McEwan's novel take on climate change

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan was the first graduate of the UEA's creative writing MA and has risen to being one of Britain's most renowned authors. In an exclusive interview with EDP books editor KEIRON PIM during a recent return to Norwich, McEwan gives a rare insight into his next novel.

INSPIRATION CAN LIE IN THE LEAST HOSPITABLE PLACES. On a ship in the Arctic, ice-locked in a remote Norwegian fjord, Ian McEwan finally found the way to write his next novel. Its topic? Arguably the most pressing problem the world faces today: climate change. Knowing that, the location seems more promising, though McEwan's epiphany had little to do with witnessing melting ice floes, and more to do with a telling insight into the vagaries of human behaviour.

“It took me a long time to find a way into this subject - I've been thinking about it for a number of years,” he says. “And then I spent some time in the Arctic, with a group of artists and scientists; we were living on a boat that was frozen in a fjord. One of the things that struck me about that was there was a sort of boot room, and one of the iron rules of this boat was we had to take off all our outer clothing - boots, goggles, balaclava, skidoo suits - and over the week, the chaos of this boot room grew more and more intense.”

These eminent inhabitants of the Cape Farewell project's vessel the Noorderlicht began to decline into a kind of genteel chaos. Someone mislaid his boots and, not wishing to delay the departure of a party itching to head out on an exploration, grabbed the nearest pair of a similar size he could find. A domino-effect of similar “borrowings” ensued. Good people, McEwan wrote at the Time (this was March 2005), were impelled to take what was not their own: “With the eighth Commandment broken, the social contract is ruptured too. No one is behaving particularly badly, and certainly everybody is being, in the immediate circumstances, entirely rational, but by the third day, the boot room is a wasteland of broken dreams.”

“I thought 'well, this is a highly self-selected group of climate change people',” he says now. “In the evenings we were discussing how to save the planet, and a few feet away through a bulkhead was this utter chaos! And I thought 'that's perfect, that's the human angle on this that I want'. If one thinks of literature and novels in particular as investigations of human nature, then human nature suddenly became at the centre of our problem about climate change: that we're sort of cooperative but selfish, we're not used to thinking in long-term eras beyond our own lifespans or immediate spans of interest.

“So I devised a character into whom I poured many, many faults. He's devious, he lies, he's predatory in relation to women; he steadily gets fatter through the novel. He's a sort of planet, I guess. He makes endless reforming decisions about himself: Rio, Kyoto-type assertions of future virtue that lead nowhere.”

Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who discovers how to derive power from artificial photosynthesis and in doing so helps to tackle climate change. Winning the prize affects him, however: he grows flabby and complacent, he spends more of his life at conferences than engaging in new work, he lives off his reputation. Then he comes unstuck. At a symposium he finds himself chattering away, filling the silence, and out of his mouth pops an idea, a small suggestion, that the imbalance between men and women in the higher echelons of physics might owe less to gender expectations and discrimination than to innate differences in the male and female brain.

First he is savaged by fellow academics, then the more rabid elements of the media pick up the story. In a frighteningly short time the words “Nazi” and “eugenics” are being hurled around. I wondered whether McEwan's own experiences at the hands of the media informed this plot; last summer he was accused of racism after saying that he “despised” Islamist fanatics - not Islam per se - for their sexism and homophobia.

“I think my encounters have been minor compared with some of the things we've watched in recent years. And I've seen it happen to friends,” he says; his comments were made in response to the treatment doled out to Martin Amis, who notoriously remarked that: “There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.'”

“So I don't think I was drawing on any specific thing,” McEwan says, “but yes, I said something like I thought there was something morally abhorrent about Islamism and I opened the Independent the next day and it has me attacking Islam. And it's deeply dishonest.”

Regardless of its derivation, there is a theme in Solar common to McEwan's other work: the potential for collapse, the moment when slow underlying forces present themselves in a seemingly sudden and devastating moment. In Atonement Briony Tallis destroys lives with a rape accusation; On Chesil Beach hinges on a disastrous wedding night in which a couple's suppressed neuroses become hideously manifest. Like Hemingway on bankruptcy, these things happen 'gradually, then suddenly'.

“Well, things can fall apart for people and they usually happen very quickly and catastrophically and unexpectedly. I don't feel that personally [in his own life] but I do have a strong sense of the random nature of life, and the number of times one passes, say, the scene of a road accident, with people rubbernecking as traffic creeps by some appalling pile-up. And you think how lives have so suddenly been transformed completely and forever in what you've just witnessed and had you got in your car two minutes earlier or two minutes later it could be you.

“It's that quality of random surprise that fascinates me. If you don't have a sense of a supernatural guiding hand in life, and I don't, then you do have to accept that the person you marry comes into your life and if you'd stayed in that night then you might not have been in the bar and met the girl who became your wife who mothered your children. There's that extraordinary level of pure chance, and that intrigues me.”

