:00:03. > :00:08.necessary to think there's some necessary to think there's some
:00:08. > :00:13.perfect thing you'll fall into by mistake. Sweet Tooth is launched at
:00:13. > :00:18.the end of Edinburgh Book Festival, any particular reason or you love
:00:18. > :00:26.Edinburgh? It is very happy coincidence, I agreed long ago to
:00:26. > :00:32.Edinburgh. I loved there. And I it just happens to be my peb will you
:00:32. > :00:37.case day. Edinburgh doesn't change. It morals maintained its intimacy,
:00:37. > :00:44.and general sense of mischaef and fun. I don't know how many times
:00:44. > :00:49.I've been but it is a great pleasure. Philip Roth said the only
:00:49. > :00:53.way he could finish the painting was when he broke the emotional
:00:53. > :01:00.engagement with. How do you break with a book? That moment you hand
:01:00. > :01:04.it of, I now take care to tell publishers, this is the penultimate
:01:04. > :01:11.draft because there's a long tailoff, many after thoughts
:01:11. > :01:16.between that moment of handing over, often disruptive suggestions, and
:01:16. > :01:21.then the process of talking about it, which at first is very happy,
:01:21. > :01:29.and then is neutral and becomes an affliction. You find if the name of
:01:29. > :01:33.the character crosses your lips again, you'd cut your throat.
:01:33. > :01:38.Ian McEwan novel things are rarely as straightforward as they appear,
:01:38. > :01:43.and his latest is no exception. Filled with spies, sex and
:01:43. > :01:48.seduction, Sweet Tooth is nar rated by Serena, a beautiful Cambridge
:01:48. > :01:55.maths student who is recruited for MI5 for one of her lovers, as
:01:55. > :02:05.befits a spy, she seems candid and evasive in equal measure. My name
:02:05. > :02:07.
:02:07. > :02:11.is Chris Froome - President Obama On a secret mission, I didn't
:02:11. > :02:14.return safely. Within 18 months of joining I was sacked having
:02:14. > :02:23.disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a
:02:23. > :02:28.hand in his own undoing. By day she toils in the belly of
:02:28. > :02:32.the service, but night, she consumes popular fiction. And a
:02:32. > :02:42.love of novels prompts her first assignment, oming a new front in
:02:42. > :02:43.
:02:43. > :02:49.the Cold War, by cultivateing Tom Halley, who is a source of anti-
:02:49. > :02:52.Communist pop prop ganda. What did you think of my stories, I said
:02:52. > :02:57.quietly. I think they're utterly brilliant. He flinched as though
:02:57. > :03:02.sun swun had pokeed him in the chest, in the heart, and he gave a
:03:02. > :03:07.little gasp, not a laugh. He went to speak but was stuck for words.
:03:07. > :03:13.He stareed at me, waiting, wanting me to go on, tell him more about
:03:13. > :03:18.himself and his talent but I held back. Sweet Tooth explores a
:03:18. > :03:22.potential crossover between the worlds of literature and espionage,
:03:22. > :03:32.play flee mixing creation with real life characters, in compelling
:03:32. > :03:33.
:03:33. > :03:41.What was the origin of Sweet Tooth? Two or three little notes to myself,
:03:41. > :03:47.over a period of five years, one was to a man writes a novel to get
:03:47. > :03:53.a woman out of his system but ends up doing the exact opposite.
:03:53. > :03:58.Another was what would happen in a love affair if one of the parties
:03:58. > :04:04.had a secret and then it became too late to divulge it. It would
:04:04. > :04:09.threaten. And finally, I had a vague idea of writing a novel, one
:04:09. > :04:13.day, in which when you got to the very end, you realised that there's
:04:13. > :04:18.a whole story that's happened outside the novel, and now you must
:04:18. > :04:23.think again to include it. So I don't want to give away the end of
:04:23. > :04:28.the novel, but I was conforming to a wish that I had a ending that
:04:28. > :04:33.rewrote the novel at a stroke. There's no perfect novel, but do
:04:33. > :04:40.you feel this one was as you wanted to be? I feel the novel was as good
:04:40. > :04:46.as I get them, but, in terms of thinking about the future and what
:04:46. > :04:54.I might do, I always think there's something, something I haven't yet
:04:54. > :05:00.quite got or achieved, or fulfilled. And without that tug I think I'd
:05:00. > :05:06.stop. It is necessary that there's some perfect thing you're going to
:05:06. > :05:12.fall into by mistake. What is sweet toot at heart S it a spy story?
