A Close Interview With the Writer Ian McEwan: The Future of Literature, and Lonely Humankind

Do you like his books?

The British writer Ian McEwan has come to China. On October 25, he and his wife, Annalena McAfee, landed in Beijing, then went on to Shanghai.

The third 21 International Literature Award for Chinese University Students — founded by Yan Lianke and hosted by the International Writing Center of the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China — went to Ian McEwan. His publisher used the occasion to fill his week in the country with public events: the award ceremony, conversations with other writers, readings, and a writing workshop.

Ian McEwan was born in 1948 into a working-class family in Britain, and turned 70 this past June. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize six times and won it in 1998 for his novel Amsterdam. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

That year, the story collection McEwan published at 27, First Love, Last Rites, came out in China — the book that won him the Somerset Maugham Award before he was 30.

The writer Yu Hua published an essay in Writer magazine recommending McEwan's novels. In it, Yu Hua wrote: "I first heard the name Ian McEwan more than ten years ago — in Germany, I think, though it might have been France or Italy — and when people spoke of this vigorous British writer, their faces and voices brimmed with respect, as if they were discussing some tottering old master. I was in my thirties then, and McEwan was in his forties, not yet fifty. I thought: who is this fellow, enjoying a grandfather's glory at that age?"

"Then I began to see scattered reports about him in the Chinese press: 'Ian McEwan has published a new book,' 'Ian McEwan has found the brother he lost long ago,' 'Ian McEwan's Atonement has been made into a film'… In recent years Chinese publishers have eagerly brought out McEwan's famous novels — The Cement Garden, Amsterdam, The Child in Time, Atonement. Yet China's literary world and its readers greeted this giant of literature with a strange silence. I don't know where the problem lies. Perhaps McEwan needs more time for Chinese readers to get to know him."

Ten years after Yu Hua's lament, Ian McEwan has visited China for the first time. Nearly all of the more than 20 novels he has written are now published here. The books of his with the most Chinese readers are still First Love, Last Rites and Atonement, whose film adaptation won a Golden Globe.

McEwan has loyal readers here, but his influence is not especially wide. Whatever he was told at his events in China, the response to his writing here has not all been favorable.

Take Nutshell, written in 2016 and published in 2017, the most recent of his novels to appear in China: it tells a modern Hamlet from the point of view of a fetus in the heroine's womb.

Some readers praised it, saying only "old Mac" could have come up with an idea like that. But plenty of others felt McEwan's novels are stylistic exercises hung on a clever premise — that they barely scratch the surface of the many subjects they raise, and that stretching so neat an idea into a full-length novel makes for tedious reading.

At his many public events, McEwan answered a great many questions. He talked about his just-finished novel, Machines Like Me, and described in detail his writing habits, how closely he gets involved in the film adaptations of his novels, his views on marriage, and — to his surprise — the questions about social class that Chinese audiences seemed so interested in. In some interviews he even discussed who was invited to his birthday party, who came, and who did not…

By the last day, the writer Huang Yuning proposed that McEwan and Sun Ganlu, the writer sharing the stage with him, put questions to each other instead. McEwan asked him: "In today's social climate, a writer's more important job, beyond writing the book, is to keep telling people what the book is about, to explain the text he has written. What do you make of that?"

Q: A selection of the questions Ian McEwan took from audiences and fellow writers during his China trip

Ian McEwan: British writer, author of Atonement, The Children Act, Amsterdam, and other novels

Q (Huang Yuning, writer): It seems the world has used up every trick for telling a story. How does one go on being "avant-garde"?

Ian McEwan: I think the question should be turned around, because every writer, every person, is shaped and constrained by their surroundings, and the reality we live in is already changing at enormous speed. Reality is running the experiment on us, rather than us running experiments on reality.

Take the bookstore we're sitting in (the Jianshe Bookstore in Shanghai) and the view outside. Someone just told me that twenty or thirty years ago this was farmland, and now it looks like a thoroughly postmodern "Magic City." Of course people are always trying to keep pace with reality, and trying to predict the future, but that is very hard — nobody can predict what the future will look like. When you're thinking about narrative, the question to ask is: what has this environment, this reality, actually done to you, and what chances has it handed you?

Future narrative can go in two directions, I think. One is realism, where we try to depict the world we live in by reproducing it fairly strictly. The other is where we set reality down in a dreamlike, metaphorical, or magical mode — taking the reality we've built for ourselves and putting it on the page through very dreamlike or magical means. Whichever of the two you take, there are many subsets inside A and B, but I think those are the two broad directions.

