Poured Over: Ian McEwan on Lessons

By Miwa Messer / September 13, 2022 at 6:00 am

“I’m heading into my mid 70s and I really want to just get into a novel and live inside it. No sense of hurry. No deadline, no sense that anyone’s waiting for this. I don’t want to talk to anyone about it, but I just want to inhabit it.” Award-winning author Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, takes readers on an emotional journey through the life of one man, and McEwan joins us on the show to talk about aging, writing a novel in lockdown, what kinds of books make us cry, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we finish this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.

Featured Books (episode)

Lessons by Ian McEwan

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Cocoon by Zhang Yueran

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Moonglow by Michael Chabon

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode:

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and yeah, admittedly, I’ve been reading Ian McEwan ‘s work for a very long time. So I’m not entirely sure where this conversation is going to go. You know him as the author of Solar and On Chesil Beach and Machines Like Me, and certainly Amsterdam, which won the Booker Prize and his best seller Atonement, which actually brought you a whole new audience, but we’ll talk about that in a minute. Lessons is the new novel, it’s out now and it is 60 years in the life of one Roland Baines. And there are people who come in and out of his life, but Ian it is so great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. And would you tell us who Roland is?

Ian McEwan

Well, I guess he’s a remote, third cousin of mine, alter ego, perhaps a life I might have had. In some respects, he regards himself as a failure in life. He struggles after a very important and scarring event in his early teens. It doesn’t quite wreck him, but it deflects him into a life that he might well not have had and all the time he’s glancing back over his shoulder at the life, you might have had as a concert pianist or a pianist, really a poet or a famous tennis player, there are all these other lives in parallel that haunt him. He was born the same year as me. At some point, his life intersects with mine. But a lot of the time his life is not remotely my life. There are three very important women in his life, as well as many other friends. And he’s also someone who I think like the rest of us finds that part of the soundtrack as it were of his existence are certain kinds of international events. And mine are very much Roland’s. So, working backwards, Berlin Wall, Brexit, of course, recently, pandemic, but moving further back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Suez Crisis, and the Chernobyl explosion, the nuclear explosion. There are events that really happen as if they are the Greek gods moving above his head, he cannot deflect them, you can do nothing for them, but they penetrate his private life. And that respect, he’s a kind of every man, I think all of us are shaped by to extend that we really can never fully plumb by those major events in our lifetimes, and how they penetrate the personal life. So he’s a bit of all of us, I hope.

The story never stops moving. I mean, we meet him as an 11 year old and like a McEwan novel, this is an unforgettable opening, I’m gonna let readers discover it for themselves. But Roland’s life shares quite a lot of physical detail with yours. He’s grown up in Libya, his father is in the military. There are other moments of overlap that you had previously said that Sweet Tooth was your most autobiographical work to date. And granted, we’re talking about a novel that published in 2012. But this feels deeply personal, in a way that earlier work hasn’t. And I’m wondering what changed