:05:12. > :05:19.It's a love story and spy novel and reflection of Britain in the 7 0s,
:05:19. > :05:25.in a sense historical novel. And a back ward look at a stretch of the
:05:25. > :05:33.Cold War. The cultural Cold War. A subject that maybe still ripe for
:05:33. > :05:38.investigation by historians. The CIA and somewhat poorer cousins,
:05:38. > :05:44.MI6 pouring money into a cultural argument with the Soviet Union, as
:05:44. > :05:49.to whether the great works derived from the best work, and cultural
:05:49. > :05:55.activity derives from a Capitalist or Communist society. Writers, will
:05:55. > :06:00.not talking optimistically about the West in the 1970s, I myself,
:06:00. > :06:05.wrote an abandoned a very gloomy dystopian novel, it would have been
:06:05. > :06:15.my first novel, and I borrowed that novel, and fed it back into the
:06:15. > :06:23.book. I revived it and given it to Serena target, Tom Haley at the
:06:23. > :06:27.University of Sussex. I mean, Sweet Tooth is a highly distorted
:06:27. > :06:33.automatic biography. I was at Sussex hike Tom Haley I got my
:06:33. > :06:42.first stories published with the new review, edit by Ian Hampton,
:06:42. > :06:48.mash mash mash was my first editor. I did give a reading Like Tom Haley
:06:48. > :06:52.did with Martin Amis. He got first billing in New York, he brought the
:06:52. > :06:54.house down, everyone sobing with laugh ter. I was standing in the
:06:54. > :06:59.wings, but fortunatelyly, Christopher Hitchins was the
:06:59. > :07:03.moderator. I was about to go on, and he said don't go on stage, I
:07:03. > :07:10.got to talk them down. Christopher, went on stage, and
:07:10. > :07:14.spoke very eloquently about the state of British literary culture,
:07:14. > :07:20.where Martins work stood there and by the time I came on, everything
:07:21. > :07:24.was calm and it was fine. So this is a distorted biography, in that
:07:24. > :07:32.Christopher Hitchins isn't there to do that. Eggs' dead. Of course it
:07:32. > :07:40.is dedicated to Christopher Hitchins. It is dedicated to him.
:07:40. > :07:44.In the early 7 0s, McEwan was the graduates of Malcolm Bradbury
:07:44. > :07:50.ground breaking course in East Anglia. His early stories, revelled
:07:50. > :07:55.in the shocking and grotesque, earning him the nickname, Ian
:07:55. > :08:00.Macabre. If I'm sitting down facing an empty sheet of paper, what is
:08:00. > :08:06.going to compel me into writing fiction? It is not what is nice,
:08:06. > :08:12.and easy, and pleasant and somehow affirming, but somehow what is bad,
:08:12. > :08:16.and difficult, and unsettling. That's the tinks I need to start me
:08:16. > :08:21.writing. The collection, first love, last rights, dealt with
:08:21. > :08:27.masturbation, incest and paedophilia, provoking controversy
:08:27. > :08:34.but lavish critical praise. Reaction to his debut novel, The
:08:34. > :08:39.Cement Garden was similarlyly split between disgust and administration.
:08:39. > :08:44.In later novels he toned down the shock factor, but maintained a
:08:44. > :08:49.precise writing style that drew a wider readership. In 1987 he won
:08:49. > :08:54.the Whitbread prize for the child this time. It seemed impossible to
:08:54. > :08:58.write about children and without time. Time in the various
:08:58. > :09:06.manifestations, became the hero, the central element. A booker gong
:09:06. > :09:15.was finally awarded for the black comedy, Amsterdam in 1988. Three
:09:15. > :09:22.years later, Atonement was a published sen sensation, it was
:09:22. > :09:29.made into a popular film by Joe Wright. More recent books tackleed
:09:29. > :09:33.social issues. Saturday was sat in the day against protest fl the Iraq
:09:33. > :09:37.war, and solar is ethics and climate change. On chessel beach
:09:37. > :09:40.looks back in the 6 0s, and considers the thought lines between
:09:40. > :09:49.sex and social expectations, a theme that recurs throughout his
:09:49. > :09:54.work from the early stories, to the latest novel. Your first novel,
:09:54. > :10:00.cement garden, 1978, it was shocking at the time. People were
:10:00. > :10:04.shocked, the idea it was incest, and violence and so forth. But, you
:10:05. > :10:14.now talk, you performance it as being, what was the phrase "it's
:10:15. > :10:16.
:10:16. > :10:20.staring at the wall fiction"? I was in love, with a certain kind
:10:20. > :10:26.of exextension aesthetic in the '70s, I thought it was irrelevant
:10:26. > :10:31.or even cheating to name the time and the place. And I wanted, my
:10:31. > :10:40.character, suspended in space and time and hiss rifplt maybe I was
:10:40. > :10:45.taking something from khat ker and it is suspended in time and place.
