Monday, August 20, 2012

Ian McEwan: 'I had the time of my life'


Ian McEwan knew that one day he would write about the decade in which he came of age, and says that his new book – a spy thriller set in the 70s – can also be read as 'a muted and distorted autobiography'…

Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan, photographed in London: 'You worry that sooner or later – it has to happen – you can’t write.' Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

Towards the end of his third year at Sussex, Ian McEwan, somewhat reluctantly, visited the university's careers office. He already knew that he wanted to be a writer, but perhaps, he thought, this could be done in combination with a parent-placating job: "I had read Seven Pillars of Wisdom [by TE Lawrence] and the one thing I could imagine being was an Arabist diplomat, the kind of man who would wear a dinner jacket one evening and a keffiyeh the next." The careers office gave him a pamphlet. "On the back of it was a table. There were two columns. On one side was your age, all the way up to 65. On the other was your expected salary at any given age. I looked at it and it filled me with horror. My whole life was there. I was going to spend the next 35 years working my way through this table." The aspiring author's riding-a-camel-over-a-sand-dune fantasies were thus brought to a sudden and rather feeble end.

Luckily, this was the early 70s, when it was very bliss to be alive. Honestly! "I had the time of my life," says McEwan, with a fervent smile. "It was very easy not to have a job, to live the life of a full-time writer. I had a huge apartment in south London and it cost me £3 a week. The occasional review for the TLS, the occasional piece for Radio Times, and I could very easily pay my rent, buy a few books, make a weekly trip to the launderette. There were no machines everyone needed, apart from a hi-fi. I didn't feel poor at all. At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year."

But what about the chaos? The piles of rubbish, the power cuts, the bodies left unburied? "Oh, the crises didn't trouble me at all. I didn't own anything; I had no stake. I was restless, excited and a touch reckless. I remember reading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. I loved the idea of a city in chaos. There was this line in it that went something like, 'We walked north out of London in order not to have the sun on our faces.' I thought: that's real freedom. I had this 'let it come down' feeling."

There follows a brief pause while he considers what brought an end to this low-level insurrection, and I attempt to match up the 70s McEwan, hair trailing his cheesecloth collar, with the 21st-century version, who is today wearing tastefully crushed pale linen. His task is probably the easier. As he will tell me: "The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish." For my part, a leap of imagination is required. When I was told my meeting with McEwan would take place in the boardroom of his publisher, Random House, I was terribly disappointed; I wanted to nose round one of his famously lovely homes (preferably the exquisite Fitzrovia terraced house that was the model for the surgeon Henry Perowne's house in Saturday). But now it strikes me as rather appropriate. McEwan is the nearest thing to EL James that literary fiction has right now; in this sense, the boardroom chair on which he is uncomfortably perched – it keeps flipping back, forcing his knees up in the direction of his ears – might as well be a throne. No wonder I can no more see him in a launderette than I can picture him watching The Only Way is Essex.
The full piece at The Observer

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