quite a few things changed. One is how I was disposed at the time that the novel was beginning to mat itself in my thoughts, which was late on maybe the fall onwards in 2019. And I thought, well, I’m heading into my mid 70s. And I really want to just get into a novel and live inside it. No sense of hurry. No deadline, no sense to anyone’s waiting for this. I don’t want to talk to anyone about it, but I just want to inhabit it. And I was already thinking of a life as I’ve just described impacted by certain large public global events. And then what was virtually a global tragedy was also for me a personal opportunity. That is, I’d started writing over 3000 words in and our first lockdown began. And suddenly my diary was clear. Every writer’s dream. By my desk diary, is a double page a week and it was blank or crossed out for months and no airports, no obligations. And that gave me the chance to have a seven day a week full time, sometimes 12, 16 hours a day immersion. And I’ve always envied those writers who raid their lives. So I gave Roland a big chunk of my childhood, relationship with his parents. I gave him my parents and the sadness and tragedy of a child given away. I gave him my boarding school up to a point. I stayed there much longer than Roland. And a few other things. I also gave him my time at the Berlin Wall, one of those crucial events that he actually does get directly involved in, but much else is entirely fictional. And the novel opens in 1986, when Roland’s wife has just vanished after sort of semi loving note on the pillow. We don’t know why for a long time. And that is a crucial event, it overlaps with the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. He’s left holding the baby literally, his son, Lawrence, and it charts a kind of existence that I almost feel I could have had myself. Right. I was never a lounge pianist. I was never a tennis coach. I was never a poet. I had a luckier life than Roland in many way. But still, he is a kind of alter ego. And so I was able to at least put myself in situations that Roland had got me into, I thought, how would I react? I didn’t have to really stop to think I just knew how I would react. And there were certain scenes— confrontation with the woman who grooms him and physically abuses him but confrontation 45 years later, I stopped myself from even thinking about that scene or even making any notes. I thought, when I get to write it, I’m just going to find out what happens. What I would do in that situation. Likewise, when he finally has a showdown with the wife who left him so many years before, she’s now Europe’s greatest novelist, and they have a morning and an afternoon together. And she actually tells him how to read a novel. And I’m really telling my readers how to read this. Because Roland is very, very divided, his wife has left him he doesn’t know why. Eventually, he discovers, she puts in his hands, her first novel, and to his immense irritation, he thinks it’s a masterpiece. There’s no way around it, right? He is angry with her for leaving him in such a way. But he cannot deny the fact that she’s had to leave him to write this book, and all the books that follow and read them as he will, looking for himself, he can never find himself. There’s no reference to Roland in the book till the very last book she writes, and that’s what she wants to go confront him with. And that’s what she puts him down and gives him a sort of little manifesto. Do not look in books to look for yourself. Look for the world but not yourself.

I want to talk about Alissa, his wife who leaves him for her novel. But I also want to talk about Daphne, the woman he ends up with much later. Roland’s obviously been traumatized by this encounter over time with his piano teacher. And I don’t know how much he knows that’s influenced him and what he considers to be life choices. Are they actually choices? Or is he reacting? Because there are moments, certainly after we learn that Alissa has left him and the police show up, he calls them and says My wife has disappeared. And they immediately suspect him. They’re just like, well, usually it’s the husband. You know this right? Usually it’s like, and of course, he’s noodling a new poem on a notepad and says some injudicious things in this and the police are just like, where’s the body? I don’t know. But Roland, there’s a gentleness to the way you handle Roland that I don’t really remember seeing before in one of your novels.

Well, I guess I haven’t put that side of myself in there. I mean, I very much enjoyed being a father of two sons, way back and so, some memory of that, and certainly incidents in my own life in relation to my own sons are there.There’s a moment, for example, when one of my sons was 12, when I realized, actually he was cleverer than me and he points to some old rusted machinery, gets his father to count the teeth on two cogs and says don’t you see they’re relative primes. And he says what? So they don’t wear out, every bicycle is the same. So the same tooth doesn’t keep meeting the same tooth. And Roland suddenly realizes that he’s out of his depth. It’s an interesting moment in parenthood, I see when you suddenly think that you’re in a fog, and your child is striding away in some Upland, lit by some sunshine of knowledge that you won’t have. I lived with him a long time, you know, I mean, actually, I suppose, you know, two and a half years. If there’s a softness about him, then I have to confess it’s my softness.

It’s okay, you’re allowed to have these things. And partially, I bring it up because I, there’s a piece towards the end of the book, and I’m not giving anything away here. But I got a little teary with something with Daphne. And I have never, in all of my years of reading you, got a little teary. And I was a little shocked. And I understand exactly. And listeners, I’m being obtuse for a reason, because it’s a delightful moment in the book, and you should just experience it for yourself. But I had a moment where I thought, oh, wait a minute, this is what aging is. You’ve captured this moment in time that you know, a lot of us are sort of staring at now going, Oh, right. Here we are. And again, it sort of folds back on this idea that Roland, at first, I was sort of approaching him as if you were sort of had a learned helplessness about him. And then I realized that wasn’t quite it because he knows he’s weird. He has a moment sort of earlier in the book where he says, I’m weird, I get it. He just doesn’t act in moments where you’re like, well, you’re actually an adult, you could do this, and he kind of can’t.

