GILES: Based on the articles I’ve read, journalists seem scared to meet you because you wrote such unsettling stuff early on–and then they seem shocked that you’re just a nice intellectual. McEWAN: Yes. They’re all disappointed that I’m not, you know, dripping in blood.
Did you ever figure out what drew you to such dark material as a young man? I can’t give you a very profound answer. What I can say is that there was something quite reactive about those early stories. In my early 20s, when I was reading a lot of contemporary English fiction, I felt very stifled. It was so nicely modulated and full of observation about class and furniture. And round about that time I started to read, quite intensively, a number of American writers: William Burroughs, Philip Roth, Henry Miller.
That’ll loosen you up. Yeah. Also Bellow and Updike. And I was really struck by the sort of vigor and sexual expressiveness–even obscenity. So then I saw what I wanted. I wanted much more vivid colors. I wanted something savage. I always used to deny this, but I guess what I’m really saying is that I was writing to shock. I did feel impatient with the kind of fiction that was being written in England. It seemed to lack all ambition. All these freedoms won for fiction by people like Joyce and Lawrence and Virginia Woolf seemed to me forgotten.
You won the Booker Prize for your last novel, “Amsterdam.” I remember you once said that you imagined winning the Booker would really screw up a writer’s life. I’d had friends who had won the Booker Prize, and they’d spent the next 18 months on the road, promoting the book in Norway and Israel and North Africa and South America. One person who always finds it hard to say no and is always polite is [Kazuo] Ishiguro.
What did you do when you won? [Laughs] Oh, well, I’m not so nice. It’s a balance all of us have to strike between doing public appearances–explaining yourself, and giving readings and having your picture taken a thousand times over–and sort of drawing up the drawbridge. Sometimes you just have to, as I put it, say no to drudge. You’ve really got to go home and write.
“Atonement” is not a book that I expected from you. In my notebooks I called it “my Jane Austen novel.” I didn’t have “Northanger Abbey” or even “Mansfield Park” specifically in mind, but I did have a notion of a country house and of some discrepancies beneath the civilized surface.
Briony witnesses a rape and wrongly sends Robbie to jail. What do readers make of her? People really do diverge. Some people write to me saying that they love the novel but that they absolutely loathe Briony–even by the end of the book. They’re not prepared to forgive her, even as she’s not prepared to forgive herself. Others identify with her because it’s not a crime she commits–it’s not a malicious act–but an error. I can’t help loving her because I spent so much time making her.
After Robbie gets out of jail, he finds himself in the Army at Dunkirk. Your father was at Dunkirk, wasn’t he? Did his stories fascinate you as a kid? You know how it is–your parents’ stories are just sort of there, like the weather. My father died in ‘96, and in his last years of life he returned to those three or four years obsessively. He makes a fleeting appearance in the novel. He himself was a dispatch rider on a motorbike. He got his legs shot up, and he teamed up with another fellow whose arms were shot up, and between them they worked the controls of the bike.
How do you read the reviews of “Atonement” and not let them go to your head? I read one the other day that used the word “masterpiece.” Yeah, that word got used a lot here [in England]. I think that’s always a judgment for other people, not for me. Of course, the publishing industry is always looking for those words–those intensifiers. When people use that word, I think all they mean to tell you is that they like it a lot.
