read lots of careless and breathless pieces in the press lately about the possible end of civilisation as we know it. I was reading about the fall of France in 1940, trying to get a sense of what it was like to see France fall in a matter of weeks, wondering if the European world was going to be divided between two vast totalitarian systems... I don't think that September 11 as yet ranks anywhere near that scale of catastrophe - people at the time not knowing what the future was. We know it as 50 years of peace in Europe, and see those alarms of the time as overstated. But at the time they had plenty of good grounds for fear.
As for now, I have no idea what's going to happen. We don't know what the scale of this is. I don't know whether we're too hysterical and easily frightened because we've led such comfortable lives so far, or whether we're near something hellish...
JS: We'll have to wait 60 years for the summary. Please join me in thanking Ian for a most entertaining and instructive presentation.
JS: With respect, you're not known as a very emotional writer.
IME: I dispute this. I think I have spent a long time thinking and writing about feelings.
JS: I should say, in defence of the emotional remark, that I know lots of American people who were moved to tears by what you wrote in The Guardian. With respect, your fiction doesn't moisten many eyes. Is that a fair point?
IME: That's not a very good measure of emotions.
JS: I'll come at you from another angle. There is that 'only a novel' feeling - that compared to the real events of life, novels are rather trivial things that you recreate yourself with, objects of entertainment. Atonement is about very big events - world war two, which you were too young to serve in. I was wondering if you do think novels are terribly important. There was an attack in tonight's Evening Standard about how trivial the English novel is, compared to the American novel. How the Booker should be open to titanic writers like Philip Roth - who, as far as I am concerned, just seems to write about ejaculation.
IME: There's a very good reason why the Booker is closed off to American writers - Philip Roth would have won it for his last four novels. And I certainly would be voting for The Human Stain - I thought that was an amazing novel. I don't think we have a senior figure who can write with Roth. But, yes, I do think novels are extremely important. And, like Jane Austen, I don't think their importance is measured by the amount of fizzing and popping and width of stage. Her famous remark about two inches of ivory holds.
JS: It wasn't her remark. It was Charlotte Brontë's. Hooray!
IME: Touché. But her sense that all human life could be examined by a few relationships in a village holds. I think Henry James said in The Art of Fiction that, in the relationship between reader and writer, what the reader must grant the writer is the subject matter. And what the reader must judge is the way it's treated.
JS: I think Atonement is a great novel. But, as a current literary historian, it wasn't so much Jane Austen that I was reminded of but her contemporary, Walter Scott. When Scott wrote Waverley - which began, I believe, a mainstream of British fiction that is still very strong - he subtitled it 'To 60 years since'. The historical novel for him had to be within what one might call 'the living past', which is a lifetime. It seems to me that Atonement is very much placed in that kind of dimension. I was born in the 1930s and the novel rang very true for me - not because I was conscious of the 1930s, but because I had enough apostolic connections to it, I knew people who'd been there. This is a historical novel, isn't it?
IME: Yes. But it's a history that can be held in the mind of one writer, one woman. It starts in 1935 and has a kind of epilogue written in 1999 - a crucial stone for the whole structure. A retreat from Dunkirk and another section, set in St. Thomas's Hospital in 1940, were the subject for me of very intense and particular research. I had to go and find things.
But, oddly enough, for the first half of the novel, set in an English country house in 1935, there was nothing to be done. I thought that someone like Briony Tallis, my narrator, would not fall into the usual trap - to tell you what was in the top 20 that week. And, while the top 20 may not have been formulated in 1935, you'd be able to get a fair idea of what they were listening to then, have this music floating through windows to mark it. And I thought, well, this is her time, everything in it she takes entirely for granted. So she describes virtually nothing that is specific to the time. It could therefore be done as an imaginative reconstruction rather than something that had to be located in a library, as was the case with Dunkirk.
JS: So you did go to The Imperial War Museum?
IME: Absolutely. And that is a wonderful resource for writers. I did all the research for both the nursing and Dunkirk up in the dome of the Imperial War Museum, now a library but once a chapel. Boxes are brought to you. You open them up and out spills a rather tea-stained letter written by a young lieutenant to his fiancee. It's the last delivery of post as the British soldiers are falling back. All hell is breaking loose around him. He guesses that France has fallen, and that all mainland Europe has gone, and he has only one thing he wants to say to her: "Go and get the money from our account and buy that bungalow." He wants an ordinary life - that came across in so many of the letters that I read. Less about the disposition of the troops - obviously the mail would be censored anyway. Just longing to be out of this and back into a life of dull routines. Life was clearly too interesting. These letters are a fabulous resource of intimate human detail that you don't really find in the history books.