Q (Huang Yuning, writer): Our subject today is "rebuilding faith in fiction." Nineteenth-century writers like Dickens or Tolstoy were trusted by readers in a way that, on the surface at least, looks stronger than what writers get now. Writers of that era liked the God's-eye view, and they really did have a godlike feeling — they could control their characters completely, because they knew readers trusted them entirely.

I don't know how it stands in the 21st century. If that trust has changed, how do we rebuild it?

Ian McEwan: Usually I have no idea whether readers trust me, because I meet readers mostly at events like this book club, and I don't tend to ask them whether they trust me — perhaps because I'm afraid of the answer.

I think many writers today have lost their confidence too. They feel they no longer have the ability, or the nerve, to narrate from a godlike position the way 19th-century writers did. I don't know how it is in China, but in America or Britain, walk into any bookstore and look at the fiction shelves and you'll find that novels are now written from a subjective standpoint, narrated in the first person, and that the events, even the temperament on display, are the author's own. First-person narration of that kind demands no stylistic effort at all. The language is very plain, ordinary everyday speech, and much of it describes what's going on inside my own head — all about the author's self.

I have no quarrel with writing novels in the first person. I think it's a perfectly good method, and we've seen many superb novels written that way.

But couldn't we try a little harder to take back the high ground of third-person, godlike narration, and speak with more confidence? Even though plenty of university literature departments now supply theories about the relationship between writer and text, exploring and researching it endlessly, and arguing that novels should not be written from this godlike view.

In today's internet society, anyone who speaks up online is hoping you'll grant them a little attention; everyone is competing for attention. Against that background we need the godlike view all the more, because the number of people who believe in God is falling worldwide. So narrating from God's position — that is, in the third person — might be a very good angle.

Work like that takes a great deal of effort and may not pay off. But as a writer, if you can command your own language and craft, keep hold of rhythm, style, and beauty, and write a novel from a godlike or third-person view, that is a very worthwhile attempt. I strongly encourage writers to take back this high ground.

Q (Luo Xin, host of that day's event): You often write characters who seem to have some physical disability and a loneliness inside. I want to ask you, Mr. McEwan — are you yourself very lonely?

Ian McEwan: In fact I'm not lonely at all. I have a large family, so there's always company to be found, and if I really were lonely I could go to a pub for a drink and be rid of the feeling quickly. So loneliness isn't the problem. The problem is the opposite: living in contemporary society, you don't have enough space of your own.

Because this is the internet age, everyone has a smartphone and keeps pulling it out to check for new information, so the room for being alone and thinking quietly has shrunk a great deal. The internet eats into your life, and in the state we're in now, getting back to something authentic, to a more self-directed state, has become a luxury.

The key to writing a novel is to find a logic, or to find a coherent story. Take a city like Shanghai, with 30 million people: who are you, and where exactly do you stand in your own fate? Everyone in a city like this is busy every day; how do you face your city day after day? And in China today, which meets enormous change every day, how are people here answering these challenges? That is what novelists tend to care about.

For my part, sometimes I write stories like The Innocent, where a man is killed and the body is put into a suitcase, and a dog takes an interest in that suitcase — much like the recent affair in Saudi Arabia, except that there was no dog in that one.

Why do I write people with some flaw in their makeup, psychological or physical — people who are odd or damaged in one way or another? I don't think I can write about people whose lives are perfect and full of happiness. There has to be conflict in a character's life for me, as a novelist, to find it interesting and worth exploring. Through plot and characterization I show that life isn't perfect, and only when a character is flawed in various ways can I go further into human nature. So that's probably what novelists care more about.

Q (group press interview): Do you write by hand or on a computer? Do you have writing habits, and how much do you write in a day?

Ian McEwan: I was very happy when the computer arrived, especially once it replaced the typewriter. I think the typewriter is one of the worst things humanity ever invented — loud and terribly clumsy. The first computer I bought had a keyboard hooked up to a screen that looked like a television set. That was my first computer. It had only 100K of storage and a little floppy disk. I think the arrival of the computer was a fine opportunity for writers, and a fine opportunity for us as human beings facing the electronic age.

I like having a small notebook on one side and the computer screen on the other, so I can go back and forth. And what I especially love is that the computer has a memory of its own. Sometimes I've written a page of a novel that hasn't been published and that I haven't printed either, so it exists only in a virtual space. That has something very mysterious about it, and I love it.

All this was many years ago, of course, before the internet age. Now, if there's a computer on my desk and a phone in my hand, it's very hard to concentrate on work. My wife uses a piece of software called Freedom, which can cut off our internet for several hours at a stretch; with no internet you can concentrate. Going online is a dangerous business, as you know — it leads you from one place to another, and before you know it lunchtime has come and you've done nothing all morning.

