Ian McEwan tells Jon Stock about the pleasure of writing a spy novel with a twist – and why he believes it’s high time John le Carré won the Booker Prize.
Author Ian McEwan claims John le
Carré deserves the Booker Prize Photo: David
Rose
In his closely woven tweed jacket, Ian
McEwan looks every inch the Cotswolds country gent as he turns up
for our lunch. He has chosen to meet at Barnsley House, a boutique hotel a few
miles east of Cirencester, and the small-talk is of how the English countryside
has been ruined by arable farming.
“The Cotswolds are now dotted with 200-acre monoculture fields, run by
contract farmers who want giant fields so they can turn around their combines,”
he says. “It’s not so bad around here. Plutocracies and the army have defended a
great deal of our countryside.”
McEwan is not putting this on, hoping to woo Telegraph readers with fighting
country talk. Last year the author moved out of London, swapping the terraced
housing of Fitzrovia, the setting of his 2005 novel Saturday, for a bucolic
corner of Gloucestershire. A keen walker, he cares passionately about the
natural landscape, but he also knows that if, as a novelist, he wants to observe
those around him, it’s best to blend in. A bit like espionage, the engine room
of his latest novel, Sweet Tooth.
McEwan shares many of the skills of a spy. His novels famously require
meticulous research, whether it’s Atonement (Dunkirk), Saturday
(brain surgery) or Solar
(climate change). Only then does he cross over into another world, cover story
intact, a quiet authorial confidence his sole protection against being exposed.
Sweet Tooth, his 15th book (which comes out in paperback next week),
allows him to explore more fully the many parallels between his own craft and
the spy’s. Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) is a female MI5 officer in the early
Seventies, charged with encouraging a young writer at Sussex University to write
novels of a certain political persuasion. She falls in love with him and must
decide between her job and her heart.
“I’d been thinking a lot about the cultural Cold War,” McEwan says, “how the
CIA bankrolled organisations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and funded
Encounter magazine. The big push was to persuade left-of-centre European
intellectuals – ex-communists who knew whereof they spoke – that the West, the
US, was the real power of culture. How extraordinary that the world of
intelligence could penetrate the world of literature, particularly fiction. It
seemed like an open field, a subject that was just waiting to be explored.”
Nothing is straightforward in a McEwan novel, of course, and in a final meta-twist that proves the novelist can be even more duplicitous than an intelligence officer, is he delivering his own verdict: Spy fiction 0, the literary novel 1?
McEwan says he is not bothered that Sweet Tooth might be categorised as genre fiction. For him, such distinctions are irrelevant. It is, after all, his second venture into espionage. The Innocent, published in 1990, was set in West Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War, and did no harm to his reputation as a literary novelist.
“In the end these things just dissolve,” he says. “The only question is how good a novel is, not whether it has spies or detectives or nurses marrying doctors. Take Conrad – we wouldn’t say of him that he’s merely a writer of seafaring yarns. What matters is whether a novelist can devise a particular and plausible world that holds us, and make a moral universe that has such a resonance that we can go back years later and find it still works. Then genre is transcended. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy holds up because it’s a brilliant novel.”
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Nothing is straightforward in a McEwan novel, of course, and in a final meta-twist that proves the novelist can be even more duplicitous than an intelligence officer, is he delivering his own verdict: Spy fiction 0, the literary novel 1?
McEwan says he is not bothered that Sweet Tooth might be categorised as genre fiction. For him, such distinctions are irrelevant. It is, after all, his second venture into espionage. The Innocent, published in 1990, was set in West Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War, and did no harm to his reputation as a literary novelist.
“In the end these things just dissolve,” he says. “The only question is how good a novel is, not whether it has spies or detectives or nurses marrying doctors. Take Conrad – we wouldn’t say of him that he’s merely a writer of seafaring yarns. What matters is whether a novelist can devise a particular and plausible world that holds us, and make a moral universe that has such a resonance that we can go back years later and find it still works. Then genre is transcended. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy holds up because it’s a brilliant novel.”
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