Readers Place

Ian McEwan interview/review

Interview with Ian McEwan with Suzi Feay, Waterstones Books Quarterly, Issue 15, 2005

1. On September 11th

‘I couldn’t write anything for a long time after September 11. I ran out of steam. It was hard to get a clear mind. I had no idea how to write about what was happening and to lodge it in the mind of a character.’

1. On the Anti-War March in London, February 15th 2003

‘The novel was always going to be set in the run-up to war. I was looking for a sequence of events, and the day of the march seemed to capture just about everything I wanted in a character who had a great deal of ambivalence. I decided it would give it a kind of unity, setting it over 24 hours. But it was always going to be a novel that in a sense history would write.’

1. On Henry Perowne

‘Partly I wanted to write a novel about work. There’s not enough work in novels. It’s people getting divorced or marrying, as if there wasn’t this other thing that takes up as much time as sleep – or more. Out of that came the decision to write a novel about a neurosurgeon.’ ‘I thought, let’s devise a character who has, in most corners of his life, happiness. So give him a big house, no money worries, he has young adult children and he likes them – and they like him. Cut away from all those other novels: there are going to be no divorces, no other people coming into his marriage. Get all that out of the way and you still find you’re in a state of great anxiety because of the state of the world.’ ‘What I wanted to do was build up a sense of fantastic warmth and pleasure and food and wine and growing children and work. And then subtract that and see you’re still chewing your nails because of the state of the world.’

1. On Fitzrovia Square – the Setting for Perowne’s House

‘The square is an amazing mix of what can happen, spiralling out of control. Especially in summer. There’s a lot of bench life. Multi-racial London at its best; people who are office workers, but from quite interesting offices: ad agencies, film companies and design consultancies and so on. And then the people with dogs on a string and the junkies, and they’re the same age! Everyone looks 26 and a half.’

1. On His Research on Surgery for the Character of Henry Perowne

‘I really came to admire the whole team. Extraordinary, skilful, daring work. We all think we work hard. The surgeon is up at 5.30am and by 7.30am he’s getting ready for his first operation. That’s when I turn up, feeling a bit groggy. On their feet, doing a big procedure for two or three hours, then filing next door to the other theatre where somebody else is waiting to be operated on…at about 11am my main thought is, I have to sit down somewhere.’

1. On Exploring the Nature of Consciousness through the Character of Perowne

‘He’s an ultra materialist philosophically. Very against religion or spirituality. He says to himself, there must be something more to life than saving lives. By the end, he’s thinking: No, there isn’t. Routinely he’s drilling into people, taking out huge bits of bone, removing bits of the brain with ice-cream scoops…’