LAST WEEK ADELAIDE, THIS WEEK WELLINGTON

Ian McEwan finds comfort in literary strangers - from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ian McEwan chose climate change as a subject after "pondering how to write the world's worst novel". He said it would have moral intensity, worthy attitudes, graphs, statistics, biology, chemistry, fashionable pessimism and, worse, factitious optimism.

But the book he finally began to write this year has none of those "do-not-read" qualities. "The way to write about climate change is to write about a deeply flawed person," he told almost 2000 people - the biggest crowd since the biennial Adelaide Writers' Week began in 1960 - who endured 37-degree heat to hear his first public reading from his 12th novel-in-progress.
Michael Beard, his protagonist, is a thrice-divorced womaniser and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, a specialist in light who has made "planetary stupidity" his business and believes solar energy can save the world.

Running late for a meeting with the experts he must convince, Beard flies into London over "industrial squalor", "catheters of ceaseless traffic", "an abundance of inventions" and the sprawl of humanity - "such a wild success, right up there with the spores". Further delayed by the crush at immigration, he fends off queue jumpers in a hilarious scene obviously experienced by many in McEwan's audience.

"I've always had covert sympathy for idealists, especially failed ones, which most of them inevitably are," he said, explaining his next task is to invent a career-wrecking scandal for his scientist. "Climate change," he said, "cuts across the political, the national and into our personal life to the very way we brush our teeth."
At 59, the British novelist is so popular that tickets quickly sold out for his appearance at the Sydney Opera House concert hall this Sunday.

Since winning the 1998 Booker Prize for Amsterdam, he has tackled issues of class, terrorism, neuroscience and marriage through exquisitely flawed characters in Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach.
The film adaptation of Atonement impressed him, especially in its first half, which found clever ways to deal with his complex shifts in time and viewpoint. But, he said, "when you sell a novel, you're like someone selling a marble quarry": the filmmakers come in with trucks and take what they want.

McEwan was last in Australia 22 years ago, when he gave the first reading of his then unpublished novel The Child In Time, about the kidnapping of a child from a supermarket.
He and his wife, Annalena McAfee, went hiking in Tasmania on their way to Adelaide and were astonished by Australia's beauty. Perhaps, as he suggested, it is not too late to find a cure for the disease of human stupidity.