He’s always trying to tunnel his way back to an intense sensual experience, which he can never have again, which he had between the ages of 14 and 16, which is why it falls within the category, certainly, of abuse and he thought he was acting freely. Now he understands that at 14 there was no consensual relationship that’s sexual and that has given him an unmoored, untethered disposition in his relationships. And he’s always trying to escape so much later on in greater maturity later in the book, he’s finally with a woman he should have married long ago. What interests me more, Miwa, are your tears. It’s odd because other readers mention other books that made them tear up. You can never predict them. I never know. I remember listening to the radio of some critic saying that he finished reading it and sobbed into his pillow and that was Atonement. Not because, well, the ending was fairly sad, but he sobbed for the whole book. And I thought, is that a good review or not? Because I remember the very interesting, largely forgotten, great Spanish literary critic, modernist Ortega y Gasset and he said famously, that tears and laughter are aesthetic frauds. And if literature or, or a Beethoven symphony moves us to tears, we must be really distrustful of ourselves in the work of art, because a commercial for lavatory paper with puppy dogs prancing on the lawn, could move you to tears. You don’t think it’s a great work of art? And I have been caught sometimes, by chance, watching some episode of some soap program to come on. And I don’t even know the charactersand I’m going like this, Yeah, she loves him. But he won’t—. He’s turning away the or whatever. And of course, we can’t trust our own moods in this just, you know, just as wine tastes not quite right after you’ve brushed your teeth. You might be feeling a little vulnerable or tired or glass of wine too much, or whatever it is. Can we trust our tears? So I have to confess I’m quite pleased when people say they were moved to tears by this or that. We have to be careful. There’s all of Disney. There’s all of terrible art that can move us to tears.

Yeah, but I’m a Bostonian. Like Yes. By nature. We were all chipped up of granite with saltwater in our veins, we don’t really know what to do. I do want to get to Henry James for a second, though, because there is something that you’ve come back to in multiple previous interviews. And it’s something that’s very clear if you’ve sat with the body of your work, which is: incident reveals character. And here, as you’ve said, you’ve got all of the major beats, right? Everything from Suez and the Cuban Missile Crisis and Chernobyl up to, you know, 9/11 and Brexit and multiple points in between. So you’ve got these moments that you kind of just slip in to the story. And suddenly, we know exactly where we are in time. And also obviously Roland’s experience from 14 to 16, with the piano teacher, and his experience of his parents and his wife, all of these things, all of these moments, where he’s constantly being pushed. And he doesn’t necessarily push back often.

Well, he becomes mildly politically involved, he’s a sort of left of centre guy. You know, he canvases for the Labour Party in his youth, remains a member until he starts falling out because one of his learning experiences is to go to Eastern Europe during the Cold War and realizes that East Germany, then, and in my experience, Poland, and what was then called Czechoslovakia, were occupied countries, right? In my own experience, I’d be sitting with Polish intellectuals, and they would say, Oh, we love your Mrs. Thatcher. We love Ronald Reagan. They give the Soviets such a bad time. And, and I can understand perfectly well what he meant. And when I came home, and I would hear the usual equivalence argument that the West was just as bad as the Soviet Empire I realized, I just no longer believe that for a second. And so I gave Roland some of that, he’s a libertarian really. And his politics, they didn’t really shift, but he, he does have serious arguments. And he remains politically involved. But most of us have, how do we change it? How do we do anything you could push pamphlets through doors, do your bit, write letters and vote, but most was not actually turning the cogs that turn the world and Roland fields, as I said before, it feels like these people, Kennedy, Gorbachev, whoever are like angry or hilarious Greek Gods full of human failings just like us, except they have power.

Let’s talk about Peter for a second because he is such a contrast to Roland and he’s also one of the most unlikable and that’s saying a lot I made it through Michael Beard in Solar and I think Peter would be quite comfortable sitting at a table with Michael Beard.

Well, Roland first meets Peter at a rock and roll gig. I mean, Peter Mount is a lead guitarist and singer in a band. And really a life experiences teaches Roland the Rock and Roll isn’t necessarily a liberating force, some really tough unpleasant people are in that scene, too. And Peter rises through the great changes we had in Britain, as our nationalized industries became just really sold off to private interests, and and now all currently owned by Chinese and Dutch and German and Americans. And Peter gets very rich. He hands over some millions of pounds to the government in power, which is the government even to this day, still in power, and gets ennobled into the House of Lords, second chamber. Your Senate as it were, but totally unelected. And I guess it’s devolved around Brexit. I mean, I’ve written and spoken too much about Brexit to really want to make it foregrounded in this book, we’re all kind of exhausted. But at some point, Roland and Peter in a remote northern part of England, get into a fight. I mean, a physical fight, two old men in their 70s and Roland comes worse off, that’s pushed into the river. And really, that’s my displaced version of how I feel Liberal Britain is at the moment, still licking their wounds.