:10:45. > :10:50.But that seemed like a blind alley for me. I think the novel needs to
:10:50. > :10:56.team with life and circumstance, and particular Lottery, and I've
:10:56. > :11:02.fallen love in history more. And like the novels of Sobello, the
:11:02. > :11:09.feel of the street or the times and real people in it. It didn't do
:11:09. > :11:14.harm that you were the shocker in your literary group? I had to sit
:11:14. > :11:20.through the first readings, and the joke, it was new to the person
:11:20. > :11:27.introducing me, so that required patience and took about 15 years to
:11:27. > :11:33.wear off. Until last Thursday, when I saw Jane's corporation, I never
:11:33. > :11:37.had special thought about death. I saw a dog run of onceings and the
:11:37. > :11:42.wheels go over the neck and its eyeballs burst, it meant nothing.
:11:42. > :11:51.When my mother died, I stayed away, a distaste for my relatives. I had
:11:51. > :11:59.no curiosity about seeing her dead, thin and grey, among the flowers.
:11:59. > :12:05.I first became aware of Ian McEwan through a television programme,
:12:05. > :12:09.Melvyn Bragg used to write, it was first love first rights, I was 15,
:12:09. > :12:13.trying to write short stories and attract today this weird, twisted
:12:13. > :12:19.imagination, that I seemed to be presented to me. His stories were
:12:19. > :12:24.twisted, taken every day, and putting a twist on it. Really, I
:12:24. > :12:32.started copying him N my short stories. He got a reputation early
:12:32. > :12:37.on, of being the this writer that had mordant imagination, had a I
:12:37. > :12:42.think critics said queasyness, about the way sex appears in his
:12:42. > :12:48.early short stories and first novel, The Cement Garden. Will is that
:12:48. > :12:54.kind of weirdly, curdleed notion of relationships and how relationships
:12:54. > :12:57.can go wrong. It was interesting, of the
:12:57. > :13:00.development, he didn't stay like that, the first novel was
:13:00. > :13:06.unrepresentative of the work afterwards. It was fascinating
:13:06. > :13:15.going on the journey, from me being 16 to 52 and watching the way his
:13:15. > :13:25.world viewed and his rank style has changed. Me growing up, at 19 I was
:13:25. > :13:28.
:13:28. > :13:33.in rooftop, I was working on a rooftop, reading a book, I saw how
:13:33. > :13:37.rich and different the American novel was, from the British
:13:37. > :13:42.counterpart, I couldn't begin to write like that, it was like a
:13:42. > :13:48.light on the horizon, it was something to start walking towards.
:13:48. > :13:52.And then, later, when Philip Roth lived in London, how he was and as
:13:52. > :14:01.a mentor, but you did have controversial? Philip took a great
:14:01. > :14:04.deal of interest in my work, and was kind about it. I made him
:14:04. > :14:08.impatient because I didn't want to do with my books he would have
:14:08. > :14:14.wanted to do. He spread the whole of The Cement Garden in type script
:14:14. > :14:19.on my floor, and he was saying this is fantastic, but this, forget all
:14:19. > :14:24.this, it's got to explode at this point. I thought this is amazing,
:14:24. > :14:33.this legendary novelist, is on my sitting room carpet on his knees,
:14:33. > :14:39.telling me what to do. I felt this thrill of recognition, that at
:14:39. > :14:45.least he thought I was another writer. But I also knew, quietly, I
:14:45. > :14:50.didn't dare say, so he was describing for me, a brilliant
:14:50. > :14:56.Philip Roth, and what he would have done with it, is brilliant and
:14:56. > :15:04.funnyings like port any's complaint. When you hear writers talk about
:15:04. > :15:09.the way they write, like Jonathan Franzen, puts a pair of headphones
:15:09. > :15:14.on and sticks glue in the internet tube, to get him in the state. What
:15:14. > :15:18.is the most pleasureable state for you? Well, this doesn't happen
:15:19. > :15:23.often, but when it happens it is wonderful. It is when you hit a
:15:23. > :15:30.stretch of writing when the sentepss set themselves down, with
:15:30. > :15:33.a kind of inevitability and more than that, your absorption is so
:15:33. > :15:41.total you forget you exist, and whole narrative of your life. You
:15:41. > :15:46.are ut territorial in the present, maybe like some yogy should be. It
:15:46. > :15:54.lathss maybe at aest best an hour, or hour-and-a-half, and you come
:15:54. > :16:00.out of it, and the world plods back in. I only have those moments,
:16:00. > :16:05.maybe, three or four times in a year. But they're worth living for.
:16:05. > :16:11.And that's when I'm very grateful to be a novelist. I think you can
:16:11. > :16:16.obviously get it playing tennis or cooking a meal, that nice sense of
:16:16. > :16:22.some psychologists call it "flow" of being self-less and happy
:16:22. > :16:30.without being mirthful, content, fulfilled, justifying your
:16:30. > :16:34.existence. One way or the other, that's when it really is sweet.
