An Interview with Ian McEwan

The following is an abbreviated version of an interview that ran on the NPR affiliate KUSP on February 16th, 1998 and 12:00 pm. Eric Schoeck is the Capitola Book Café Events Coordinator.

E.S.: Several of the reviews I've read have targeted the opening scene of Enduring Love as particularly compelling. Have you been hearing this from people as well?

I.M.: I came across a journal entry I wrote about six months before I began working on Enduring Love. My journal tends to be full of little exhortations, and it said, "write a first chapter that would be the equivalent of a highly addictive drug." I did want to have the reader hit the ground running...

E.S.: So to speak...

I.M.: So to speak. In fact, one of the other chapters was originally the opening. It's a chapter where someone makes an attempt on the life of the narrator in a restaurant.

E.S.: Which comes much later.

I.M.: Which now is Chapter 19. But originally was the opening. Then I thought, no, that needs to go in its correct place chronologically and we'll start somewhere else. So, yes, there always was a scheme to have something fairly arresting and, more importantly, an event that would bring fates of different characters into collision.

E.S.: The randomness of fate seems to be one of the most important parts of this novel. It reminded me once again, not how fragile we are, but how fragile fate can be.

I.M.: I often think that when people talk of coincidences that they're almost bound to occur because we're like so many atoms in a turbulent system or a gas under pressure. If you lead an averagely busy life, the number of people that you collide with, so to speak, is extraordinary. One could become your husband, or your wife, or, for that matter, your murderer. That random element in life is a gift to a novelist to make a pattern of it, to make some sense of it, to contest its meaning or even ask whether there's any meaning to it at all. That's part of the pleasure and unpredictability of writing a novel itself.

E.S.: Often our lives seem burdened by dailiness, routine, so that we don't tend to notice the special elements that might change us, delight us, or perhaps torment us.

I.M.: Yes. You drink your coffee, go to work. You don't know of the disaster you avoided by simply leaving five seconds before a certain other point. There's a lot of talk here at the moment of a terrible accident that occured in a ski resort in Italy yesterday when a American jet fighter sliced through the cable carrying 20 people 300 feet above the ground. All the people at the bottom of the mountain waiting for that car to come down and collect them would all be reflecting, had they just made it down the slope a little faster they would have been on that earlier cabin.

E.S.: Had they not paused to have that extra sip of coffee, any number of things that delayed them from a certain death.

I.M.: Exactly so. It was an absolutely terrible accident. A one in a billion chance... but these things can have an extraordinarily powerful influence on our lives, on our fates.

E.S.: This notion of randomness also takes place in the opening of the book. Can you sketch out for us what happens in the opening?

I.M.: It's actually based on a real event. There's a helium balloon, in a high wind, there's a man in his fifties with a young boy and they're trying to tether this balloon. The man is rather inexperienced and panic-stricken and they're having a great deal of difficulty. The boy is in the basket, the man half out of the basket, the wind is blowing hard and he's being dragged along the ground. The narrator, plus three or four other people, converge on this wide, high field and come running over to help. At some point the wind lifts all of them - they've all got ropes - and they're faced with an immediate dilemma. They know that if they can all hang on, their combined weight will bring the thing to the ground. If one lets go, it's crazy for anyone else to hang on. In this I saw a parable, a microcosm, of one of those great conflicts in our lives between altruism and that other primary necessity of looking after yourself.

E.S.: At one point it's described as "us versus me."

I.M.: This is the basis of our morality, the extent to which we will give to others and hold back for ourselves. In one person the flame of altruism burns just a little longer and that split-second forecloses his options.

E.S.: This scene is so compelling. The way it is described, it stays with the reader long after the novel ends. And, so much followed from this incident, so much branching and subdivision, readers certainly wonder, "what is next?

I.M.: At some point in that opening, as Joe (the narrator) says to himself, "the afternoon could have ended in mere tragedy," and been just that. It's a device to reflect upon what might lay behind our moral instincts. Also, to bring these fates into collision... the narrator's fate and one particular man who's suffering from a fairly rare form of psychological syndrome known as de Clerambault's syndrome.

E.S.: Love and obsession intertwined horribly.

I.M.: Exactly... a psychotic delusional state. Many of the people we call "stalkers", men and women obsessed by a particular person, do suffer from this syndrome. One of its main features is that the sufferer thinks that the love object is the person who loves him, that this is something reciprocal. A terrible form of delusion and almost impossible to shake off.

E.S.: Could you talk about the religious aspect of Enduring Love. Jed, the delusional character, is after all a devout Christian.

I.M.: It's a challenge for the narrator because he is a man steeped in science, in rationalism. What for him is a random meeting is for Jed a meeting ordained by God. We often talk of science and religion as being from two different spheres, not contradictory. I don't really go along with this. I think they do embrace, in some respects, mutually exclusive ideas of the world.

E.S.: Jed expects Joe to resist his spiritual coercion and so everything Joe does and feels is fully accounted for -- fueling the delusion - by Jed's philosophy.

I.M.: If a de Clarembault's sufferer attaches himself to you and you give every clear sign that you wish him to leave or you bring in the police or court orders, the sufferer will simply see this as completely predictable, will always find a way of justifying anything you do as fitting into the pattern ordained by his love.

E.S.: The image I have is of quicksand - the more you struggle, the more it pulls you in.

I.M.: Yes. I've just been reading an account of a man who's life was ruined by a de Clarembault's sufferer. Sometimes the only solution is to start a new life with a new name in a completely different place.

E.S.: Joe's partner Clarissa is not entirely sympathetic to Joe's plight. In some ways she sees him as complicit, partly to blame, for Jed's obsession.

I.M.: The reader is supposed to be wondering whether he can trust this narrator (Joe).

E.S.: Who is obsessed here?

I.M.: Joe does react pretty strongly right from the very beginning. He's in shock (from the balloon incident) so everything seems twice as real. His responses are exaggerated. Clarissa has a point; though, in the end, she's wrong and Joe is right. Jed posed much more of a threat than she ever realized.

E.S.: A Village Voice reviewer, after praising your prose style, said that you take a "nasty delight' in shocking your readers. Any comment?

I.M.: I want my reader to be wholly engaged, gripped rather than shocked. I'm pleased when people tell me that they sat down and read Enduring Love in one sitting. In that respect, writers are like jealous lovers: "I just want you to think of me." I've always wanted prose that has about it a great clarity. Having a scientist narrate this novel I was able to indulge my own taste for precision in what's happening. I like a sort of lambent clarity in the opening pages which can then dissolve into mystery.

E.S.: In a letter Jed tells Joe, without an awareness of God's love you are living in a desert. It struck me as ironic, yet there is something in that assertion that rang true.

I.M.: I don't know where you stand on God. For me, I don't find the statement obviously true. I find that life is rich, diverse, fabulous, and extraordinary, conceived without a god. Perhaps I'm continuing a conversation I had with myself in another novel, Black Dogs. I'm very interested in belief and faith. What makes some believe and others not. Yes, Joe has a lack of emotional awareness, but the world he conceives through science is one with a sense of awe, with respect for that which we don't know. It's one that can have any amount of love in it and doesn't necessarily need a presiding God.

E.S.: A marvelous novel. Thank you for joining us.

I.M.: It's been a pleasure talking to you.