The Book Review Show The Review Show

necessary to think there's some necessary to think there's some

perfect thing you'll fall into by mistake. Sweet Tooth is launched at

the end of Edinburgh Book Festival, any particular reason or you love

Edinburgh? It is very happy coincidence, I agreed long ago to

Edinburgh. I loved there. And I it just happens to be my peb will you

case day. Edinburgh doesn't change. It morals maintained its intimacy,

and general sense of mischaef and fun. I don't know how many times

I've been but it is a great pleasure. Philip Roth said the only

way he could finish the painting was when he broke the emotional

engagement with. How do you break with a book? That moment you hand

it of, I now take care to tell publishers, this is the penultimate

draft because there's a long tailoff, many after thoughts

between that moment of handing over, often disruptive suggestions, and

then the process of talking about it, which at first is very happy,

and then is neutral and becomes an affliction. You find if the name of

the character crosses your lips again, you'd cut your throat.

Ian McEwan novel things are rarely as straightforward as they appear,

and his latest is no exception. Filled with spies, sex and

seduction, Sweet Tooth is nar rated by Serena, a beautiful Cambridge

maths student who is recruited for MI5 for one of her lovers, as

befits a spy, she seems candid and evasive in equal measure. My name

is Chris Froome - President Obama On a secret mission, I didn't

return safely. Within 18 months of joining I was sacked having

disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a

hand in his own undoing. By day she toils in the belly of

the service, but night, she consumes popular fiction. And a

love of novels prompts her first assignment, oming a new front in

the Cold War, by cultivateing Tom Halley, who is a source of anti-

Communist pop prop ganda. What did you think of my stories, I said

quietly. I think they're utterly brilliant. He flinched as though

sun swun had pokeed him in the chest, in the heart, and he gave a

little gasp, not a laugh. He went to speak but was stuck for words.

He stareed at me, waiting, wanting me to go on, tell him more about

himself and his talent but I held back. Sweet Tooth explores a

potential crossover between the worlds of literature and espionage,

play flee mixing creation with real life characters, in compelling

What was the origin of Sweet Tooth? Two or three little notes to myself,

over a period of five years, one was to a man writes a novel to get

a woman out of his system but ends up doing the exact opposite.

Another was what would happen in a love affair if one of the parties

had a secret and then it became too late to divulge it. It would

threaten. And finally, I had a vague idea of writing a novel, one

day, in which when you got to the very end, you realised that there's

a whole story that's happened outside the novel, and now you must

think again to include it. So I don't want to give away the end of

the novel, but I was conforming to a wish that I had a ending that

rewrote the novel at a stroke. There's no perfect novel, but do

you feel this one was as you wanted to be? I feel the novel was as good

as I get them, but, in terms of thinking about the future and what

I might do, I always think there's something, something I haven't yet

quite got or achieved, or fulfilled. And without that tug I think I'd

stop. It is necessary that there's some perfect thing you're going to

fall into by mistake. What is sweet toot at heart S it a spy story?

It's a love story and spy novel and reflection of Britain in the 7 0s,

in a sense historical novel. And a back ward look at a stretch of the

Cold War. The cultural Cold War. A subject that maybe still ripe for

investigation by historians. The CIA and somewhat poorer cousins,

MI6 pouring money into a cultural argument with the Soviet Union, as

to whether the great works derived from the best work, and cultural

activity derives from a Capitalist or Communist society. Writers, will

not talking optimistically about the West in the 1970s, I myself,

wrote an abandoned a very gloomy dystopian novel, it would have been

my first novel, and I borrowed that novel, and fed it back into the

book. I revived it and given it to Serena target, Tom Haley at the

University of Sussex. I mean, Sweet Tooth is a highly distorted

automatic biography. I was at Sussex hike Tom Haley I got my

first stories published with the new review, edit by Ian Hampton,

mash mash mash was my first editor. I did give a reading Like Tom Haley

did with Martin Amis. He got first billing in New York, he brought the

house down, everyone sobing with laugh ter. I was standing in the

wings, but fortunatelyly, Christopher Hitchins was the

moderator. I was about to go on, and he said don't go on stage, I

got to talk them down. Christopher, went on stage, and

spoke very eloquently about the state of British literary culture,

where Martins work stood there and by the time I came on, everything

was calm and it was fine. So this is a distorted biography, in that

Christopher Hitchins isn't there to do that. Eggs' dead. Of course it

is dedicated to Christopher Hitchins. It is dedicated to him.

