“I had this sense of total physical inadequacy,” Ian McEwan says about how he felt after appearing at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, in August. When he left the event, “There were four or five incredibly athletic guys doing splits on the carpet.
“I had to step over these muscled legs and gleaming bodies. They were trapeze artists. They were about to hurl themselves through space. And I thought, Wow, I would rather have watched these guys!”
Others disagree. McEwan, who is now 77, is one of the UK’s leading novelists, and he attracts big crowds. About 1,000 people came to his Edinburgh event; when I met him at Ennis Book Club Festival, in Co Clare, in March, he had an audience of 500.
Appropriately, the value we place on writing is one of the themes in his new novel, What We Can Know. The book comes in two parts. In the first, set in 2122, an academic, Tom Metcalfe, is investigating a great lost poem by the fictional poet Francis Blundy.
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Blundy read the poem, A Corona for Vivien – a verse in 15 sonnets – to his wife at a dinner party in 2014, then presented her with the only copy. The poem was never heard nor read again. But Tom thinks he can find it.
The second part of the book it would be wrong to reveal, but it highlights, as the title suggests, the gulf between what we think we know and what really happened.
The setting of early-22nd-century Britain gives McEwan the opportunity to make some predictions for the next 100 years, from playful to menacing. On the one hand, acorn coffee is all the rage; on the other, universities have moved their archives to high ground, as the lowlands of Britain are flooded.
It turns out that this is not straightforwardly about climate change, although that is a factor. “I’ve been puzzling for years how we write a novel about climate change,” McEwan says. “People don’t need to be warned, because it’s already happening. Dystopias can cause false comfort.
“Is the realist novel up to such a large subject? I’m very much tied to this form, but the only way I could see back into the subject was to write from the point of view of the future, looking back with anger and scorn but also with energy.” In the book, people view enviously the riches we enjoy now and that we are putting at risk.
Does he feel as pessimistic as some of his scenarios envisage? For example, in the novel, nuclear war has made a comeback.
“Shortly after I finished the final proofread of this novel, India and Pakistan were at it again – two nations armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. They backed off, but I think it’s an open question whether we get through the 21st century without an exchange of [nuclear] weapons.
“We are in a new arms race, with the added element of AI being brought into weapons systems, because decisions need to be made very quickly, and it’s possible that these things will move out of our control.”
It’s not just India and Pakistan, though: other global players seem equally febrile. “I’ve been following politics for 50, 60 years, and I’ve never felt quite this level of anxiety about the chaos, the lack of good leadership. Very large power blocs who have little consideration for human rights, and America drifting into a kind of madness that 10 years ago would have been very hard to predict.
“Every day from that direction there’s something that shocks me profoundly. The latest one was hearing President Trump praising the leader of North Korea. Is [Trump] just a passing thing or is it all going to collapse, the end of the American republic?”
But your friend Julian Barnes, I say, argues that we tend to overstate how bad the world is as we get older, because it makes us feel better about leaving it soon. “I think one has to always bear that in mind,” McEwan agrees. “Frank Kermode published a book called The Sense of an Ending, and oddly Julian [later] published a novel with the very same name.
You do need some self-scepticism, and you don’t find that in Trump and you certainly don’t find it in Putin.
— Ian McEwan
“Kermode’s point was that we want to make sense of our lives, and it doesn’t suit us to think we were born in the middle of things and we’re going to die in the middle of things. We always think we’re at the end of time. But I can’t shrug it off. I think there’s a sense that we’re somewhat out of control.”
Still, What We Can Know takes the long view of human history, and predicts that, even if our civilisation does collapse, we will rise again: “Each time we fail,” the narrator writes, “or calamities overwhelm us, we will come back from a slightly higher place.”
McEwan agrees, if not entirely enthusiastically: “My guess is that we’ll scrape through.”
The losses in the book are not only generational but also personal. One character has advanced Alzheimer’s disease. These passages seem deeply felt. Has he personal experience of dealing with this?
“Absolutely. My mother died of vascular dementia. My brother-in-law had Alzheimer’s. My sister has it. Quite a few friends have it. The subject is very alive for me.”
It makes sense for the book, too, he adds, because “if you watch someone slowly lose their memory, and therefore their identity, you have a really close analogy of how important it is to have some historical sense.
“I mean, my mother died long before she died. She wasn’t there. She didn’t know who she was. It’s particularly tough on those who care for Alzheimer’s patients. We currently have going through [the UK] parliament [the Assisted Dying Bill], with the possibility of people ending their lives by their own choice – but we’ve excluded all possibilities of mental illness.
“But maybe this is just a first step. Opponents of the Bill say this is the thin end of the wedge. My point is that I hope it is the thin end.”
To return to the book, it’s notable that we never get to read any of Blundy’s poems. Did McEwan ever contemplate including them, as Anne Enright did in The Wren, The Wren?
“Francis Blundy is a great poet,” McEwan says. “I’ve been a novelist for just over 50 years. I think in that time I’ve written one villanelle and one other poem. They’re not very good.
“I don’t take poetry lightly. I read a lot of it, and Martin [Amis] and I used to sit around, and we talked about poetry more than we talked about fiction. We decided it was the Senior Service; it was the highest expression.
“And I did write one or two lines [for Francis’s poems]. And they just weren’t good enough. TS Eliot said anyone seriously wanting to be a poet needs to start at 22 and give their life to it.”
We haven’t bettered the novel yet. I don’t buy into all that [talk about] collapsing attention spans
— Ian McEwan
The influence of poetry, and McEwan’s own rich prose, remind me of a line about another writer character in the book, the novelist Mary Sheldrake, whose writing is “so impenetrably bland” that readers “mistook it for the hard gleam of modernist profundity”. That sounds like a dig at plain prose. Is it?
“Absolutely. I’m not going to name any names, but there were certain contemporary figures I had in mind who seem to have no ear – or it’s more like a decision. You just write it down as it comes. You type it out. You correct a bit of grammar and it’s done. No ear for the music.
“Martin and I shared a huge regard for [Vladimir] Nabokov. It was the attention to the surface of the prose that we would find missing in a lot of our contemporaries. The great point of divergence between us was who wrote the better prose, [John] Updike or [Saul] Bellow.”
But, he adds, “I think Bellow was not a good influence on Martin. Bellow’s prose was a specifically American idiom, and that didn’t sit well on top of an educated English literary voice.”
What about Amis’s novel Money, widely regarded as his best, where the English and American influences achieve a great synthesis? “Yeah, but it’s set in the States.” True. (Well, partly true: it’s set in England and the US.)
Speaking of educated voices brings me to a comment made by one character in What We Can Know that an education is important to democracy because “those with minimal education were more easily influenced by subtle input” and, as he bluntly puts it, “early school-leavers make bad decisions”.
Does McEwan agree, given what democracy has recently delivered?
“Yes. I say that with caution because Lenin was an educated man, and within six months he was running a paranoid state that was picking off its enemies. But it does need some historical sense. You do need to understand how we might be wrong about things. You do need some self-scepticism, and you don’t find that in Trump and you certainly don’t find it in Putin.”
Eliot said a poet needs to give their life to poetry; McEwan has given his to the novel. It has been, he says, a great privilege. And he sees a future for the novel. “We haven’t bettered it yet. I don’t buy into all that [talk about] collapsing attention spans. When people say, ‘Oh, he’s up in his room, he’s never got his face off the screen, he’s not socialising’, well, someone reading a novel isn’t socialising.”
So at least in one aspect, that of our literary culture, and despite war, despite climate change, despite Trump and everything else we’ve discussed, McEwan concludes, “I am an optimist.”
What We Can Know is published by Jonathan Cape