JS: Where did you find out about the nursing practices of the 1940s?
IME: Lots of the girls who nursed were well educated, often from upper-middle-class families, and they wrote home every week. They had never been away from home and the letters were filled with homesickness.
JS: That very beautiful scene, where Briony consoles the dying French boy, was that based on anything?
IME: I drew that from a memoir by a woman called Andrews, who was a nurse during the war. It was a heavily changed account, but the idea that these women had to be the comfort in the dying moments of these men is what triggered the writing of this scene.
JS: I found the war section extraordinarily powerful, but it really is anti-war, isn't it? You don't like officers and you choose what used to be called the biggest cock-up since Mons as your pivotal moment in the book.
IME: I didn't actually approach it with any anti-war notion, although I don't see how anyone could be for war.
JS: You should read the Daily Telegraph. Read Jan Daley.
IME: OK. But within the human community. My emotional relationship with this is that my father was at Dunkirk along with 320,000 other soldiers, making his way to the beach. I am not sure if I have any specific feelings about the officer class, except that I have read the accounts of exhausted men, who've been walking for two days; they turn a corner, and there is a mad-keen captain, with a revolver strapped to his shoulder, wanting to take out a machine-gun nest in a wood. And you just know that the whole thing is over. The Germans have control of the skies and you are all on your way out. And to take out a machine-gun nest for a bit of derring-do...
JS: There is a scene where a jumped-up pipsqueak officer tells someone who has been through hell: "Your shoelaces are undone. You're a bloody disgrace." It seems to me that moments like that embody a critique.
IME: Well, perhaps there is something slightly patricidal about that. My father, who was a regular soldier and remained in the army all his life, was a terrible one for spit and polish. He was a regimental sergeant major with one of those sticks to measure a man's pace and a very fierce moustache.
In 1942 the German army decided to dispense with all this drilling and concentrate instead on actual physical fitness. I read a memo from a high-ranking British officer saying, "Perhaps we are wasting a lot of time with new recruits, making them march up and down and scrub the parade ground with toothbrushes." But this was completely demolished as an idea. Part of the absurdity of reading about war is this adherence to forms - the white-painted rocks, the importance of marching in time. On the other hand, when I came to write the nursing section of the novel, the Florence Nightingale school of nursing, embedded in St Thomas's Hospital, had absorbed a great deal of military thinking into its practices, so that the nurses were subjected to a parallel regime.
JS: But Nurse Drummond comes out as a very good figure for qualities which, you say, are bull and the parade square ...
IME: There is a very crude psychology behind all this - unending, unthinking obedience. It helps in moments of crisis to be able to do as you've been trained to do and to do it even though it might seem absurd. You are so used to carrying out absurd actions for so long that when, for example, a young recruit nurse with only 12 weeks' experience is required to do quite advanced things, unthinking obedience becomes a resource. So it's balanced out throughout the novel.
JS: I was wrong-footed - you are very good at wrong-footing readers - because I thought she was just a terrible battleaxe, but it turns out that she is very humane.
IME: She's the one who sends Briony to the bedside of a young French soldier, and Briony automatically assumes it's because she is looking tired and begins to protest. But, of course, just half a word from the sister cuts her off; she knows she has to obey. So, yes, the sister actually has a large humane side, but the prevailing practice in those days was that you must never show it. In fact, one of the great sins for a nurse to commit is to let a patient know her Christian name. And of course, in this dying moment, Briony wants to communicate her name to this boy, because he thinks her surname is her Christian name and she can't bear the idea of him dying with that thought.
JS: Amazing for a modern novelist to do a deathbed scene. One gets them everywhere in Victorian literature. How does this scene fit into the pattern of the novel?
IME: The central love story does not concern Briony, it concerns her sister and another man. I felt that unless I had some sort of eruption of feeling from Briony - I saw it as a love scene, even though it's a dying scene - there would be something too unreliable about her account of love. There is another moment when she is standing on Westminster Bridge and two young officers go by, and she feels a sudden pang - a sense that her life has been completely closed in this hospital, with all these routines, and that something huge is missing from it. I knew that by the end of this hospital section I would be jumping forward 50, 60 years, and I needed a moment of softening in Briony at the time.
As for the earlier love scene, I thought, well, I haven't really done a love-making scene, so I had better do one. Of course, they are notoriously difficult to write. There is always the fear that you'll win not the Booker prize but the Bad Sex Award. You are aware of how other people around you have done it. I thought of John Updike, whose interest is the visual - the mucus membrane, as it were. This was an account given by a 77-year-old woman, so it had to be fundamentally different. Certainly, to write an account of love-making - of two people making love for the first time and falling in love at the same moment - seemed to me more difficult to undertake than a death-bed scene.