Yeah. And Peter needs to exist. I mean, the reality is, I think Roland would prefer to live in a Roland bubble, but he doesn’t live in a bubble. And it’s that’s the piece that gets him it’s, it’s the connecting with other people and operating on terms that he’s not necessarily thrilled about, but doesn’t really have the energy to do anything about

when he fights, he fights. And when he limps back home, it’s his 70th birthday and all his family’s there around the table. When he looks at them. There’s the social worker, the doctor, the Community Housing Association, because he realizes that we are the lost people at the moment, we we don’t run this place. And our values are not the values that hold sway at this particular time. So he’s really examined life, I say that for him. And no, he’s got a broken rib or two and a big scar across his forehead, and he will live to fight another day. But he’s not acid. And I mean, the novel is, I think, quite full of incident in Roland’s life from being a murder suspect through to the end of a man who is looking at the incredible optimism he felt in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and everything seemed possible in international politics, and his heart was bursting with the idea of possibility. And basically, it charts as an adult, the next 30 years, that brings him to reflect on the events last year of January 6, and the assault on the Capitol, I could have gone on, I could have continued this to the Ukraine war, or even to the threat war in in the Taiwan Straits or whatever. But that and climate change, and various other things that are going around, make him wonder whether as he gets older, does he do that typical old person’s thing? I think, because I’m old and dying, the world is old? Or is it really mean just because old people think it doesn’t mean it’s not true? So, I mean, that’s something that reader has to sort of share with him and wonder, too, he doesn’t, can’t give us an answer.

Did you start out knowing where you were going to go with this? Did you have sort of, for want of a better phrase and inciting incident that made you sit down and say, or was it just rolling, who rolled up and said, Hi, I’m here, I would like you to write a novel about me.

Roland and his piano teacher were right there from the beginning. And the first thing I wrote was actually the first three pages of the book as published. And then I stopped, as I often do, when I’ve written what I think might be an opening, and sat on it for a couple of months writing, rewriting, shifting it around, wondering what sort of style it should be written in. Then I thought, back to all the notes I’d made two or three months before, and I knew actually, I was committed. And we were gonna make this journey. I think what was heightened for me was that lockdown was for many of us, especially they’re saying, people, let’s say, over the age of 30, who had enough I don’t like, I think, lockdown, as long as you weren’t actually ill or too lonely, it was the time of the backward glance the I was involved in so many conversations usually by phones and sometimes then afterwards, when the first lockdown had ended with people who’ve been thinking a lot about their parents, their childhood, their past, the decisions they made. And it’s it’s that that I really wanted to get involved in how we make a life, how we look back on it, how our backward look itself becomes a narrative because it changed, right? You think I think once mid 30s I think it’s first time we maybe get real distance, and I wrote about this in the novel on who you are in relation to your parents, childhood, past were you loved or not loved. Were you loved too much whatever it was, and the choices you made, or did you make any choices, right? Because one thing that haunts Roland is that while Alissa has made a sadly ruthless and to some degree a heartless decision to abandon her baby and her husband and pursue what she must pursue. There’s something also very enviable about women who do get castigated and men somehow seem rather heroic for doing it. And I wanted to explore that too. Right? Yeah, the literary biographies are just stacked with men who, you know, drank a lot, had loads of lovers, abandon their families, yet still wanted to be supported in some way or other. Poor Doris Lessing, who I mean, her story is not quite that but there was an element of that she got a lot of stain for in a way that no man would have. So how we construct that past and how others around us are constructing it too, what’s going on around me, and so that that’s why I wanted to write a whole life novel. That gives us more at Roland from the age of 10 to Roland still into his 70s. And always, the shadow that fell over his parents was the Second World War. And the secret, they sat on all their lives and never diverged. So I gave Roland, my experience of finding a brother. I was in my early 50s, when I understood my mother, who was already married, but having an affair with my father, first husband was away, fighting in Italy, and North Africa. She got pregnant by the man who became my father. And together they gave a child away on a railway station. And now here he was in front of me. A lifetime later, us meeting going towards each other in a, in a pub in England, fumbling between an embrace, do you embrace such a person or handshake? I can’t even remember which one I did, or which one he did, how it all just so clumsy. And even as I was walking towards him, I thought, this is like something in a dream. This like something in a novel, it’s quite common. Look, one hears about this. I never thought this would be my drama. So all of that the backward look, the shadow of the Second World War, the tumult of private lives, secrets held and how the past is recalculating. It became very much a part of the privilege of being locked down and all writers are professional lock down artists. I mean, lockdown is what we live for. But we never had it in such quantity. And as long as one wasn’t ill or too close to someone who was extremely ill. There was space to do all these things.

