Ian McEwan - “I write to find where I’m going” - The Financial Times Weekend Magazine
Ian McEwan Interview - The Financial Times Weekend Magazine
On a hike in the Cotswolds, the novelist talks about the ethics of AI, his Brexit obsession — and the ‘profound refreshment’ he finds in walking
Ian McEwan’s days are spent crafting complex fiction about human morality and social change. But during our trek in the limestone hills near his home in the Cotswolds, his primary challenge is to stop his border collie Rab from slaloming after the scent of rabbits. “Rab, come here!” yells McEwan. We forgot to pack a lead so, at a road crossing, one of Britain’s most celebrated novelists fashions a makeshift tether from his elasticated belt. “He has zero traffic sense and tries to bite the wheels of cars,” says McEwan as Rab yanks him forward.
McEwan has hiked all over the world, including the Lake District, Dolomites, Atlas Mountains and Himalayas. He and his wife, the novelist Annalena McAfee, began 2019 with a snow hike in Bavaria. The North American tour for his new novel Machines Like Me — a riff on ethics, empathy and consciousness, refracted through a love tryst involving a couple and a darkly perfect synthetic human called Adam — has been structured around a four-day hiking break in Vancouver.
Sporting his German-made Meindl boots and Deuter backpack, McEwan looks, at 70, admirably fit. “I carry a sackful of essentials — two good penknives, some very strong but thin rope, two survival blankets — but I have never had a chance to use them in 25 years. I am still waiting to be snow hiking and find someone shivering on the ground so I can rescue them. I only use the penknives to cut cheese.”
Hiking is a source of deep sensory pleasure for McEwan. At various moments he crouches to smell wild garlic, spots brook trout darting through a stream and pauses to admire the sunlight on the birch trees. As in his writing, he seeks to capture pinprick moments through precise observation. “It is the art of being in the present,” he says, adding, “This is the closest you will ever get to childhood — that sense of just ambling and going off-piste, leaving the track behind, or seeing some ridge that would be fun to be up on and enjoying that sense of freedom.”
At various moments, McEwan crouches to smell wild garlic, spots brook trout darting through a stream and pauses to admire the sunlight on the birch trees. Wandering also provides mental liberation. “When I get back to my desk I usually find that some profound refreshment has taken place,” McEwan says, as we edge around a patchwork of corrugated fields. “Occasionally, the way ahead on something will just come from nowhere. It’s like getting free advice.”
The honey-coloured houses we are now strolling past are quintessentially English but McEwan grew up in East Asia, north Africa and Germany. His father David was a domineering army officer and his mother Rose a loving but timid housewife whose first husband died during the war. “That coastal strip of Libya imprinted me with a love of the Mediterranean landscape and even today if I take a train out of Paris heading south, when I see the olive trees, the vines, the skies, a certain kind of dustiness and a different light, my heart lifts,” McEwan says.
He can also remember, as a boy, collecting a scorpion in a jam jar. “I used to feed it stag beetles but it didn’t eat them — it was too traumatised, I think.” His mother thought it was dangerous, so his father got someone to pickle it in formaldehyde. McEwan later sold it for two and sixpence in a Brighton junk shop. “I so regret that,” he mourns.
Aged 11, he was sent to Woolverstone Hall, a state boarding school in Suffolk. “With my parents 2,000 miles away it was traumatic, but I sort of buried it,” he says. “I didn’t even cry. It might have been better if I had.” As a teenager with thick Buddy Holly glasses and acne, McEwan discovered the writing of Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene and William Wordsworth, but he also experienced a deep urge to explore the oak forests, tidal rivers and salt creeks of Suffolk. “That was my awakening,” he says. “We’d go off, climb trees, dig dangerous tunnels and crawl through them, with unsupported earth above. My heart sinks thinking about it even now.”
After studying English at Sussex University in the late 1960s, he took an MA Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. But as his interest in literature and art grew, McEwan says he felt alienated from his parents, who had left school at 14. “That’s a terrible feeling,” he says. “You never forgive yourself.”
