Ian McEwan shared the stage with his friend Craig Raine, founder and editor of Areté, the literary magazine, whose first novel, Heartbreak, will be published in July.
McEwan read from his most recent offering, Solar, and quickly had the audience nodding and chuckling with his amusing introduction to the book’s protagonist, Michael Beard. In this novel he has ambitiously tackled the political minefield that is climate change in a characteristically unconventional way – through the story of a womanising physicist on the brink of his fifth marital breakdown. As with all attempts by writers of fiction to take on ‘controversial’ political topics, McEwan ran the risk that his work of fiction would turn into a dry moral fable. Fortunately those afraid of being righteously preached at from behind a thin sprinkling of adjectives can rest assured that McEwan is quite aware of this danger: he emphasised that his concern is with reflecting the world as he sees it, not in telling people how to live. If the first few pages of the book are anything to go by, McEwan’s timeless wit and eye for psychological detail will ensure the book is enjoyable for Greenpeace fanatics and polar bear haters alike.
Raine’s reading was less assured than that of his better known contemporary: the section he read detailed one character’s loss, and subsequent ingestion, of the crown from his tooth. While McEwan admitted that Raine’s book had twice brought tears to his eyes, I couldn’t help but feel that either he selected the wrong part to read, or that I have suddenly developed a heart of stone: my eyes remained stubbornly dry. The move from poetry to prose is always a tricky one to get right, and the two writers disagreed on whether he had written a poet’s novel or a novelist’s novel – McEwan contended that the decision to use paragraph breaks urged the reader to pay attention in a way which novels rarely demand. Perhaps this works, I shall withhold judgement until I’ve read it myself – paragraph breaks don’t make much of a difference when you are being read to.
The pair have known each other for thirty plus years, since their days as contributors to New Review. Apparently Raine used to write ‘FLF’ in the margins of McEwan’s work when he spotted a cliché (FLF standing for, he explained, Flickering Log Fire). Their interest in one another’s work has not diminished: McEwan informed Raine that he had circled the word ‘somehow’ in his new book, and suggested that he remove it before the second edition. The general feeling between the two was, however, very much on the warm side, and the audience were rewarded with various shared anecdotes amassed during their long-standing acquaintance. This meant, however, that the style of discussion did descend into a slightly tedious in-joke marathon from time to time. I would compare it to the experience of listening to people you barely know sharing their holiday photos – guess you just had to be there.
One of the most enjoyable things about the festival was the insight we were afforded into the relationships between figures in the British literary scene. With Raine and McEwan the underlying rivalries and pointed critiques were glossed over with friendly banter and extensive compliments about each others’ work. While both are highly regarded in their separate fields, I thought that the McEwan/Raine combination didn’t really work – neither fully got to grips with the work of the other, and their desire to drive the conversation back towards each other was as distracting as it was noble.
This was, however, nothing on the Craig Raine/Martin Amis pairing two days later, which was, to put it mildly, a disaster. Throughout the interview, the barely concealed friction between the author and his former tutor made for interesting viewing: the sight of their egos bouncing off each other was certainly very entertaining. Amis was actually quite rude to Raine, which, literary giant though he is, made the interview quite awkward to watch at times.
The choice of interviewers during the festival as a whole could certainly have been more careful: the one-size-fits all approach meant that there was often a lack of preparation, and the interviewees were not always posed questions which were thoughtful enough to induce them to reveal interesting insights into their work. Some of the questions asked in other interviews were just downright silly: choosing the right pairings is a delicate task, but it certainly pays off.