JS: In the opening section, it looks as though it is going to be a book about sexual molestation of children, but in fact it moves away from that very quickly. Are you particularly interested in that scene?
IME: It's a catalyst; two things were more important to me than the scene itself. One is that for Briony, who is 13 at the time - who sees it and makes a misjudgement in indicting the wrong man - this is the beginning of a life's process. The second thing has a lot to do with Jane Austen. The heroine of Northanger Abbey is a young girl whose head is stuffed with gothic novels, and she misreads the situation in a parallel way. A huge indulgence in literary models by Briony is partly what leads her to make her misjudgement.
She wants things to fit with the story she has in her head. It's not a story she has written yet. It is a story that she plans to write, but she has no idea that she is going to spend her whole life writing it and that this is going to be an atonement. But she does what I think we all do one way or another - and I was also interested in this when writing Enduring Love - 'believing is seeing'. If you have your mind set in a certain way, you will see things in a certain way. And Briony is determined that this man, not that, committed this crime. So it's not the crime itself but how it is perceived through her love of literature and her burning ambition to be a writer.
JS: Is she a great writer?
IME: Difficult one, that. I didn't want her to be too good. She's almost as good as me.
JS: Right, we're now going to have questions from the floor.
Q: Have you read a lot of literature from the second world war, and, indeed, the first?
IME: Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf make an appearance as influences.
JS: There's a terrifically good parody of Cyril Connolly.
IME: Briony submits her first bit of writing, while still a nurse, to Horizon magazine and Cyril Connolly very untypically writes a five-page rejection letter. A novel that was very important in this, and I wanted to fit in, was The Go-Between, so Connolly says, "I trust you've read The Go-Between." I was very disappointed when the copy editor informed me that it was written in 1952 and I had to take it out. But what does remain from The Go-Between is the long hot summer.
Q: There was some talk about Philip Roth earlier, and whether or not the English novel could provide a writer of similar stature. Do you think that has something to do with the inadequacy of English writing or the inadequacy of English publishing?
IME: I have nothing to say about publishing. I know nothing about it. When I started writing in the early 1970s I was struck by the ambition of American writers - William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Updike, Roth. I thought that perhaps it was something to do with class - with the free-roaming nature of American society that allows a writer like Saul Bellow to be so much of the street on one hand and yet such an unashamed intellectual on the other.
And there seemed something rather pinched about English writing that maybe had something to do with class and our education system and our inability to talk for a whole society. Since then writing in this country has got a lot bolder and has had infusions of new blood, as it were. This point is constantly made - about different kinds of Englishness coming home to roost. But I still feel that it's quite hard for a British novelist to be so engagingly intellectual, so inquisitive and awestruck about the world, and yet be down there on the street. I still feel that class is a limiting element.
JS: If I can speak up for the English novel. I thought that The Human Stain had terrific force and power but it does seem to be unstructured, happening rather than being made. One of the things that strikes me about all your novels, and Atonement in particular, is just how beautifully architectural it is - how well put together and constructed. It seems to me that that's a quality of other British writers, the famous quartet.
IME: I don't know. I haven't seen the Standard's piece tonight, but I can imagine how it was put together at the features table - you know, "Get someone to write something about what the problem is with our literary culture." But you'll get the same kind of pieces in the New York Times. I saw one a few years back saying, "We've really got no one to compare to..." with a list of 12 or so British writers. It seemed wrongheaded.
Q: If you were writing now about current events, what would be the difference?
IME: The difference is enormous. We've got no idea what is going to happen - whether or not it's going to be a blip, where the west just carries on accumulating and spending, or whether it's a vast turning point. That ignorance of the future is clearly what marks off any participatory fiction as opposed to a retrospect.
I've read lots of careless and breathless pieces in the press lately about the possible end of civilisation as we know it. I was reading about the fall of France in 1940, trying to get a sense of what it was like to see France fall in a matter of weeks, wondering if the European world was going to be divided between two vast totalitarian systems... I don't think that September 11 as yet ranks anywhere near that scale of catastrophe - people at the time not knowing what the future was. We know it as 50 years of peace in Europe, and see those alarms of the time as overstated. But at the time they had plenty of good grounds for fear.
As for now, I have no idea what's going to happen. We don't know what the scale of this is. I don't know whether we're too hysterical and easily frightened because we've led such comfortable lives so far, or whether we're near something hellish...
JS: We'll have to wait 60 years for the summary. Please join me in thanking Ian for a most entertaining and instructive presentation.
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