I'm at my desk at nine every day. Coffee matters to me; that's when I need my coffee. I try hard not to look at the newspaper first, and usually fail. We live on the outskirts of an English town, quite far from things, but one splendid thing about our era is that wherever you live you can read the news of the world, all sorts of different newspapers. The bad part is that it pulls your attention away and stops you working.

For instance, I'm very curious about the various ways the current American president behaves. And I've been following the recent murder at the Saudi Arabian consulate closely.

When the writing is going well, when it's flowing, it's hard to stop. If it's going well I force myself to keep at it, writing from morning until night, because I know a smooth stretch will end — so while it flows, I make myself carry on.

Q (group press interview): Could you say more specifically what else interests you these days?

Ian McEwan: As I said in my talk today, artificial intelligence — the novel I've just finished is about artificial intelligence too. I'm very interested in thinking about whether machines can have a consciousness of their own.

That's an ancient philosophical question, of course, but in our era the ancient question has become a real one, a real question bound up with ethics and technology. For a novelist it may be a great challenge, and it's one of the things that interests me.

The other has to do with politics: my country, Britain, is in the middle of choosing to leave the European Union, Brexit, and I care about that a great deal. What sort of person am I? You could call me a newspaper addict, like a junkie — I can't go a day without reading the paper. My interest in science has never faded, whether in the life sciences or physics. I think we humans have just come through a golden age of physics; we've made huge advances in both the life sciences and physics, and these are things I've always been interested in.

Q (reader question): Should writers take up political subjects, or write on political themes?

Ian McEwan: I see it this way: in an age of freedom, writers should write whatever they want to write. Whether they write about politics or something else should be their own decision — they can write about men and women, or they can write about politics. Generally, giving writers that freedom is the best thing. Many writers write about politics only because political pressure leaves them no choice. I once did an event in Israel, and while I was there I talked with a number of Israeli and Palestinian writers. They said they envied writers in some European countries, who have more freedom — who can write whatever they like and pursue the eternal subjects that concern humanity, rather than having to write about politics day after day, as people in their two countries must.

So it depends. In an ideal setting, I would still hope some writers write about politics — not everyone, of course; each person is free to choose how far to go. Brexit is a very important subject, and it could probably make a novel too: a novel about how a country harms itself. As you know, a lot of young people in Western society today like to hurt themselves, cutting their skin with a blade now and then.

Written that way, Britain does look rather similar — choosing to leave the EU is like a young person taking a blade to their own arm. Perhaps I could open a novel with that, but it's difficult, because these large, macro subjects generally have to come down to one or two individuals before they can become a novel. It's very hard to turn a big subject straight into fiction.

I've also tried writing about climate change, and it isn't so simple; a macro subject doesn't automatically make good material for a novel. In short, I think writers should be free to choose whether or not to write about politics.

Q (reader question): Literature is lovable, literature is fun — in the West that means novels like Cervantes' or Rabelais'; in China it's the more legend-like kind of book. That literature seems vast, its mountains high, and even realists find it hard to get over them.

The first book of Ian McEwan's I read was First Love, Last Rites, and what I found there was not horror but humor. I think that's a quality of the novel.

Two sorts of books are common now: one that ordinary readers find too demanding, something like Ulysses; the other very bestselling books that, as Mr. Sun put it, aren't written all that well. It's hard for ordinary readers like us to judge when we choose a book. In writing, or in reading, will literature return to childhood — to a more humorous period?

Ian McEwan: For us to sit here and say what state literature will finally return to is worrying over nothing — the world might end tomorrow, for all we know. It's hard to say. When I heard just now that you were interested in First Love, Last Rites because of the humor I put in, I was very happy, and relieved as well.

Because all week people have been asking me things like, "When you wrote this book everyone called you 'Ian Macabre'" — but the book was plainly written with a humorous touch, so why can't anyone feel it? I put in so many funny jokes, and it seems most people don't sense them at all. As for the history of literature, I don't much agree with comparing it to a person's infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, middle age, even old age. I don't think it runs in a straight line, because in any one period all kinds of people are writing all kinds of things.

What will survive we can't know, of course, but let me speak of European literature, the tradition I come from. Our origins go back to writers like the author of Tristram Shandy, whose prose is almost a paradox in style — fantastical forms and realism all fused together, merging in one period, scattering in the next, then merging again into a whole. Look at how each period developed and you can see the writing that gave each one its character.

Even if the world were to be destroyed tomorrow, I wouldn't want to say literature has now reached old age. I don't accept that way of putting it. I come from a Western country, but I think Chinese literature must be the same: in any one period all kinds of writers are writing all kinds of stories, myths as well as serious novels. That's my own reading of literary history.

Cover image: a still from Atonement