And speaking of the tunnel of private lives, Roland is quite intrigued by Robert Lowell, the poet, who I might argue, is the patron saint of Massachusetts. What does a writer owe himself. And this is something that Roland’s wife clearly has figured out for herself in a way that other characters in the book have not. She knows exactly what she needs to make her art. And here’s Lowell, just sort of stabbing Hardwick in the face, in print. I mean, if you read this collection, and it’s been a minute since I’ve read it, but I remember thinking, Wait a minute, what just happened here? Can we just revisit Lowell for a second? Because he seems to always pop up.

Well, I think he’s a fascinating person. And I think a great person and I have Roland go to a lecture and the lecturer wants to answer that question: Should Lowell have published this and is it a great book? And he takes a rather difficult position. He says it’s a great book, maybe his best, but he shouldn’t have published it, Roland in the sitting in the audience. And he wants to say, I’ve got something to say here too. I’m the left behind. I’m the Hardwick of this story. But he doesn’t want to. He’s been told by the chairman, the adjudicator of the proceedings, I don’t want any statements. Going out to the audience. You must have heard it 1000 times. They’ve even said it. I don’t want statements. I don’t want manifestos, ask a question from the lecturer. A row goes on because a woman stands up and says, there’s an elephant in the room here, Lowell behaved like this because he’s a man and they behave throughout literary history in this way, and there’s a bit of applause and Roland never gets to speak. He puts his hand up, and then the q&a is over. But it brings him back again to this business, of does he still love her? Is he still angry with her 2530 years on? And he finds actually, no, something has shifted. All he thinks about now is, she’s a great novelist. Can’t wait for her next book. He always gets it in proof from a publisher who’s an old friend of his. It’s an old old question. And I think it’s endlessly fascinating that some of the most loathsome people in the world are also great artists. And you might want to chop their statues down or think the wrong views on this and that and you know, you think of Dostoyevsky’s antisemitism, it’s endless. Lots of writers in the past had terrible attitudes, even by the standards of the time even if we’ve been given that to, and where do we stand when we sit down to Wagner? Or read yet again, with pleasure, or admiration, Dostoyevsky, it’s irresolvable. But it’s always good to keep having that conversation. We can’t deny the past. We don’t want to eliminate the lives that certain artists lead might dismay us. And we somehow have to live with the admiration and the dismay, which in part is what Ronan feels in relation to his own work.

And again, this brings me back to isn’t the novel The perfect art form for this though, because of the way you can cover time, and the interiority of your characters, I mean, this idea of character is, you could argue it’s relatively recent, which sounds like a strange thing to say, but it’s not. Serialized fiction reads differently from a character driven narrative. It’s just the pacing is different. The pacing in Lessons is pretty extraordinary, because you do cover 60 years. And you get these sort of moments of really sorry, Roland playing the piano. Yeah, the whole idea of being a hotel pianist. It’s very funny, until he shows up at that final lesson, and tells the teacher his name is Theo Monk, and she figures out exactly who he is.

