His sceptical surgeon, says McEwan, judges that “people who believe that they have the route to establish Utopia on earth are to be feared because, rationally, there should be no limit to the number of people they would be prepared to kill now, to secure happiness for everyone for ever after. And I think that lies behind our fear of radical Islam, when they say – chillingly, as if it could make us impressed by them – ‘You love life, we love death’.” The writer once himself accused of being too much possessed by suffering and savagery chuckles over this grim mantra. “I think, ‘Yeah, that just about sums it up.’”Biography: Ian McEwanIan McEwan was born in Aldershot in 1948, the son of an army NCO who was wounded at Dunkirk He studied at the Universities of Sussex and East Anglia. His acclaimed collections of stories First Love Last Rites and In Between the Sheets (1975/77) were followed by the novels The Cement Garden (1978), The Comfort of Strangers (1981), The Child in Time (1987), The Innocent (1990), Black Dogs (1992), Enduring Love (1997) and the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam (1998). Atonement (2001) won the WH Smith Literary Award and the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award This week, Cape publishes his new novel, Saturday. Ian McEwan lives in central London with his wife and his two student sons.. Sarah Waters, whose Fingersmith was heavily garlanded in 2002, is close to finishing her fourth novel.
It will again be published by Virago, where publisher Lennie Goodings reports that it’s set in 1940s London, in the darkest wartime days, and is “tender, tragic, beautiful and marvellously realised”. Fingersmith will reach our TV screens soon, starring the Oscar-nominated Imelda Staunton, as well as Charles Dance.
* Chronicles was so long coming it’s by no means certain that Bob Dylan will ever write another volume. Let’s hope he is encouraged by news that his memoir has been shortlisted for a US National Book Circle Award for non-fiction, alongside John Guy’s life of Mary, Queen of Scots and Stephen Greenblatt’s life of the Bard, Will in the World. The winners are announced in New York on 18 March.* Andrea Levy, a child of the Windrush generation of migrants, said a few especially well-chosen words on Tuesday when she added the Whitbread Book of the Year award to her Orange Prize for Small Island. In the week when Michael Howard made hostility to immigration a central plank of Tory policy, Levy thanked “all those people … From Buenos Aires to Barcelona; from Budapest to Beijing: the 16 books longlisted for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize cover an extraordinary range of territory, in culture, style and genre as much as simple geography.
Over the past few months, I and my fellow judges (the writers Julian Evans and Mich? Roberts, the editor and translator Margaret Obank, and Kate Griffin, international literature officer of Arts Council England) have read, thought and argued long and hard in order to reduce the 80-odd titles submitted to the list detailed below. In early March, we will publish our final shortlist of six candidates for the £10,000 award, which is divided equally between author and translator, and enjoys the magnificent support of Arts Council England and Champagne Taittinger.
In the meantime, I would urge you to explore at least some of our formidably eclectic pack of front-runners. Our longlist offers, I believe, something for everyone: from a blockbuster literary thriller in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind to a landmark investigation of Turkey today in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow; from the Brazilian pop idol-turned-novelist Chico Buarque getting seduced by Old Europe in Budapest to the French enfant terrible Fr?ric Beigbeder imagining the terror and pity of September 11 in the Twin Towers in Windows on the World.Other books would have made the list if the judges had been convinced that their translations did full justice to the original texts: they include Sylvie Germain’s The Song of False Lovers and Fred Vargas’s Seeking Whom He May Devour. As for the range of languages represented at this stage, it’s heartening – if quite unplanned – that the western European heavyweights have found challengers from further afield. So we have two Turkish novels, two sets of Russian short stories, a Serbian Holocaust fable, a Saudi coming-of-age novel, and a tale of young China torn between rural warmth and urban cool. Only one language – Portuguese – can muster three contenders, and even so they roam across three continents: the Nobel laureate Jos?aramago from Portugal itself; Chico Buarque from Rio de Janeiro; and Mia Couto from Mozambique. It seemed a rather unlikely achievement for a woman in Perivale, so I had to find something else for Lily to be.”Although McEwan admits that “I have let bits of my life pour into the book in a quite deliberate way,” Henry’s medical mindset remains an ocean apart from his creator’s.
McEwan’s research led him to shadow a dynamic and “incredibly hard-working” neurosurgeon, Neil Kitchen of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Henry drives down the Great West Road for a routine visit to his mother in a home, where dementia has reduced her to an eternal present without memory or expectation. McEwan’s mother suffered from vascular dementia; he says “this is absolutely an account of visiting her in her last months.” Lily has also forgotten her proud youth as a county-standard swimmer “My mother wasn’t a swimmer,” he says. “But by an accident of history, because she was married to a soldier, she was a markswoman She did win medals with a .22 rifle. We leave Henry as we found him, contemplative at his pre-dawn window, an exhausted, worry-prone but – yes – a happy man.Within the McEwan canon, Saturday is both a very personal and a coolly detached work.
It was very liberating – like deciding to write a sonnet.”The streets, squares, people and hospitals of his new neighbourhood crowd the pages So, in a less obvious shape, does McEwan’s family. Prompted by the move to London, McEwan decided that he would “let circumstance and event and place pile into a novel in a way I’d never done before”. Even the day-in-a-life format had to wait until the great demo before it set: “I work at 500 words a day and events were going at a million words a day. Then I saw that there was a significant moment in which nothing was resolved – the march itself – but into which everything else could be poured…