The grim consequences of the coronavirus added to his “sense of visceral revulsion” at the stabbing violence. “Everything seemed one with my own perception,” he says. “A colossal weariness and also disgust at the thought that it takes a lot of hatred, a lot of zeal, to drive a knife deep into someone’s eye. It is beyond the limits of human cruelty. And only an intact ideology, not available to be refuted in any way, could get you to the point.” We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie over the Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s sweeping look at post-war British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” she says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion was a non-issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t show up.” So when the fatwa was decided, “it was explosive. It broke the multicultural assumptions we had at the time. The people we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.” Although he was not initially part of the notorious gang of writers – Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and the late Christopher Hitchens – who made their name in the 70s and dominated the literary scene for much longer (too long, according to critics them), Rushdie reached a A few years later with the 1981 publication of Midnight’s Children, which changed both British and Indian writing and won the Booker Prize that year. “It was amazing, broadening horizons,” says McEwan. “Salman is a great conversationalist, with a great taste for fun and mischief,” she adds. “So we all started right away.” Audio excerpt: Lessons
Listen to an audiobook excerpt of Ian McEwan’s upcoming novel
Unfortunately your browser doesn’t support audio – but you can download and listen here https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/05/05-61553-gnl.fw.200505.jf.ch7DW.mp3 McEwan’s ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which “world events seep into individual lives”, of which the fatwa was a perfect example. “It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal consequences, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech,” he says. “It was a very steep learning curve.” It seems odd to remember that 1989 was also the year the Berlin Wall came down, a central event in the new novel. “The fatwa just preceded a rather wonderful era where democracies were springing up across Europe, free speech was growing, free thought was growing,” he says. “Everything has changed since 33 years ago. We now live in an era of heavily restricted, shrinking freedom of expression around the world: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, you name it. Plus the free speech issue of the rich West he created himself.” It is precisely this trajectory from youthful optimism to disillusionment and despair that the novel charts, following the life of its central character, Roland Baines, from the Suez and Cuban crises to Brexit and the pandemic. McEwan finished writing the Lessons before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, otherwise he would have included it as a further example of his “garbage” of hopes, which he compares to the dashed dreams of Orwell’s generation in the late 1990s. 30. If he was still writing, it would also be the attack on Rushdie. “It’s horribly in tune with the times,” he says. “We live in an age of occasional death threats, like JK Rowling, for example. For some lonely, inadequate individuals, it is a short step to some terrible deed. This is a very dark time.” Things look a lot brighter when I meet McEwan in his immaculate white Mews in Bloomsbury in July. He’s tanned and fit from a recent walking holiday (he’s a keen walker) in the Lake District with McAfee. He shows me a picture of Lincoln Bridge, which they visited, the site of a late scene in Lessons when Roland, on the eve of his 70th birthday, gets into a fight with a Tory peer and is pushed into the river. “That’s what I felt defeated by Brexit,” admits McEwan. He describes Lessons as “a kind of post-Brexit novel”. Our world has become smaller, he says. “The ceiling in our rooms is down two feet.” It’s a day before Boris Johnson is forced to resign and he tells a delightful story about “a delightful hour” spent discussing Shakespeare with the former prime minister (who is writing a biography of the playwright) over dinner, long before Brexit. “He’s got to get back into that book,” McEwan says dryly. We had our time, my generation. We can’t complain. We got awards, some money and now it’s this tsunami of other voices Few interviews fail to note the disconnect between the suave man in the linen shirt and jumper, who could just as easily be an eminent scientist, and his enduring reputation as the “prince of darkness” of modern fiction. During his 50-year writing career, which has included winning the Booker in 1998, becoming a fixture on school reading lists and blockbuster films, notably Atonement, McEwan has earned the status of ‘national novelist’. “National psychologist” in fact, a label he is now winning. Lessons teasingly warns of the perils of being “white, queer and old” as a writer today. If there’s no more fuss when his novels don’t make the Booker longlist (lessons don’t), he’s not complaining. “We had our time,” he says frankly. “My generation, when we first published in the 70s, were very boyish. It was a tight crowd. We are all in our 70s now. We can’t complain. And I especially can’t complain. And for a very good reason. We got the awards and some money and had the writing life. And now it’s this tsunami of other voices. Everything has opened up great.” He started writing Lessons in 2019, after a long publicity tour for Machines Like Me. All he wanted to do was stay at home and write throughout 2020. “You have to be careful what you wish for,” he says deadpan. “All novelists are locked up. Lockdown is what we do. But I never thought I would have such opportunities for total immersion, seven days a week, often 12 hours a day, broken only by walking the dog. I really wanted to write a big novel, to relax in it, to live in it.” With Salman Rushdie and Melvyn Bragg at a book launch in 2012. Photo: Mike Marsland/WireImage At just 500 pages, it is much longer than McEwan’s characteristically “short, smart and saturnine” novels, as John Updike summed up his work in a 2002 review of Atonement. So much for his claim in earlier interviews that he would spend his 70s writing novels. “I think you’ve written your last novel,” wrote a writer friend after reading the final result. “Though I hope you write more.” As McEwan admits, you know what he means. “It is a novel of hindsight.” Billed as “the story of a lifetime”, it is in many ways the story of McEwan’s life. “I’ve always felt envious of writers like Dickens, Saul Bellow, John Updike and many others, who just plunder their lives for their novels,” he explains. “I thought, now I’m going to spoil my life, I’m going to be shameless.” Before readers assume that he was abused as a boy or that he experienced any of the misfortunes that befell Roland, parts of McEwan’s past are fictional and “woven” into the narrative. “It’s definitely my most autobiographical novel, but at the same time, Roland is not me. It didn’t drive my life,” McEwan explains. “But in a way he’s living the life I could have lived. We all have those moments, in hindsight, where we could have followed a different path. I could so easily not have become a writer.” While McEwan’s previous historical novels have zoomed in on specific periods – memorably the Second World War (Atonement), the Cold War (Sweet Tooth, Black Dogs, The Innocent), the 1980s (Machines Like Me) and post-11 September (Saturday). ) – Lessons march through the political landscape of post-war Britain, taking in Thatcherism, New Labor (Tony Blair with his “big hair, good teeth, energetic stride”) to new populism (Trump and Johnson are not strongly named). He did not intend to write the British equivalent of the Great American Novel: “We don’t have that ghost carrying a whip that American writers have.” Instead, he wanted to show how the actions of those “very human gods,” our political leaders, can wreak havoc on mere mortals: “a speck of dust as from their heels flies into your eyes.” People are talking about Salman’s ‘life changing injuries’. This is very difficult at 75. This age is quite life changing The opening segment, a minutes-long “affair” between young Roland and his 25-year-old boarding school piano teacher (much like the one the author attended), which Roland ony later realizes was abuse, is vintage McEwan:. ..