In the early 7 0s, McEwan was the graduates of Malcolm Bradbury

ground breaking course in East Anglia. His early stories, revelled

in the shocking and grotesque, earning him the nickname, Ian

Macabre. If I'm sitting down facing an empty sheet of paper, what is

going to compel me into writing fiction? It is not what is nice,

and easy, and pleasant and somehow affirming, but somehow what is bad,

and difficult, and unsettling. That's the tinks I need to start me

writing. The collection, first love, last rights, dealt with

masturbation, incest and paedophilia, provoking controversy

but lavish critical praise. Reaction to his debut novel, The

Cement Garden was similarlyly split between disgust and administration.

In later novels he toned down the shock factor, but maintained a

precise writing style that drew a wider readership. In 1987 he won

the Whitbread prize for the child this time. It seemed impossible to

write about children and without time. Time in the various

manifestations, became the hero, the central element. A booker gong

was finally awarded for the black comedy, Amsterdam in 1988. Three

years later, Atonement was a published sen sensation, it was

made into a popular film by Joe Wright. More recent books tackleed

social issues. Saturday was sat in the day against protest fl the Iraq

war, and solar is ethics and climate change. On chessel beach

looks back in the 6 0s, and considers the thought lines between

sex and social expectations, a theme that recurs throughout his

work from the early stories, to the latest novel. Your first novel,

cement garden, 1978, it was shocking at the time. People were

shocked, the idea it was incest, and violence and so forth. But, you

now talk, you performance it as being, what was the phrase "it's

staring at the wall fiction"? I was in love, with a certain kind

of exextension aesthetic in the '70s, I thought it was irrelevant

or even cheating to name the time and the place. And I wanted, my

character, suspended in space and time and hiss rifplt maybe I was

taking something from khat ker and it is suspended in time and place.

But that seemed like a blind alley for me. I think the novel needs to

team with life and circumstance, and particular Lottery, and I've

fallen love in history more. And like the novels of Sobello, the

feel of the street or the times and real people in it. It didn't do

harm that you were the shocker in your literary group? I had to sit

through the first readings, and the joke, it was new to the person

introducing me, so that required patience and took about 15 years to

wear off. Until last Thursday, when I saw Jane's corporation, I never

had special thought about death. I saw a dog run of onceings and the

wheels go over the neck and its eyeballs burst, it meant nothing.

When my mother died, I stayed away, a distaste for my relatives. I had

no curiosity about seeing her dead, thin and grey, among the flowers.

I first became aware of Ian McEwan through a television programme,

Melvyn Bragg used to write, it was first love first rights, I was 15,

trying to write short stories and attract today this weird, twisted

imagination, that I seemed to be presented to me. His stories were

twisted, taken every day, and putting a twist on it. Really, I

started copying him N my short stories. He got a reputation early

on, of being the this writer that had mordant imagination, had a I

think critics said queasyness, about the way sex appears in his

early short stories and first novel, The Cement Garden. Will is that

kind of weirdly, curdleed notion of relationships and how relationships

can go wrong. It was interesting, of the

development, he didn't stay like that, the first novel was

unrepresentative of the work afterwards. It was fascinating

going on the journey, from me being 16 to 52 and watching the way his

world viewed and his rank style has changed. Me growing up, at 19 I was

in rooftop, I was working on a rooftop, reading a book, I saw how

rich and different the American novel was, from the British

counterpart, I couldn't begin to write like that, it was like a

light on the horizon, it was something to start walking towards.

