Meeting Ian McEwan - Page 2

Then Gibb took the podium, gave some prefatory remarks, and read from her Sweetness In The Belly.

It dawned on me about a minute or two into Gibb's talk that the back of the head 18 inches before me was McEwan's.

When McEwan took the podium, he said he'd been very impressed by Gibb's talk but felt that in some respects he'd gone about the job of inventing stories in the opposite way. She'd described to the audience how she'd drawn on her experiences doing fieldwork in Ethiopia for her Oxford University Ph.D. in social anthropology, during which she lived in very penurious circumstances with a host family as an equal member, fighting like the others for her part of the bone marrow in the meatless stew they all had to share. McEwan, by contrast, far from travelling to the ends of the earth and living among people of different cultures, had chosen as his setting for Saturday not just his own neighborhood but his own house. He felt, he told the audience to laughter, like quite a "slouch."

He then read the passage from Saturday in which Dr. Perowne visits his mother, whose mind is gravely impaired by Alzheimer's, in her nursing home.

Afterwards, he took 5 or 6 questions from the audience. Mine was the first.

I stood and told him: "First, I'd like to say ... I love your books!"

I said I'd only discovered him a month ago when, not having read any fiction for 6 or 12 months, I by chance picked up a paperback edition of Atonement while browsing in a Toronto bookstore. Since then I'd read that, Amsterdam, Saturday, and had just finished The Innocent a couple of nights before. (McEwan's novels listed here.)

I did have a question. I wanted to ask — there's a passage in Saturday, I don't remember it exactly, where Perowne, reflecting on the news being dispensed to the citizenry in the run-up to the Iraqi war, has the sense that he's playing a part that's been contrived for him — the ignorant citizen and news consumer. That's how I remembered it, anyway. And perhaps — I told McEwan I wasn't sure he'd intended the parallel — Perowne was as oblivious as his mother about what was really going on in the news.

So, I told McEwan, my question for him was: As a master writer of fiction himself, did he sometimes get the sense that the news we receive is also fiction?

Article Author: Uriel Wittenberg

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