Years later, when his first marriage ended, McEwan gained custody of his sons William and Greg. He remembers that he kept his study door ajar while writing. “I wanted to demystify my study for my children,” he says. “Because it was always open to them, they would come in and [see it] wasn’t such a big deal.” Some of his most famous novels, such as Enduring Love (1997) and Atonement (2001), came during this period.
In a sheep-cropped meadow by a stream, he shows me a text from his four-year-old granddaughter, sent on her mother’s phone. “I sent her a description of frogs and toads, then sent her a picture and she wrote: ‘Dear Grandad, I think they are all toads.’ Toads are knobbly and frogs are smooth, so she got it right.”
We meander past a brook where McEwan says he often picnics with his grandchildren. He enjoys cooking at home but on hikes he prefers a hunk of cheese, bread and tomato, or some smoked salmon or sardines on bread soaked in lemon juice. He usually carries nested steel cups and a bottle of wine. “I do take pleasure being in some high, remote place, deep into conversation about literature, science, philosophy, consciousness, nationalism or whatever. But if you and I had a glass of wine in our hands in this moment, the landscape changes: suddenly it is your vast sitting room. There is an ease and comfort of being in it.”
We pass stone houses where details of a meeting with the local Conservative MP are pinned to a notice board. McEwan is historically a centre-left voter who hopes Keir Starmer or David Miliband might lead Labour back to the centre ground. He is also an active campaigner against Brexit. “If you go back just five to six years, think how happy the country was in the afterglow of the Olympics in 2012. If you’d gone round then with a clipboard and said, ‘Could you list all the problems Britain has?’, how many people would have said the EU? They might have mentioned migration. The poverty gap. The state of education. Crime. Terrorism. Global warming. The housing shortage. Doctors’ waiting lists. But not the EU . . . [People have] been persuaded that all their ills are down to the EU. It is a popular delusion. A delusional state, cynically managed.”
When hiking, you can have a range of moods, from joy to a sudden stream of the darkest thoughts McEwan’s novels often excavate topical issues such as euthanasia (Amsterdam), climate change (Solar) and family courts (The Children Act), and the pattern is continued in his latest book. Though set in an alternative 1980s London, where Britain has lost the Falklands war and Tony Benn beats Margaret Thatcher in a landslide election victory, there are familiar elements: a Trotskyist left, far-right xenophobia, terrorism — and a push for Brexit. McEwan reminds readers that the present is the frailest of possible constructs, in which a kaleidoscope of options remains possible. “I have been very obsessed about Brexit and it could have devoured my novel live, so I wanted to keep it in the zone of a reflection on the contingent, and how so much of what happens could have been otherwise,” he explains.
It is a gritty subject for a spring day but McEwan admits that walking alone can also trigger dark reflections. “Solitude is interesting when you are hiking because you can have quite a range of moods, from joy to a sudden stream of the darkest thoughts or remembering a friend who died. You become more vulnerable to the freewheeling nature of your own thoughts. As one gets older, one’s address book of the dead gets longer, which leads to larger thoughts of mortality. And sometimes it is not even a dark thought; it’s a sort of neutral calculation: how long have I got? Ten years? Twelve? Fifteen?”
We stroll down a narrow country lane and arrive at St Mary’s Church in Edgeworth. “Let me show you this,” he says, opening the wooden gate. “It dates to the 11th century but there are some Saxon remains.” We wander between the gravestones and encounter a roving church historian. What follows is a glimpse into the voracious mind of a novelist, as McEwan politely plunders him for information about crosses, pilasters, Saxon carvings, Norman timberwork and stone gargoyles. McEwan on his walk:' Occasionally, the way ahead on something will just come from nowhere. It’s like getting free advice', he says of hiking .
We carry on into a luxurious green valley encircled by forests. McEwan clearly has eclectic interests but his love of science draws frowns from some literary circles. “People do ask with a certain amount of suspicion, as if you were confessing to being in the arms trade or running a brothel,” he says. “If one thinks of science as organised curiosity, how could you not be interested in science? I don’t know how you can get through life without loving fiction, art, music, landscapes, food and wine — and science can pitch in with the rest as one of the sensual, intellectual pleasures of life.”