:16:34. > :16:44.British literacy landscape was altered in the 197 0s, by the new
:16:44. > :16:46.
:16:46. > :16:49.wave of writers, McEwan, Rushdie, barns barns and aim mus, it was
:16:49. > :16:52.provocative and often shocking. Nifplt a way they were creating the
:16:52. > :16:59.theme the literary novel we call now. Where the point was novels
:16:59. > :17:03.could be exciting, partly because of the difficulty in subject matter,
:17:03. > :17:10.but also because they played all sort of clever tricks, with
:17:10. > :17:15.narrative and doing that. Writing at a time of mass unemployment,
:17:15. > :17:21.protest and sea-change, McEwan spear headed a literacy revolution,
:17:21. > :17:31.that altered the form of the novel. I remember the issue of Granta,
:17:31. > :17:32.
:17:32. > :17:38.which was published in 193, which had the opening chapter of AMIS's
:17:38. > :17:42.money, that came at you with energy, which was novel in fiction. They've
:17:42. > :17:45.all gone on to award winning success. When literature comes
:17:45. > :17:55.face-to-face, with stardust. They've all been short listed for
:17:55. > :17:56.
:17:56. > :18:00.the booker, and all, apart from Amis have won. It is how fiction
:18:00. > :18:07.has come to prominence. Rushdie wins the book, it is important and
:18:07. > :18:13.influential thing, those particular four names, lush by, McEwan, AMIS
:18:13. > :18:17.and Barns, can be misleading now, not least because - rush by,
:18:17. > :18:23.because some of them have done their best work in recent years,
:18:23. > :18:33.and some have found it hard to recapture what they had in the 80s,.
:18:33. > :18:35.
:18:35. > :18:39.Novelists like to be accepted, and acknowledged. Amsterdam, when it
:18:40. > :18:47.was described as a comic novel, what did you make of that?
:18:47. > :18:51.thought it was comic, joy despirit, it was one of the few novels I
:18:51. > :18:55.wrote having the whole idea from the start. I just finished,
:18:55. > :19:01.Enduring Love, it is the only time I've just been publishing one novel
:19:01. > :19:08.and correcting the proofs of another. I thought how wonderful if
:19:08. > :19:14.you managed this in one's life. I suppose it is, you know, the
:19:14. > :19:20.accident, the spining bolt of prize committees, it won a prize, but
:19:20. > :19:24.maybe I would have rathered it won for Atonement or Saturday, or a
:19:24. > :19:30.longer and more considered book. But what I think funny about Sweet
:19:30. > :19:36.Tooth is because, the committee, suggests that well, if Tom Haley,
:19:36. > :19:41.can fix it for him to win the booker, this new fangled prize, and
:19:41. > :19:47.that's, because it seems like you are taking a poke at prize giving
:19:47. > :19:50.anyway? One of the operatives said in 1972, sooner or later, someone
:19:50. > :19:56.from MI5, will be chairing the booker committee, and we'll make
:19:56. > :20:00.sure it gets in. I mean, Stella Rimmington, not for a minute, was
:20:00. > :20:05.she influenced by anything that MI5 would have wanted in the way of a
:20:05. > :20:12.book. But I thought I would have fun in with the idea. And all of
:20:12. > :20:17.your group, Rushdie, have been nominated or short listed or
:20:17. > :20:22.whatever, was there an element of competition amonk you as writers?
:20:22. > :20:26.We've known each other, long before we were well known. I met, Martin
:20:26. > :20:35.just as he was publishing his first book, I was yet to publish mine.
:20:35. > :20:42.Skpwruelian was three or four years away from his. Metro land, that
:20:42. > :20:49.came later with Grimus. I feel it is not a positional good, there is
:20:49. > :20:54.infinite space for good novels. So it is not a race. There's an
:20:54. > :20:59.credibly funny rant, obviously measureed rant. A measureed rant.
:20:59. > :21:03.You basically rant about ox bridge, the great stiff about Tommy being
:21:03. > :21:10.at Sussex, and Sussex is a new university, we have to do work
:21:10. > :21:20.there. You don't get to Swan about at ox bridge? Well I had to balance
:21:20. > :21:23.Serena's snipy and They dripgs of the university, she shares jeth
:21:23. > :21:33.though tul and ask see people play football in the student union and
:21:33. > :21:37.can't take seriously the idea of a university being new. So, her lover,
:21:37. > :21:42.mounts a spirited defence of Al- Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade brig' New Map
:21:42. > :21:47.of Learning, from which I benefited enormously. I was put in touch with
:21:47. > :21:53.a lovely, thriving diverse sense of European literature and yet still,
:21:53. > :21:58.wrote three he is says, every two weeks for three years, Sussex
:21:58. > :22:04.tuetuerl system in those days. It was jolly hard work, but it was
:22:04. > :22:11.eminently defensible, and so, I just wanted to give Serena a little
:22:11. > :22:19.correcting. Unfavourable comparisons are often made between
:22:19. > :22:23.a novel and screen adaptation, with seven films made and author of
:22:23. > :22:29.screen place, he is not a stranger of moving it from page to screen.
