‘It’d be a stretch to write like Shakespeare’
Ian McEwan tells Lewis Jones why his Hamlet-inspired new novel is his most audacious yet
‘I woke up one night and thought that all I needed was half an hour to talk Blair out of the Iraq war’
Over lunch at a grand hotel near his house in Gloucestershire, Ian McEwan is talking about his latest novel, Nutshell. “Maybe it’s old age,” he says, “I’m 68, staring at the jaws of 70, but in part I think it’s a return to the sort of writing I was doing in the Seventies, somewhat extravagant.”
McEwan is fond of understatements, and that “somewhat” is one of them. He made his name with sensitive, fastidiously observed and wildly extravagant short stories about recherché sexuality – incest, fetishism, bestiality, necrophilia and so on – which he continued to explore in his early novels.
In his mature fiction he has tackled more mainstream subjects with the same mastery of dread and pathos, much more sophisticated plots, and extraordinary levels of research. For Saturday (2005) he spent two years shadowing a neurosurgeon. For Solar (2010) he immersed himself in physics, and for The Children Act (2014) in the work of a High Court judge. “I love the expertise and language. But people kept asking me, ‘Why don’t you do airline pilots?’ And I don’t want to become the nation’s careers master.”
He has, though, become the nation’s literary novelist, outstripping his cohort (Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie) not only critically but also commercially, with several bestsellers, and successful film adaptations of Enduring Love (1997) and Atonement (2001).
Nutshell, his 14th novel, is something new. “It was quite a holiday not to do any research, and have a really young narrator – my youngest so far.”
Another understatement. Nutshell’s narrator may be the youngest in all of literature, for despite a nostalgia for his “careless youth” he is in his third trimester as a foetus. And he is not just any foetus, but that of a modern-day Hamlet, helpless to act as he listens in the womb to his mother Trudy plotting with her lover, his uncle Claude, a stunningly banal property developer, to murder his poet father and steal the ancestral home.
It’s an outrageously audacious conceit, and McEwan has great fun with it. Although he is quite often funny, he is a predominantly sober writer. But Nutshell is a jeu d’esprit, and consistently hilarious.
When not planning the murder of her husband or having sex with his brother, often simultaneously, Trudy drinks a great deal of wine and listens to educational radio programmes and podcasts. So the foetus is an absurdly well-informed oenophile, and suffers hangovers. “Once you have a foetus who can divulge his taste in wine, I think you’ve set yourself free, and can say anything you like.
“I had it in mind, in my earliest drafts, that it’s Shakespeare who’s talking, about to be reborn. But I didn’t want to get bogged down in rebirth. And it would be quite a stretch to write as well as Shakespeare.”
The unborn child’s mother is of course an unfaithful wife. How does McEwan view infidelity? “When friends tell me of a forthcoming or recent infidelity I always feel torn. I resent being told, because it puts me in a situation of bad faith with the spouse. But I find it quite easy to be faithful. Life just seems larger and simpler.”
The foetus worries that, once they have murdered his father, Trudy and Claude might abandon him to strangers. In 2002 McEwan learnt that he had an older brother, David Sharp, who was born during the Second World War, when his mother was still married to her first husband, and given up for adoption. Was that on his mind when he was writing the book? “No. It honestly hadn’t crossed my mind.”
At one point, listening to the radio, the foetus despairs of the state of the West, threatened by inequality, demographic collapse, climate change. But then he rejoices in its freedoms and luxuries. He’s a bit of a pundit. “Yeah, he bangs on about the world. It’s all going to hell, but maybe not. Typical Guardian reader. I gave him some of my opinions, but not all.”
Does he anticipate imminent apocalypse? “Well, I do keep an eye on the one thing that I think could see us all go down, which is the militarisation of the South China Sea.”
What about a Trump presidency? “He seems completely inadequate, ignorant, with real personal problems of dealing with criticism. It’s alarming that he got as far as he did, but I think he’ll go down in flames.”
McEwan once said he thought the world would be a better place if women were in charge. Does he still think so, now that we have Angela Merkel, Theresa May, and possibly Hillary Clinton? “I had a romantic notion that women should be the repository of all high moral value, but life has taught me that badness can be evenly distributed across the sexes. And I probably said that long before Mrs Thatcher.” Saturday, his most politically topical novel, is set in 2003, on the day of the demonstration in London against the imminent invasion of Iraq. “There were lots of people who accused me of not writing the anti-war novel that they wanted, but that wasn’t my purpose. I was trying to take a snapshot of the country.” What was his own view? “I’d been very interested in Iraq since the late Eighties, so when I heard in the summer of 2002 this idea of deposing Saddam, I thought, ‘Well, maybe that would be a brilliant idea.’ But as we got nearer I suspected, as it turned out correctly, that it would be an almighty mess because they’d do it on the cheap.
“So just a week before, mid-February, I woke up one night, still half asleep, and I told Annalena [McAfee, the writer, his second wife] that all I needed was half an hour with Blair and I could talk him out of it. And I did know one or two people who knew Blair, so it wouldn’t have been completely impossible. But it all looked very different in the morning.
He rejects the idea that the Iraq war was the chief reason for the rise of Isil. “I think it’s been one element,” he says. “But jihadism would’ve existed if we’d gone in or not.”
McEwan has been called an atheist, but says he is strictly an agnostic. He loves the Bible as literature, though, and the music of Bach, and even has a soft spot for the Anglican Church now that it’s become “apologetic”. And he has fond memories of a journey he made in his early twenties – he recalls its itinerary: “Istanbul, Mashhad, Iraq, Kandahar, Kabul, Jalalabad… all these places would be impossible now” – when he was met with “unbelievable hospitality, in the Homeric sense, total tolerance, with no interest in whether you believed in anything or not, because they were so secure in their understanding of the world”.
For a novelist, all experience is raw material. I ask him if there is anything in his life he hasn’t been able to use? “Ah, I would never write about my first marriage.” (He and his first wife Penny Allen divorced in 1995 and there followed a bitter dispute over the custody of their sons.) “Or talk about it. So there’s that. What else wouldn’t I write about? Income tax. VAT. Golf.”
His generation of literary enfants terribles are now grand old novelists. Does he mind that he is not a candidate for this year’s Booker Prize? “No. The time to complain is when you’ve just won it.” (He won with Amsterdam in 1998, uncomplainingly.)
As to the new generation of novelists? “I’ve read all Zadie Smith’s stuff, and others randomly, but never been aware of them quite as a generation. I’ve just been in Bavaria with Julian Barnes, and we were asked a lot about has our generation fulfilled its promise. We both said things along the lines of ‘Well, we didn’t promise anything. We just carry on writing, and hope to do so for another 10 years or so, at least.’” So do we all.
Nutshell (Jonathan Cape, £15.99) is published on Sept 1