And then, later, when Philip Roth lived in London, how he was and as

a mentor, but you did have controversial? Philip took a great

deal of interest in my work, and was kind about it. I made him

impatient because I didn't want to do with my books he would have

wanted to do. He spread the whole of The Cement Garden in type script

on my floor, and he was saying this is fantastic, but this, forget all

this, it's got to explode at this point. I thought this is amazing,

this legendary novelist, is on my sitting room carpet on his knees,

telling me what to do. I felt this thrill of recognition, that at

least he thought I was another writer. But I also knew, quietly, I

didn't dare say, so he was describing for me, a brilliant

Philip Roth, and what he would have done with it, is brilliant and

funnyings like port any's complaint. When you hear writers talk about

the way they write, like Jonathan Franzen, puts a pair of headphones

on and sticks glue in the internet tube, to get him in the state. What

is the most pleasureable state for you? Well, this doesn't happen

often, but when it happens it is wonderful. It is when you hit a

stretch of writing when the sentepss set themselves down, with

a kind of inevitability and more than that, your absorption is so

total you forget you exist, and whole narrative of your life. You

are ut territorial in the present, maybe like some yogy should be. It

lathss maybe at aest best an hour, or hour-and-a-half, and you come

out of it, and the world plods back in. I only have those moments,

maybe, three or four times in a year. But they're worth living for.

And that's when I'm very grateful to be a novelist. I think you can

obviously get it playing tennis or cooking a meal, that nice sense of

some psychologists call it "flow" of being self-less and happy

without being mirthful, content, fulfilled, justifying your

existence. One way or the other, that's when it really is sweet.

British literacy landscape was altered in the 197 0s, by the new

wave of writers, McEwan, Rushdie, barns barns and aim mus, it was

provocative and often shocking. Nifplt a way they were creating the

theme the literary novel we call now. Where the point was novels

could be exciting, partly because of the difficulty in subject matter,

but also because they played all sort of clever tricks, with

narrative and doing that. Writing at a time of mass unemployment,

protest and sea-change, McEwan spear headed a literacy revolution,

that altered the form of the novel. I remember the issue of Granta,

which was published in 193, which had the opening chapter of AMIS's

money, that came at you with energy, which was novel in fiction. They've

all gone on to award winning success. When literature comes

face-to-face, with stardust. They've all been short listed for

the booker, and all, apart from Amis have won. It is how fiction

has come to prominence. Rushdie wins the book, it is important and

influential thing, those particular four names, lush by, McEwan, AMIS

and Barns, can be misleading now, not least because - rush by,

because some of them have done their best work in recent years,

and some have found it hard to recapture what they had in the 80s,.

Novelists like to be accepted, and acknowledged. Amsterdam, when it

was described as a comic novel, what did you make of that?

thought it was comic, joy despirit, it was one of the few novels I

wrote having the whole idea from the start. I just finished,

Enduring Love, it is the only time I've just been publishing one novel

and correcting the proofs of another. I thought how wonderful if

you managed this in one's life. I suppose it is, you know, the

accident, the spining bolt of prize committees, it won a prize, but

maybe I would have rathered it won for Atonement or Saturday, or a

longer and more considered book. But what I think funny about Sweet

Tooth is because, the committee, suggests that well, if Tom Haley,

can fix it for him to win the booker, this new fangled prize, and

that's, because it seems like you are taking a poke at prize giving

anyway? One of the operatives said in 1972, sooner or later, someone

from MI5, will be chairing the booker committee, and we'll make

sure it gets in. I mean, Stella Rimmington, not for a minute, was

she influenced by anything that MI5 would have wanted in the way of a

book. But I thought I would have fun in with the idea. And all of

your group, Rushdie, have been nominated or short listed or

whatever, was there an element of competition amonk you as writers?

We've known each other, long before we were well known. I met, Martin

just as he was publishing his first book, I was yet to publish mine.

Skpwruelian was three or four years away from his. Metro land, that

came later with Grimus. I feel it is not a positional good, there is

infinite space for good novels. So it is not a race. There's an

credibly funny rant, obviously measureed rant. A measureed rant.

You basically rant about ox bridge, the great stiff about Tommy being

at Sussex, and Sussex is a new university, we have to do work

there. You don't get to Swan about at ox bridge? Well I had to balance

Serena's snipy and They dripgs of the university, she shares jeth

though tul and ask see people play football in the student union and

can't take seriously the idea of a university being new. So, her lover,

mounts a spirited defence of Al- Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade brig' New Map

of Learning, from which I benefited enormously. I was put in touch with

a lovely, thriving diverse sense of European literature and yet still,

wrote three he is says, every two weeks for three years, Sussex

tuetuerl system in those days. It was jolly hard work, but it was

eminently defensible, and so, I just wanted to give Serena a little

correcting. Unfavourable comparisons are often made between

a novel and screen adaptation, with seven films made and author of

screen place, he is not a stranger of moving it from page to screen.

