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Interview: Ian McEwen

In receiving the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and Saturday, has joined the ranks of Margaret Atwood, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Muriel Spark and Seamus Heaney.
McEwan describes his own style as ‘vaguely unprepossessing’, but you can sense he thinks more of it than that. Yet who could blame him? Here is a man who is frequently described as perhaps the greatest living writer of modern fiction. A little smugness is therefore at least permissible. McEwan exhibits no false modesty, nor claims it when he says that in the 1970s, his ‘intellectual maturation’ represented ‘an explosion in [his] mind’.
He is, however, at least thoughtful, and his status as a fiction giant whose literature revolves around the macabre sides of ‘psychological and social phenomena’ was bound to induce some form of pretension.
The upside of this is that he can spin a good-sounding yarn. The downside shows itself in his apparent characterisation of his fellow students at Sussex as ‘intellectually infantile’ compared to his ambitious dreams and cerebral pursuits — he dismisses his classmates with the casual remark that they were ‘filled with rather different ideas about how to spend their time.’
Starting out in North Africa, McEwan describes his first recollection of being fascinated by a book, the children’s novel ‘The Gauntlet’, in which a young hero slips on an old glove and is hurled back in time to the middle ages. His description of this odd experience as a catalyst for his love of fiction appears to stem more from a desire to create a neat and tidy chain of events than from a genuine desire to present the truth. But it chimes well with McEwan’s self-confessed obsession with the bizarre coincidences that appear to hold such potency in the lives of every ordinary and extraordinary man.
More likely his discovery at a precociously young age of Iris Murdoch, and his childhood upbringing which included considerable familiarity with a North African Library, kindled an imagination that has never left him.
All this was realised in his degrees, his BA in English Literature from Sussex and his MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Oxford boasts of its tutorial system of one tutor to only one or two students, but in his MA course, he was the sole student on a course with two tutors; a remarkably privileged education.
Otherwise, McEwan was quite reticent about influences on his writing and reading of his own work. He claimed that the filming of Atonement had absolutely no impact at all. When asked about the influence of Oxford (he lived in the North of Oxford for many years), he first denied any connection and then, when pressed, decided that it is at least, ‘a nice place to work’.
He didn’t seem to be able to identify any non-literary sources of influence on his work, or the creative processes of his mind. The only one that he did let on was when he mentioned that ‘happiness doesn’t sell books’; it is easy to forget that even literary giants have bank accounts that exert a very real influence on their writing style.
Meeting McEwan gave the impression that he puts a lot of himself into his work: a sense of confidence bordering on arrogance on the one hand, but also an obsession with, and a perceptive affinity for, psychological analysis. Self-important, thoughtful and even slightly cynical would go well to describe both the man and his writings, which he is set to expand shortly with a book about ‘a short, fat man who was possessed of a disposition that was utterly irresistible to women. At least, that’s what he thought, and thinking seemed to make it so’. Given his excitement for the project, I have no doubt it will constitute an important addition to his canon, and further justify McEwan’s selection for this prestigious accolade.

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