:22:29. > :22:33.His first original screen play, the ploughman's lump, in 1938, was
:22:33. > :22:39.laweded by one critic as the most politically aware film, produced in
:22:40. > :22:44.Britain since the second world war. What have you been up to?
:22:44. > :22:51.Everyone's desperate for a new Falklands angle. Purdy's come up
:22:51. > :22:55.with a real dog. Workers writes in Argentina.
:22:55. > :23:04.I've been running around trying to get people to do thing, workers
:23:04. > :23:12.rights. In contrast, his Hollywood thriller, The Good Son, featured a
:23:12. > :23:16.change of role. If I let you go, do you think you could fly? I hope.
:23:16. > :23:23.Films made from early novels reflect his unusual story lines,
:23:23. > :23:29.such as the incestuous relationship in The Cement Garden. Ill Top of
:23:29. > :23:34.them. And the troubleling atmosphere that pervadeed McEwan's
:23:34. > :23:38.Venice is caught by Augusto Pinochet in The Comfort Of
:23:38. > :23:48.Strangers. The precise scriptive style and striking imagery, became
:23:48. > :23:59.
:23:59. > :24:05.a gift for film makers, as evidence, But Atonement, nominated for seven
:24:05. > :24:10.Oscars, including a nod for best screen play for Christopher Hampton
:24:10. > :24:16.has become the biggest box office triumph. It gloryeeed in sum tueous
:24:16. > :24:21.sets and made the most of their young stars, Keira Knightley and
:24:21. > :24:31.James McAvoy, to make a success out of a novel, that some deemed
:24:31. > :24:33.
:24:33. > :24:39.You always had a relationship with screen plays, a film? Tifplt always
:24:39. > :24:44.fascinate me, writing, Writing for a director so much, but writing for
:24:44. > :24:51.a camera. And around about the time I was publishing my first story, I
:24:51. > :24:58.was writing for television, worked with Mike Newall. We made
:24:58. > :25:07.adaptation for one of mine, Sold Geometry, that was exciting, I was
:25:07. > :25:13.on the front page of the Sun, and then Morrison seriously, started
:25:13. > :25:18.work with Richard Air, we came up with a screen play for the
:25:18. > :25:24.ploughman's lump. And when I gave it to Richard, almost two weeks
:25:24. > :25:31.later, hardly any gap at all, the whole Falklands crisis started. So
:25:31. > :25:34.I was able to adapt this to absorb that, and end, to write into it,
:25:35. > :25:40.the Tory party conference of that year, and triumph and speeches. And
:25:40. > :25:50.I thought this is the charmed life, I will now just write novels and in
:25:50. > :25:54.between, I will write movies. So, meetly I started working with
:25:54. > :25:58.Bernardo Bertolucci, and it was then you can't plan, movies are
:25:58. > :26:03.messy and hard to fund, they fall apart, screen plays V to be
:26:04. > :26:08.rewritten, sometimes by other people, you get sacked. So that
:26:08. > :26:14.dream, never really worked out. It was only, in that early time.
:26:14. > :26:18.when it came to, for example, Atonement, did you never think,
:26:18. > :26:23.when you wrote Atonement, "I would like to tackle the screen play of
:26:23. > :26:30.this" or was that never going to happen? Well, I had first refusal
:26:30. > :26:35.on that. I had a novel I wanted to write, and when Christopher Hampton
:26:35. > :26:45.said he would do it, I was delighted. I think, Joe and his
:26:45. > :26:48.
:26:48. > :26:58.team, pulled off a brilliant, superb job in the casting, I
:26:58. > :27:00.
:27:00. > :27:07.thought Henry Perowne was beautifully chosen. - Saoirse Ronan
:27:07. > :27:13.was superbly delight, I was delighted by it. It brought me to a
:27:13. > :27:18.much wider readership. Like most, I start in publishing, a few stories
:27:18. > :27:22.in literary mag designs, publish your first book, I solid maybe 1500
:27:22. > :27:27.copies, and the next one, 2,000, and so you proceed through a
:27:27. > :27:34.writing life and you get to 1,000 readers. If you're lucky. And you
:27:34. > :27:40.keep at it. And Atonement's purned this up into hundreds of thousands.
:27:40. > :27:44.Is there a conflict, between a very much literary writer and being a
:27:44. > :27:48.best seller? Modernism wanted to teach us, if a book was understood
:27:48. > :27:55.about too many people, there must be something wrong with it. But I
:27:55. > :28:01.think the novel always had, it was always a popular form and the great
:28:01. > :28:05.19th century novelists, where Dickens, or whatever, were read by
:28:05. > :28:11.a wide section of society. And I think we got fooled in the early
:28:11. > :28:15.part of the 20th century, by the high priest notion, of the novel as
:28:15. > :28:19.exclusive form. And perhaps, we're regaining that territory now.