His fascination with science and morality collides in his latest novel. The presence of synthetic humans raises some profound questions. What does it mean to be human? Could you accept a form of artificial intelligence as a conscious being? Should you be able to sleep with them, or to kill them with impunity? “I have always taken an interest in what used to be called the ‘mind-body problem’ and out of that whether machines could be conscious and whether synthetic humans could think,” says McEwan. “When the narrator has a row with his girlfriend because she has made love with Adam, she says, ‘You wouldn’t complain if it had been a vibrator.’ And he says, ‘Yes, but a vibrator doesn’t weed the garden.’ Even though he feels betrayed, he is rather pleased with himself because he is on the cutting edge of a new problem: cuckolded by a machine. Or is it a machine?”
The narrator muses on whether the neurological impulses in his brain and optic nerves are any different from the electrical signals rushing through Adam’s microprocessors. “I take the materialist view that if we could find equivalence to all those neurons and axons and synapses, those are clearly sufficient necessary conditions of a consciousness,” says McEwan. “In other words, the mind is what the brain does from my point of view. And I am not really sure what other point of view there can be unless you are a vitalist, or you think that consciousness is the function of some being from heaven.”
McEwan is less interested in the technology — which he insists won’t be mastered for centuries, if at all — but wants to ponder the moral questions AI raises. With AI controlling self-driving cars, conducting military simulations, issuing medical diagnoses and selling stocks, these questions are already relevant. He references the Moral Machine experiment in which millions of people worldwide were asked who a self-driving car should avoid in a split-second collision. In the west, most people opted to save a child. But in China, it was an old person. “I am coming round to the Chinese view,” quips McEwan. “But that we are even having to discuss passing on ethical decisions to our car is already beginning to open up this whole new world of what our future relationships with these machines are going to be. That offers real insights into human thinking, which is of particular interest to a novelist.”
It is a complex conundrum and Rab has passed his own judgment by disappearing into a sweet-smelling hedge. He is called back and we stroll down a farm track and arrive back at McEwan’s home. He offers me a lunch of gravlax and salad, followed by cheese and biscuits. I wonder how he feels about AI potentially encroaching into his own sphere of writing. The novel is, after all, one of the ultimate expressions of human empathy, requiring the ability in both writer and reader to imagine what it is like to be someone else. Could a machine ever master what McEwan has dedicated his life to achieving? “That would be the ultimate Turing test for me,” he says. “As language is an open system it requires a knowledge of the world to understand it, not just a knowledge of grammar. To write a good novel, you have to understand how people relate to each other and what it is to have subjective feelings and describe them over 100,000 words. If a machine could write a novel like Anna Karenina, then I would have to throw my hands up and say, ‘Welcome to our world.’”
Ian McEwan on walking and writing
“I was with Annalena in Arizona and came to a little gulch and saw in the distance a piece of A4 yellow-and-white legal paper nailed to a post and it said: “Mountain lions in this area. If you are reading this notice, get out immediately.” It was the fastest we have ever hiked.”
“We’re passing the river Frome now, which will be familiar from the name of my character in Sweet Tooth [Serena Frome]. The opening to Enduring Love came from a walk in Ireland. That was a novel I began writing in the middle, not knowing how it started. It was a windy day and my hiking friend Ray Dolan [a professor of neuropsychiatry at UCL] told me about a ballooning accident [in Bavaria, in which a father and son tried to hold it down, but when the son let go, the father fell to his death]. And I thought, “Ah that is just what I want: a microcosm of moral relations.”
“There is a sense of this upriver journey with writing. It will take you two to three years and you don’t know necessarily what you will find . . . As the work unfolds, it teaches you its own rules. I write to find where I’m going. But with both [writing and walking] I enjoy the total absorption in something that interests you.”
(C) The Financial Times
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