His first original screen play, the ploughman's lump, in 1938, was

laweded by one critic as the most politically aware film, produced in

Britain since the second world war. What have you been up to?

Everyone's desperate for a new Falklands angle. Purdy's come up

with a real dog. Workers writes in Argentina.

I've been running around trying to get people to do thing, workers

rights. In contrast, his Hollywood thriller, The Good Son, featured a

change of role. If I let you go, do you think you could fly? I hope.

Films made from early novels reflect his unusual story lines,

such as the incestuous relationship in The Cement Garden. Ill Top of

them. And the troubleling atmosphere that pervadeed McEwan's

Venice is caught by Augusto Pinochet in The Comfort Of

Strangers. The precise scriptive style and striking imagery, became

a gift for film makers, as evidence, But Atonement, nominated for seven

Oscars, including a nod for best screen play for Christopher Hampton

has become the biggest box office triumph. It gloryeeed in sum tueous

sets and made the most of their young stars, Keira Knightley and

James McAvoy, to make a success out of a novel, that some deemed

You always had a relationship with screen plays, a film? Tifplt always

fascinate me, writing, Writing for a director so much, but writing for

a camera. And around about the time I was publishing my first story, I

was writing for television, worked with Mike Newall. We made

adaptation for one of mine, Sold Geometry, that was exciting, I was

on the front page of the Sun, and then Morrison seriously, started

work with Richard Air, we came up with a screen play for the

ploughman's lump. And when I gave it to Richard, almost two weeks

later, hardly any gap at all, the whole Falklands crisis started. So

I was able to adapt this to absorb that, and end, to write into it,

the Tory party conference of that year, and triumph and speeches. And

I thought this is the charmed life, I will now just write novels and in

between, I will write movies. So, meetly I started working with

Bernardo Bertolucci, and it was then you can't plan, movies are

messy and hard to fund, they fall apart, screen plays V to be

rewritten, sometimes by other people, you get sacked. So that

dream, never really worked out. It was only, in that early time.

when it came to, for example, Atonement, did you never think,

when you wrote Atonement, "I would like to tackle the screen play of

this" or was that never going to happen? Well, I had first refusal

on that. I had a novel I wanted to write, and when Christopher Hampton

said he would do it, I was delighted. I think, Joe and his

team, pulled off a brilliant, superb job in the casting, I

thought Henry Perowne was beautifully chosen. - Saoirse Ronan

was superbly delight, I was delighted by it. It brought me to a

much wider readership. Like most, I start in publishing, a few stories

in literary mag designs, publish your first book, I solid maybe 1500

copies, and the next one, 2,000, and so you proceed through a

writing life and you get to 1,000 readers. If you're lucky. And you

keep at it. And Atonement's purned this up into hundreds of thousands.

Is there a conflict, between a very much literary writer and being a

best seller? Modernism wanted to teach us, if a book was understood

about too many people, there must be something wrong with it. But I

think the novel always had, it was always a popular form and the great

19th century novelists, where Dickens, or whatever, were read by

a wide section of society. And I think we got fooled in the early

part of the 20th century, by the high priest notion, of the novel as

exclusive form. And perhaps, we're regaining that territory now.

there is always a discourse at the heart of the novel that stays with

you. Let's go to rattle for a moment, you hold on to rationalism,

almost like a talisman, don't you? I don't think it was a talisman, it

was irrational kind of symbol. I'd like to give rattle a full riched

blooded life. I think it underpins, many things in our lives from our

legal system, to the laws we consider good, to the love affairs

that run with fulfilment to both sides. In other words, coherence

and degree of holding to what you say in meaning, to what you say, as

well as understanding the world around us, and science has shown us

wonders all down to one corner of our total being, which is our per

expenseity for being rational. So, I want to rescue it from the

romantics, I suppose that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the

first in a long battle to give us, rattle a cold hard, logical, poor

images. I want to celebrate it. I think it is a marvellous thing.

