Meeting Ian McEwan

Considering the multifarious connections between the great writer Ian McEwan and myself (previously documented in Ratatouille #4), I had really no choice but to attend the reading he was giving at Toronto's downtown Church of the Holy Trinity last night.

The still-proliferating links between us barely even come as a surprise any more. My first mention of McEwan came in Ratatouille #3, the same piece that discussed the ostensibly unrelated case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman about whose case at least six neuroscientists have testified before the courts. Later I encountered Henry Perowne, the protagonist of McEwan's just-published Saturday, who works as.... Indeed. A neurosurgeon. And what physical sport does that neurosurgeon play? Mine — Squash. At 17 pages, the novel's depiction of a squash match is probably the most extensive ever seen in fiction.

So it was reasonable to expect something cosmic as I arrived to see and hear McEwan for the first time.

Another novelist was also on the programme — Camilla Gibb, who was also going to be reading from a new novel.

My initial reception suggested an incipient Canadian screwup of the sort referred to in my Ratatouille pieces. On breaching the crowd clustered by the church entrance, I espied the ticket handlers just inside, to the left and to the right. I chose the left. They directed me to the right. Then as I reached the right, the handlers there were gone. Then one of them reappeared ... and directed me back to the left. I patiently acquiesced, but politely pointed out the inconsistency to the people on the left. Was I on a waiting list, I was asked. No, I answered firmly, I had a real reservation. A consultation between left and right took place. Then it was all sorted out, and I was given my ticket. (Apparently my method of making a reservation — phoning a week ahead and presenting my credit card info as requested — was quite unusual. Don't ask me how the other 400 attendees did it.)

I'd arrived only about 5-10 minutes before the 7:30 PM start time and most seats were already taken. I found a single seat in one of the middle rows, but just then the organizer at the mike asked people to raise their hands if they had an unused seat beside them — and I relocated to the second row.

There was a pleasant-seeming woman to my left, another to my right. We had only a minute or two to wait, and then the organizer began the proceedings by introducing Camilla Gibb.

Article Author: Uriel Wittenberg

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