:28:19. > :28:24.there is always a discourse at the heart of the novel that stays with
:28:24. > :28:31.you. Let's go to rattle for a moment, you hold on to rationalism,
:28:31. > :28:39.almost like a talisman, don't you? I don't think it was a talisman, it
:28:39. > :28:44.was irrational kind of symbol. I'd like to give rattle a full riched
:28:44. > :28:50.blooded life. I think it underpins, many things in our lives from our
:28:50. > :28:55.legal system, to the laws we consider good, to the love affairs
:28:55. > :29:00.that run with fulfilment to both sides. In other words, coherence
:29:00. > :29:09.and degree of holding to what you say in meaning, to what you say, as
:29:09. > :29:15.well as understanding the world around us, and science has shown us
:29:15. > :29:20.wonders all down to one corner of our total being, which is our per
:29:20. > :29:30.expenseity for being rational. So, I want to rescue it from the
:29:30. > :29:37.romantics, I suppose that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the
:29:37. > :29:47.first in a long battle to give us, rattle a cold hard, logical, poor
:29:47. > :29:47.
:29:47. > :29:51.images. I want to celebrate it. I think it is a marvellous thing.
:29:51. > :29:55.favourite of eep's books is Saturday. I was given it when I was
:29:55. > :30:01.a junior doctor. And I was a trainee in neurosurgeon, very much
:30:01. > :30:04.at the beginning of my career. Throughout your training, you
:30:04. > :30:09.become immune to other people's suffering, because you're expose
:30:09. > :30:16.today such a lot of it. And it is possible, after years and years of
:30:16. > :30:20.working why A and E or surgical works, McEwan he talks about that,
:30:20. > :30:25.the five or six years character worked in emergency units, how you
:30:25. > :30:29.can lose think for people. And then, also how difficult it is to not let
:30:29. > :30:32.that translate into when you go back home. There's an account in
:30:32. > :30:38.the book of a very difficult separation, called a
:30:38. > :30:45.transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, where you have to peel the face
:30:45. > :30:50.back, open up the nasal cafity and go in the central of the caf vit,
:30:50. > :30:56.through the nose, you get in the pituitary gland and extraordinarily
:30:57. > :31:00.difficult place to get at. You can tell he took great deal of care.
:31:00. > :31:06.But similarly great deal of care over the poetry publishing business,
:31:06. > :31:12.or the ins and outs of becoming a blues, player in New York and
:31:12. > :31:18.London together. So, I think, his research on the neurosurgical topic
:31:18. > :31:25.sincere as good as the research on other topics. You talk about
:31:25. > :31:29.learning, you take your learning seriously. So in Saturday, Henry is
:31:29. > :31:36.the neurosurgeon, but you shadowed a neurosurgeon for a long time?
:31:36. > :31:43.stood at the elbow of a gifted neurosurgeon, Neil Kitchen, on and
:31:43. > :31:50.off over a period of two years. And hung about in his operating theatre
:31:50. > :31:55.and got to know his firm as he calls his team. Often in my scrubs,
:31:55. > :32:02.passed myself off as a neurosurgeon at one point. You passed yourself
:32:02. > :32:05.off as a neurosurgeon? Yifplt he I did. I say we, Neil was doing an
:32:05. > :32:10.operation, so already I was thinking we, and two medical
:32:10. > :32:15.students came into the theatre, fifth year, and came over to me,
:32:15. > :32:25.and said "excuse us doctor, would you mind if we watch" I said go
:32:25. > :32:29.ahead". They said, what is going on, I saidings well, we're cliping a
:32:29. > :32:35.middle cerebral artery aneurysm". And I thought, have I learnt enough
:32:35. > :32:40.to do this. They come to the light box and I show you the CT scans, I
:32:40. > :32:43.told them exactly what was going on in a low murmuring voice. And at
:32:43. > :32:49.the end, they said, thank you very much doctor, and they left. I
:32:49. > :32:55.always wonder how they got on in their exams,. I wop der were you
:32:55. > :32:59.right, the danger was you were given the right details? I had it
:32:59. > :33:05.right. Do you fear the wrong detail? I always get things wrong
:33:05. > :33:13.and I get letters, I have written a lecture on making mistakes in
:33:13. > :33:19.fiction. I made so many mistakes in fiction. An xax, in Saturday, Henry
:33:19. > :33:26.has a Mercedes 500 SE, he gets into it, and the car, as he releases the
:33:26. > :33:32.clutch, it slips out the garage. I get a nice letter, saying, they
:33:32. > :33:38.enjoyed the nox, but you can't get a man uel, if you want him to
