I went to hear Ian McEwan speak at the Opera House yesterday.
It was billed as 'in conversation' with Ramona Koval, but in fact McEwan first spoke for 45 minutes, under the heading 'The Go-Between', about the intersection between 'truth' and fiction.
Not that he announced it as such. Instead, he began with an anecdote about himself reading The Go Between as a 14 year old. That novel is set in the hot summer of 1900 and the boy who is the main character keeps checking the temperature guage. One day, the monthly Punch magazine arrives and the cover has a startling change - instead of the usual drawing of Punch, Punch is mopping his brow.
McEwan told how, reading this in his school library in the 1960s, he looked up and saw a set of bound copies of Punch magazine on a nearby shelf. He went and looked through them and finally took out the issue for July 1900 - and there was the picture of Punch wiping his forehead.
It was a magical moment for him - although maybe 'magical' is the wrong word, because the effect came from his verification that a work of fiction was historically factual.
From this McEwan moved to reading excerpts from several different novels of his own - all of which had attracted letters from readers pointing out that he'd got his facts wrong, whether they be facts about the night sky, a car, French grammar or surgical procedures.
Why did the facts matter? After all, these are works of fiction. But I think one of the most magnetic and powerful aspects of McEwan's fiction is precisely its location in the recognisable contemporary social world. He quoted Phillip Roth who said way back in the 60s that American life constantly outstripped fiction - and it's certainly true that real life these days is comprehensively "larger than life". The night before we had watched United 93, including watching the 'special feature' interview with many families of those who were on that plane. After they saw the film for the first time, they spoke about how important to them it was that the film is so "realistic".
In an odd (for me) bit of synchronicity, McEwan read from the piece he wrote for the Guardian just after September 11. In real life he had just finished writing Atonement, with its early passage about the child Bryony's musings about whether other people are as "real" as she is. McEwan's fiction made it into real life, when he wrote post 9/11 of the failure of empathy which enabled the hijackers to do what they did - their failure to see other people as real.
[I'd add that military technology also completely abrogates the psychological realities of the people who are on its receiving end.]
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