It always takes long to come to what you have to say,
you have to sweep this stretch of land up around your feet
and point to the signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth
and guess at the fall of words.
– Dionne Brand, “Land to Light On”
Ian McEwan is a master prose stylist, a brilliant and dutiful researcher, and he has a spring-like wit. Interviewing him –- as part of the Harbourfront Centre’s International Festival of Authors –- was both a privilege and a daunting challenge. Though gracious, he is a man who would prefer, I sensed, not to suffer fools at all.
(Click Here to view a video podcast of the interview)
Our topic was On Chesil Beach (published by Knopf Canada), McEwan’s most recent novel and a book of near-perfect construction and organization: five chapters of roughly equal size, each finely calibrated, each sentence carefully crafted, and the whole so fluid that I imagined a “quick write.” While McEwan’s hope, he said, was to produce a novel that could be read in one sitting, I took two and would recommend not rushing. A quick read and you might miss some of McEwan’s delicious humour and/or some of the many subtle clues he drops along the way.
While many have commented on the book’s most apparent topic, sexual dysfunction (and it is true that On Chesil Beach is one of the shortest books and longest sex scenes I have ever read), of equal importance is McEwan’s tight analysis of a very particular and troubling time for Britain, the interregnum period of the early 1960s as Britain remembered its glorious World War II past, bid adieu to its colonial outposts, and braced itself for the coming modernity and liberalization. McEwan is too careful a craftsman to ever “guess at the fall of words,” and it took him “long to come to what [he] had to say,” but for social historians there is much in this fine book.
Ken Alexander
Editor, The Walrus
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