We met in a book-lined sitting room in the Georgian bed and breakfast at 3 Princes Street, with sharp morning sunlight cutting through the French windows and coming to rest on McEwan's stern, heavy-lidded face. This was the day after he had provided the UEA's ever-impressive spring literary festival with a suitable climax: a previously unheard reading from the novel. McEwan is three-quarters of the way through writing it and expects the book, which is in three parts, to total 90-100,000 words. When it is published next year, Solar (as he is almost sure it will be called) will be his 11th novel. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam and has been three times shortlisted: in 1981 for The Comfort of Strangers, in 2001 for Atonement and in 2007 for On Chesil Beach. Hailing him at the UEA reading, festival organiser Prof Jon Cook said he was confident McEwan will be read in a century's time. Others label him Britain's greatest living novelist (which makes him shudder - “it's lazy thinking really, it just means they haven't read all the others”). This much-lauded career had its birth in a Norwich bedroom when he was the first student on what became the university's now-famous creative writing MA.

“First of all I had lodgings on the Newmarket Road with a very nice family, a solicitor's family, in one of those big houses; I had a nice spare room there,” he recalls. “I started writing then. Later with a friend I took a little two-up two-down on Silver Road. The city itself was marvellous - it was much sleepier, much more of a backwater in those days.

“As for the course itself, [at that stage] it was really an MA in English and American Literature with some theory attached. There was a provision that you could hand in some fiction rather than an extended essay. I was the only one who took up this option, it was the first year of this possibility and while I didn't really get much time with Malcolm Bradbury what I did get was very important to me. First of all, just a year dedicated to writing and secondly being read by someone. It made a big difference. And likewise with Angus Wilson, who took over in the summer.”

Born in Aldershot in 1948, McEwan spent much of his childhood in the Far East, Germany and North Africa; his father was an army officer. McEwan returned to England to read English at Sussex University and then came to Norwich. His relationship with the city endures thanks in large part to this friendship with Prof Cook, forged back in those heady days of the early 1970s. McEwan's reading at the UEA threw many of his audience. His reputation is for being rather intense and serious. The excerpt from Solar was disarming: as well as being predictably well-versed in climate science, it was also extremely funny. Indeed, in conversation his slightly austere tendency is leavened by flashes of very dry humour. He is on record as disliking comic novels - he has likened the experience of reading them to being held down and tickled. Does Solar mark a change of heart?

“I hate the comic novel,” he says. “I like novels that have comic stretches in them - that's the point about not being held down and tickled all the time. It's very hard to be made to laugh all the time. Especially with a novel - you've got to move people across the room, it can't always be funny - and that's why comic novels are often so strenuous.

“I think there's a necessity of some elements of comedy in this, because the subject matter is climate change. It's so colossal, it's so serious, it's so morally weighted that it could kill a novel, it could drown it, it could melt it - whichever climate change image you want.”

His dedication to research is well known. When modelling Henry Perowne in Saturday, he spent two years shadowing a neurosurgeon. Here again he is striving to master his subject, to learn far more than he needs to put in the novel so that he has the confidence to “move easily and freely around”. The only risk is of stifling the narrative with statistics and terminology, he explains.

“That's another problem with writing about climate change - it's full of facts and figures. We're putting into the atmosphere 16 gigatons of carbon every year; it takes 16 terrawatts to run civilisation. It's very necessary to keep these out. My character is engaged in a project to use light to split water, imitating something of the process of photosynthesis. Even writing sentences about splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, already I know that about half the readers [will] see the names of those gases and their minds white out. Just seeing the word 'hydrogen', they panic.”

In the process of his research he has grown increasingly frustrated by people who differ from the consensus that climate change is linked to human activity. They get a rather peremptory dismissal, which is unlikely to endear him to them.

“The thing with science is it doesn't deal in certainties, it deals in probabilities,” he says, “and there are some vigorous deniers here and in the States. Usually they're people, not very bright, who haven't grasped certain fundamental ideas about, say, statistics. There are some very active journalists in this, and they say 2008 was a much colder year than the preceding five years. It's perfectly true - 2008 was the coldest year since 2000. But it's still the 12th warmest year in the last 150 years. And if you take a graph and put at the beginning of the graph 1998, which was a very hot year, you can show a decline. The temperature fluctuates all the time. If you look at it over a 30-year period you see a zig-zag but that zig-zag itself is ascending. And it's those kinds of little, I think very fundamental and easily grasped matters. I'm very interested in the psychology of this kind of denial.

“It amazes me. I was reading pieces only a couple of weeks ago not only denying that it's anthropogenic, caused by humans, but denying that there's any temperature rise. I mean heavens, it's so overwhelming… I think just talk to a salmon fisherman, if you don't want to talk to scientists. Go talk to a ski-lift operator in Switzerland.”

As the book has developed he has actually “taken out more and more stuff about climate change”, to the point where it is more “a background hum”. Sifting what is useful to the novel from what is useful to know has far less appeal than capturing the initial spark of imagination. “As for the pleasures,” he concludes, “the pleasures are a peculiar kind of elation, of some things fitting together, some net of language made finer, the mesh made finer by some metaphor, by some simile, by some association that wasn't there at 9 o'clock but is there by 11 o'clock. It's that element of surprise too that is very pleasurable.

“It's not easily come by, that pleasure; I don't get it every day. Sometimes writing novels is almost drudgery. And one has to keep pushing and pushing at it in order to get to those points when pleasure is possible again.

“The best bits are the first draft; all the other things are a slow diminution, right down to schlepping around cities like a sort of brush salesman, trying to persuade people to read it.”

In truth this is something he no longer has to do in order to sell books and therefore does very rarely. Instead he picks the odd appearance that he fancies, such as his latest trip to Norwich, which only confirms the continuing importance to McEwan of the city where his literary career began to take shape.