Meeting Ian McEwan - Page 3

I sat down.

McEwan said he'd repeat the question for those who hadn't heard it. "Briefly ...."

There was some laughter and applause from the back. Apparently some people felt my question had been a mite long-winded.

"No," he said in my defense, "it was a very nice question...."

After recapping the question, McEwan quipped about his astonished senses when Fox News aired as he lay sprawled out half-asleep on hotel beds. Al Jazeera's news coverage too, he added, at the other end of the spectrum, often seemed questionable.

"However," he went on — McEwan was evidently not on a mission to savage the mainstream news media — "there are certainly some journalists who are considerably more serious and responsible than others."

And he moved on to other questions.

Afterwards, when he sat to extended applause, I gambled that he was a squash player and leaned forward to suggest that he might care to have a squash game during his visit to Toronto.

Alas, he was leaving the next day. But anyway, he added, "you'd probably thrash me ... you look quite fit."

Not merely a brilliant writer. An excellent gentleman too.

Not to mention.... Thrashing an acclaimed writer like McEwan would certainly lessen the sting of being unpublished myself.

I cast about for a witty rejoinder (or I might have fallen back on protesting that, no, he looked far fitter than I) but an instant later the crowd was upon him, and there was no opportunity to prolong our exchange.

I hung about a bit, but there didn't seem to be any blazing debates going on about McEwan's works. (This is Toronto.) So after a while I strolled out of the church to go home.

Up ahead I saw a fellow I'd noticed in the very short queue, consisting of 2 or 3 people, at the table where Camilla Gibb had been signing copies of her book. About 100 people had been queuing for McEwan's signature. (It's funny how we impose the dullest chores imaginable on the greatest achievers of imaginative feats.)

"I guess you didn't have too long to wait," I called out.

We fell into a little discussion. McEwan had mentioned in his talk that the protagonist's mother in Saturday was patterned on his own mother, who'd also had Alzheimer's. He'd given the character his mother's middle name. McEwan's talk had also referred to another Saturday character, a dangerous criminal who suffers from Huntington's disease, a rare disease that also leads to dementia.

Article Author: Uriel Wittenberg

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