favourite of eep's books is Saturday. I was given it when I was

a junior doctor. And I was a trainee in neurosurgeon, very much

at the beginning of my career. Throughout your training, you

become immune to other people's suffering, because you're expose

today such a lot of it. And it is possible, after years and years of

working why A and E or surgical works, McEwan he talks about that,

the five or six years character worked in emergency units, how you

can lose think for people. And then, also how difficult it is to not let

that translate into when you go back home. There's an account in

the book of a very difficult separation, called a

transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, where you have to peel the face

back, open up the nasal cafity and go in the central of the caf vit,

through the nose, you get in the pituitary gland and extraordinarily

difficult place to get at. You can tell he took great deal of care.

But similarly great deal of care over the poetry publishing business,

or the ins and outs of becoming a blues, player in New York and

London together. So, I think, his research on the neurosurgical topic

sincere as good as the research on other topics. You talk about

learning, you take your learning seriously. So in Saturday, Henry is

the neurosurgeon, but you shadowed a neurosurgeon for a long time?

stood at the elbow of a gifted neurosurgeon, Neil Kitchen, on and

off over a period of two years. And hung about in his operating theatre

and got to know his firm as he calls his team. Often in my scrubs,

passed myself off as a neurosurgeon at one point. You passed yourself

off as a neurosurgeon? Yifplt he I did. I say we, Neil was doing an

operation, so already I was thinking we, and two medical

students came into the theatre, fifth year, and came over to me,

and said "excuse us doctor, would you mind if we watch" I said go

ahead". They said, what is going on, I saidings well, we're cliping a

middle cerebral artery aneurysm". And I thought, have I learnt enough

to do this. They come to the light box and I show you the CT scans, I

told them exactly what was going on in a low murmuring voice. And at

the end, they said, thank you very much doctor, and they left. I

always wonder how they got on in their exams,. I wop der were you

right, the danger was you were given the right details? I had it

right. Do you fear the wrong detail? I always get things wrong

and I get letters, I have written a lecture on making mistakes in

fiction. I made so many mistakes in fiction. An xax, in Saturday, Henry

has a Mercedes 500 SE, he gets into it, and the car, as he releases the

clutch, it slips out the garage. I get a nice letter, saying, they

enjoyed the nox, but you can't get a man uel, if you want him to

change the gears, you have to step down to the00, TKL, and it won't do

you any good changeing to a BMW or Audi, because these are plutocratic

cars, and owners don't need to mess with gear sticks. In eliminated the

clutch. And at the end of Atonement, which is full of mistakes, slowly

corrected, Imperial War Museum library, Briony, and she herself

talks about crawling towards the truth. These points, of moments of

truth, when she's corrected by a military historian, who says no-one

was wearing a beret at Dunkirk, someone told me that. So, I think

that when writers, write you and correct you on a detail, you are

lucky to have that engagement. That is the instead of rejecting it

oring with defensive, well say, either they're right or wrong. If

they're right that is the form of engagement, a realist novel, would

welcome. But do you think as a writer then,

you have a duty to be involved in the public debate? I don't feel it

as a duty. And I think broadly, the novelist, is so cap patience as a

form. Some writers, clearly should or need to or want to inhabit a

private space and others a mix of both and others write in a public

world. There should be no should in this. I just go where I'm

fascinateed. That's all. Walking down to the kitchen, he reads the

headlines, Blix telling the UN the Iraqis are beginning to co-operate.

In response, the Prime Minister, is expected to emphasise in a speech

in Glasgow today, the humanitarian reasons for war n but thepm's late

switch looks cynical. Hen very hoping his own story, breaking at

4.30, may make the late editionness London. But there's nothing.

There were I mean, memories play tricks, but in the leadup to the

invasion, I was present, as no doubt you were, with a a lot of

thunderous kitchen table debate. Nor could you tell if someone was

on the left or right, quite where they would stand. I wanted to get

that full, cock cough any of voices. I'd been following Iraq since the

late 8 0s, hen the republic of fear came out, at that point. And I do

remember, nobody much noticed the weapons of mass destruction used in

norp Iraq on the Kurds, it didn't bring anyone out on the street so.

