He got an early taste of notoriety in 1979 when the BBC abandoned a television version of his short story “Solid Geometry” over concerns about the Victorian antique at the heart of the narrative: a foot-long pickled penis. Back then, his dark, cerebral work quickly earned him the nickname “Ian Macabre” the restrained realism of his prose style only made the perversities captured in his tales all the more shocking. Certainly, he’s interested in talking about the way the internet has warped social discourse since he first arrived on the literary scene in the late Seventies. He also has a knack for swerving questions – indeed, ask him about JK Rowling, in support of whom he signed an open letter in 2020 after she received “hate speech” for her views on transgender issues, and he’ll bat you away, deftly steering the conversation back to, say, the troubling rise of AI. Surrounded by books, he’s engaging and erudite a deep thinker with a professorial manner. McEwan is talking to me from his Cotswolds home. Have I declined?’ It was a fascinating thing to do.” “There were moments when my fingers twitched around an imaginary blue pencil and I thought: ‘I wouldn’t punctuate that like that now.’ Other times I was thinking: ‘Wow, that was good. Selecting which passages to perform from that rich material has been a revealing process. “It was like a review of a big chunk of my adult life,” says McEwan. Backed by 80 musicians, the Booker Prize winner will deliver extracts from a career that stretches over 16 novels, from the psychological horror of 1978 debut The Concrete Garden to bestselling tragic romances such as Atonement and On Chesil Beach. Most recently, he published Lessons, a sprawling, semi-autobiographical look back at the sweep of history in his lifetime. It’s not that the 74-year-old author has been struck by a sudden attack of solipsism rather, he’s deep in preparation for a one-off performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican. Lately, Ian McEwan has found himself reading a lot of Ian McEwan. ‘I feel rather depressed about the way things are, and have been for a while’ (Shutterstock)
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