He just plays the opening bars of “‘Round Midnight” and she knows. And that’s when they know, she knows, they knew and I knew that’s what I think myself into the scene— I didn’t know where it was going to go. On character, it’s interesting because I think that the invention of character in fiction is our brilliant inheritance from the 19th century, from Jane Austen, Flaubert, Stendhal, Dickens, Tolstoy and modernism was its interruption. Virginia Woolf famously said, character is dead, although I actually To the Lighthouse, etc, Mrs. Dalloway is a great character, but it seemed like an interruption. In postwar Europeans, which, for example, with its very strong existential qualities postmodern feel about it, character was missing. I mean, I’ve always been interested in it. Because I think without it, we can’t have that human curiosity. And I know that curiosity was considered a rather low mat. But it’s very hard to read novels that are not interesting. The only time we ever have to do that is when we’re at college, when you’ve got to read something, if you’re not interested then the rest of adult life is gloriously devoted to only reading the novels of interest. We no longer have the burden on us. School is over, we’re out, we’re free. And personally, the incredible artificial, clever matter of making a character out of symbols on a page is one of the most wonderful things to to experience as a reader. I love it. Sometimes I’ve been in discussions with readers who puts up on one of my novels Enduring Love with a group of 30 people and a fellow stood up and said I hate this novel. I said, Oh, why? Because I hate the character of whoever it was and that was a first person novel. I just hate him. I hate him. And I said, Well, I have to tell him rather flat. I mean, he was talking about him as like a hated neighbor lived up the street, knew everything about him, he loathed him. I can’t help feeling very touched and flattered by this, because it seems so real to you. So hate away, but I’ll take it as praise.

And you should I mean, I don’t have to, like characters, to get lost. And I just I absolutely don’t I mean, I just want to know, what’s next. And that’s always, there were plenty of people in in Lessons where I was, you know, raising a proverbial eyebrow. But, again, I’m responding to fictional characters, because they are so real. And because you slide in these tiny details in a single sentence that make you just stop for a second and say, uh, right. And again, it’s that grounding. I referenced it earlier in the show where we’re talking about, you know, Chernobyl, you’re just describing it, as you know, the toxic cloud that’s wafting towards the UK, and you’re not, and then later other details pop up and whatnot. But it was just that little detail where it’s like, Oh, I know exactly where I am. I know exactly what period this is, and what’s happening. When you’re working on a new piece, whether it’s a novel, Short Story, Screenplay, when you’re working, you’re starting from the sentence level, though, it strikes me that you really are in there and reworking sentence by sentence until you get the thing that you are looking for. And that is the emotion that’s the connection.

I have to trick myself. I’m not good at starting. And many of the novels I’ve written began with me, simply setting myself free in a large green notebook. They always have to have green covers, like many writers superstitious. And because it’s longhand, and no one’s gonna see it, I feel completely free to just do. And out of that will, might come eventually, three or four paragraphs, and suddenly, I’m intrigued. Once it was I was at a rather boring meeting, to sit with a smile on my face. And so I took out a tiny notebook, and out of nowhere is it from a on a ticker tape? I wrote sentences that are more or less like this. So here I am upside down in a woman. I thought, ah, a novel. You must be a fetus. He or she must be a fetus. What am I going to do? I left it and then sat and then it wouldn’t go away. And then I wrote, and then I was tricked into writing a short sort of jeux d’esprit called Nutshell, which is a take on Hamlet. Atonement started exactly the same way. After my son’s playing some sort of hotel holiday place we were at. And I knew I had an hour and a half and I just started writing something. Young woman runs into a very elegant drawing room with some wildflowers in her hand that she’s just picked. And there’s a man outside in the garden that she very interested in, but doesn’t want to meet. But she does. She’s conflicted. And again, I left it for weeks, returning thinking, what’s all this about? And realize, eventually, that it was about all things I’ve been writing in notebooks before that, it was rich, it was possible for me, it was liberating.

There are some people who would argue that Child in Time which ’87? I think pubbed in ’87, that was the real switch for you from sort of the edgier stuff that you were doing in The Cement Garden and then we get to Child in Time, where you sort of shift into this sort of more character driven, slightly more familiar to the people who have been reading you more recently. And then there’s an entire gang of readers that come to you with the success of Atonement, something like 6 million copies in print worldwide now, across formats, I think, or is it more than that now? I mean, Atonement was it for a moment and obviously it still continues to sell, but there was a moment where everyone was completely obsessed with Briony and Cecilia and Robbie. And then of course, the film came later, and whatnot. But it seems to me that part of the joy of writing for you is: One, your own curiosity, and where it’s going to take you. And also this idea that you won’t separate literature, from real life, I mean, all of your books are, in some ways, a little sideways approach at reading and writing and your philosophies about all of those things. Yeah.