:33:38. > :33:46.change the gears, you have to step down to the00, TKL, and it won't do
:33:46. > :33:53.you any good changeing to a BMW or Audi, because these are plutocratic
:33:53. > :34:00.cars, and owners don't need to mess with gear sticks. In eliminated the
:34:00. > :34:08.clutch. And at the end of Atonement, which is full of mistakes, slowly
:34:08. > :34:12.corrected, Imperial War Museum library, Briony, and she herself
:34:12. > :34:18.talks about crawling towards the truth. These points, of moments of
:34:18. > :34:25.truth, when she's corrected by a military historian, who says no-one
:34:25. > :34:30.was wearing a beret at Dunkirk, someone told me that. So, I think
:34:30. > :34:35.that when writers, write you and correct you on a detail, you are
:34:35. > :34:39.lucky to have that engagement. That is the instead of rejecting it
:34:39. > :34:43.oring with defensive, well say, either they're right or wrong. If
:34:43. > :34:47.they're right that is the form of engagement, a realist novel, would
:34:47. > :34:54.welcome. But do you think as a writer then,
:34:54. > :35:01.you have a duty to be involved in the public debate? I don't feel it
:35:01. > :35:08.as a duty. And I think broadly, the novelist, is so cap patience as a
:35:08. > :35:13.form. Some writers, clearly should or need to or want to inhabit a
:35:13. > :35:19.private space and others a mix of both and others write in a public
:35:19. > :35:24.world. There should be no should in this. I just go where I'm
:35:24. > :35:28.fascinateed. That's all. Walking down to the kitchen, he reads the
:35:28. > :35:32.headlines, Blix telling the UN the Iraqis are beginning to co-operate.
:35:32. > :35:42.In response, the Prime Minister, is expected to emphasise in a speech
:35:42. > :35:42.
:35:42. > :35:47.in Glasgow today, the humanitarian reasons for war n but thepm's late
:35:47. > :35:53.switch looks cynical. Hen very hoping his own story, breaking at
:35:53. > :36:00.4.30, may make the late editionness London. But there's nothing.
:36:00. > :36:04.There were I mean, memories play tricks, but in the leadup to the
:36:04. > :36:08.invasion, I was present, as no doubt you were, with a a lot of
:36:08. > :36:15.thunderous kitchen table debate. Nor could you tell if someone was
:36:15. > :36:19.on the left or right, quite where they would stand. I wanted to get
:36:19. > :36:28.that full, cock cough any of voices. I'd been following Iraq since the
:36:28. > :36:31.late 8 0s, hen the republic of fear came out, at that point. And I do
:36:31. > :36:38.remember, nobody much noticed the weapons of mass destruction used in
:36:38. > :36:41.norp Iraq on the Kurds, it didn't bring anyone out on the street so.
:36:41. > :36:46.I was sceptical that suddenly, people cared about Iraqi lives,
:36:46. > :36:52.when the Iraqi trade unions were saying, please come. And the women
:36:52. > :36:58.as movement and all kinds of good sectors of Iraq. But, by the time
:36:58. > :37:02.we got to January, February, March, I was really, I knew that the last
:37:02. > :37:08.country on earth, or last administration on earth, to invade
:37:08. > :37:12.Iraq and organise it, would be the Bush administration. Paradoxically,
:37:12. > :37:18.France or Germany, would have been actually better, running the
:37:18. > :37:22.occupation. Than the United States, which wanted to privatise even
:37:22. > :37:26.torture at Abu Ghraib. I had one sleepless night, I woke my wifeings
:37:26. > :37:31.and said, I will get, I think I could get half an hour with Tony
:37:31. > :37:39.Blair, I have a plan. It was one of those hours of the wolf. To talk
:37:39. > :37:45.him out of this. What was your plan, your argument? My argument we would
:37:45. > :37:52.move 8,000 troops out of Kuwait and put them in Afghanistan. So the
:37:52. > :37:59.Army would lose no face, and we wouldn't be contradiction of not
:37:59. > :38:04.having a second resolution in the UN, we couldn't stop the Americans
:38:04. > :38:10.invading anyway. And, then 8am, full light of day, this, you know,
:38:10. > :38:16.of course I couldn't get half an hour of Tony Blair, what was I
:38:16. > :38:21.thinking of. That was after a good bolt of Beaujolais after you went
:38:21. > :38:26.to bed. Now here we were, somewhere between 1 d 30 and 2 in the morning
:38:26. > :38:32.lying in bed, staring at each other by the low light of one lamp. Me
:38:32. > :38:37.naked, she in a cot tan nightdress, our arms and hands touching, but
:38:37. > :38:40.neutrally, without commitment. All the questions, were heaped
:38:41. > :38:48.around us arcs for a while, neither dared speak.