Well, I’m very good at not writing. The time between novels is very, very precious and important, because I do a lot of reading. And I do sometimes traveling, sometimes hiking, but I just go back into the world. Yes, I’m making notes, sometimes making full stops, and so on. But I am quite happy not to be finding myself once more in the foothills of this enormous stamina demanding effort to complete a novel. So by the time I start, I’m a slightly different person. And everything that’s been on my mind and on the minds of all the people around me has filtered through to this. I mean, the term was a historical novel, really, although it, it comes right up into the present and present then was 1999, what I’ve especially done with Lessons, which is simply to live inside the moment when I’m not writing and then carry that over into living inside the novel, so that what’s going on around me percolates through even if it’s displaced in time. And I’m a great admirer of Saul bellows novel Herzog. There’s a moment when Moses Herzog is going to have dinner with his lover, who’s a florist. She’s cooked dinner, and he goes into the bathroom to wash his hands. And he looks in the mirror. And he says something like, you know, well, what is it and then speaks to himself, a little soliloquy that I couldn’t help feeling was a kind of manifesto, for me, I felt it was addressed to me. And it says, to be a person, in a century, in a city, in the conditions of modernity. In other words, what it’s like to be here now is, I think, one of the great projects of the novel. And the reason I thought the second half, possibly more of the 20th century was the time the great time of the American novels, they never lost faith in that idea of giving you what it was to be in the street in the time and the circumstance. In other countries, there was magical realism, yes. Here in the 70s, we were much obsessed with sort of marital dramas and class issues, but it didn’t have that sort of sense of real engagement with the now. And I think German and French novelists suffered a little from the shadow cast by the existential novel. That’s, that’s passed now. And I think that doesn’t mean you need to be endlessly commenting on politics of the day, I just mean something of the the spirit of the times is there. And that requires the realist novel. I mean, for me, at least, I know I’ve written these fantasies of narrated by a fetus and cockroach and so on. But those were really little holidays from the project, and the project is to me the novel, that’s why I like Franzen so much. I mean, I think he’s fully engaged. And here’s another novelist, Chinese novelist, I think is brilliant. Has she come your way? Zhang Yueran, Cocoon.

I will go looking for that.

Does she engage with her generation, the millennial Chinese looking back at the generation who raised them, who were scarred by the Cultural Revolution. They had no siblings. So there’s a kind of emptying out. Really? I’m very impressed. So that’s my sense. Moses Herzog put it down on paper for me now use it as the epigraph to my novel Saturday.

You did. And you quote, actually, Joyce, there’s a great line for your epigraph in Lessons.. I do want to raise for a second. I’m just, here’s my galley. I have. I have many, many notes in front of us. Yes. “First we feel then we fall” Yeah.

I have to say, the last, I mean, I’ve never read all the way through Finnegans Wake, I have to confess. But there are pages if you just concentrate on the page, the poetry and the last two pages of Finnegans Wake and my friend, Professor Colin McKay, was wonderful for him to do that novel and to its triumphant end, in he thinks its the most beautiful thing Joyce ever wrote. And it has something in common with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. So anyone who’s daunted by getting through the 500 pages of Finnegans Wake, just turn to the end, the last couple of pages and then maybe you’ll be tempted to more. But yes, first we feel then we fall. One point Roland sardonically notes that is it in old age is just all about falling, downstairs, tripping over getting out of the bath or the shower, slipping on leaves in the fall. That sense of the fall for Roland is just that trajectory, that downward trajectory I was describing of how you got from the Berlin Wall tumbling to near collapse of the Democratic consensus of the transfer of power and the assault on January the sixth. It’s not that he’s pessimistic, the end. It’s full of foreboding, and also joy. I mean, in a sense, the novel ends with a little nine year old German girl leading, Roland, her granddad across the room and I wanted to set, there’s another generation and he doesn’t quite say it. You don’t see it on the page, but there’s a sense that’s where he’s putting it.

Ian McEwan, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. This was a real treat.

Thank you. Thank you, Miwa. It was a joy talking to you.