:38:48. > :38:53.It was enough that we could look each other in the eye ". When you
:38:53. > :38:59.seek inspiration, do you have a comfort blanket of books, or do you
:38:59. > :39:03.seek new fiction? I try to write each novel as if it is my first.
:39:03. > :39:09.I'm happy to leave a stretch of time. I'm in this time now, and I
:39:09. > :39:16.always look forward to it now. Time to read or think or hike, or just
:39:16. > :39:21.hang out with friends, and travel. And then sooner or later, I get
:39:21. > :39:25.impatient and loif doesn't seem structured or worth living without
:39:25. > :39:28.something forming and that's the time I start looking back into my
:39:28. > :39:32.notebooks and fishing out the suggestions and messages that will
:39:32. > :39:37.mean something to me. So I'm just on the edge now. What do you have
:39:37. > :39:42.in the plot book? Do you have a gather plot books of scenes yos,
:39:42. > :39:48.what do you think your next novel will be? It has something to do
:39:48. > :39:51.with the law. And with hau, in general. And I think its hero is a
:39:51. > :39:56.judge, that's all about I'm prepared to say. You're going to
:39:56. > :40:02.have to shadow a judge now? going to have to talk to someone.
:40:02. > :40:06.Pass yourself off as one? Yes, we all could with a wig and firm
:40:06. > :40:16.opinions. If you were to look at a novel that you think is the perfect
:40:16. > :40:18.
:40:18. > :40:25.novel. What would it be? I would say, Anna Karenina would be my
:40:25. > :40:35.candidate. It is cap patience novel, it is sprawling, in there, is a
:40:35. > :40:36.
:40:36. > :40:40.kind of perfection. Greatest sweep of emotion and the intimate as well
:40:40. > :40:49.as the whole society at a particular turning point. Plus, and
:40:49. > :40:56.I think this is the clincher for me, scores, maybe 150 pages describing
:40:56. > :41:01.the nature of happiness. But it is long, and maybe the point
:41:01. > :41:09.here is that novels are bound to be imperfect. They're all too human.
:41:09. > :41:13.It is a very personal form. Anyone who sights down to write, a few
:41:13. > :41:17.hundred words of prose in noveliststic form will discover how
:41:17. > :41:25.embarrassing and personal it is, even if you think you're writing
:41:25. > :41:28.about something outside you. As I have in Atonement, even writing "he
:41:28. > :41:35.said" embarrassing, because he didn't and you made it up. And
:41:35. > :41:40.somehow, in making it up, you make yourself, vulnerable. Highly
:41:40. > :41:46.susceptible. That's why, when, a reviewer, says," Don't take this
:41:46. > :41:51.personally, but your book is a load of crap" you know it is impossible
:41:51. > :41:57.proposition. It is probably the most intimate personal form, there
:41:57. > :42:02.is. And you cannot help over 300 paims, somehow, splaiing yourself,
:42:02. > :42:05.like a flog in a dissection class back in the O-level days, when such
:42:05. > :42:14.terrible things were permitted, your insides are suddenly out.
:42:14. > :42:20.There's no way around it. I think in, Karenina ka car Dr Anna
:42:20. > :42:26.Karenina, opened him up in a way which is near to perfection. Thank
:42:26. > :42:29.you very much. Sweet Tooth is out this week. I will be back next week,
:42:29. > :42:36.in the final programme in our Edinburgh festivals.
:42:36. > :42:46.We'll be brainging you the best of the fest and new novel by Zadie
:42:46. > :43:11.
:43:11. > :43:18.Well it is bank holiday weekend for most of us, so rain in forecast,
:43:18. > :43:24.showery day on Saturday, heavy, slow moving in Scotland and Wales.
:43:24. > :43:26.Let deal with England and Wales first. Some very heavy thundery
:43:26. > :43:30.downpours across the heart of the Midlands, southern England too.
:43:31. > :43:34.Light winds for most part but brisk breeze along the English Channel
:43:35. > :43:39.coasts and not a clever day to be going to the beach. There will be
:43:39. > :43:44.heavy rain at times and cool breeze. Across Wales, the winds will be
:43:44. > :43:48.lighter but that means the showers could well last a while. This will
:43:48. > :43:53.be sunshine in between. Talking of sunshine, Northern Ireland will get
:43:53. > :43:56.away with best of the weather, on Saturday. And showers will be
:43:56. > :44:02.isolate, and should stay mostly dry and bright.
:44:02. > :44:06.Further east, rather cloudy, cool breeze and scattering of showers.
:44:06. > :44:12.As we go to the evening time, showers will linger on. Further
:44:12. > :44:17.afield, to find sunshine, good luck if you're going to north western
:44:17. > :44:23.parts of Europe, showers are around. The heat hangs on, particularly