I was sceptical that suddenly, people cared about Iraqi lives,

when the Iraqi trade unions were saying, please come. And the women

as movement and all kinds of good sectors of Iraq. But, by the time

we got to January, February, March, I was really, I knew that the last

country on earth, or last administration on earth, to invade

Iraq and organise it, would be the Bush administration. Paradoxically,

France or Germany, would have been actually better, running the

occupation. Than the United States, which wanted to privatise even

torture at Abu Ghraib. I had one sleepless night, I woke my wifeings

and said, I will get, I think I could get half an hour with Tony

Blair, I have a plan. It was one of those hours of the wolf. To talk

him out of this. What was your plan, your argument? My argument we would

move 8,000 troops out of Kuwait and put them in Afghanistan. So the

Army would lose no face, and we wouldn't be contradiction of not

having a second resolution in the UN, we couldn't stop the Americans

invading anyway. And, then 8am, full light of day, this, you know,

of course I couldn't get half an hour of Tony Blair, what was I

thinking of. That was after a good bolt of Beaujolais after you went

to bed. Now here we were, somewhere between 1 d 30 and 2 in the morning

lying in bed, staring at each other by the low light of one lamp. Me

naked, she in a cot tan nightdress, our arms and hands touching, but

neutrally, without commitment. All the questions, were heaped

around us arcs for a while, neither dared speak.

It was enough that we could look each other in the eye ". When you

seek inspiration, do you have a comfort blanket of books, or do you

seek new fiction? I try to write each novel as if it is my first.

I'm happy to leave a stretch of time. I'm in this time now, and I

always look forward to it now. Time to read or think or hike, or just

hang out with friends, and travel. And then sooner or later, I get

impatient and loif doesn't seem structured or worth living without

something forming and that's the time I start looking back into my

notebooks and fishing out the suggestions and messages that will

mean something to me. So I'm just on the edge now. What do you have

in the plot book? Do you have a gather plot books of scenes yos,

what do you think your next novel will be? It has something to do

with the law. And with hau, in general. And I think its hero is a

judge, that's all about I'm prepared to say. You're going to

have to shadow a judge now? going to have to talk to someone.

Pass yourself off as one? Yes, we all could with a wig and firm

opinions. If you were to look at a novel that you think is the perfect

novel. What would it be? I would say, Anna Karenina would be my

candidate. It is cap patience novel, it is sprawling, in there, is a

kind of perfection. Greatest sweep of emotion and the intimate as well

as the whole society at a particular turning point. Plus, and

I think this is the clincher for me, scores, maybe 150 pages describing

the nature of happiness. But it is long, and maybe the point

here is that novels are bound to be imperfect. They're all too human.

It is a very personal form. Anyone who sights down to write, a few

hundred words of prose in noveliststic form will discover how

embarrassing and personal it is, even if you think you're writing

about something outside you. As I have in Atonement, even writing "he

said" embarrassing, because he didn't and you made it up. And

somehow, in making it up, you make yourself, vulnerable. Highly

susceptible. That's why, when, a reviewer, says," Don't take this

personally, but your book is a load of crap" you know it is impossible

proposition. It is probably the most intimate personal form, there

is. And you cannot help over 300 paims, somehow, splaiing yourself,

like a flog in a dissection class back in the O-level days, when such

terrible things were permitted, your insides are suddenly out.

There's no way around it. I think in, Karenina ka car Dr Anna

Karenina, opened him up in a way which is near to perfection. Thank

you very much. Sweet Tooth is out this week. I will be back next week,

in the final programme in our Edinburgh festivals.

We'll be brainging you the best of the fest and new novel by Zadie

Well it is bank holiday weekend for most of us, so rain in forecast,

showery day on Saturday, heavy, slow moving in Scotland and Wales.

Let deal with England and Wales first. Some very heavy thundery

downpours across the heart of the Midlands, southern England too.

Light winds for most part but brisk breeze along the English Channel

coasts and not a clever day to be going to the beach. There will be

heavy rain at times and cool breeze. Across Wales, the winds will be

lighter but that means the showers could well last a while. This will

be sunshine in between. Talking of sunshine, Northern Ireland will get

away with best of the weather, on Saturday. And showers will be

isolate, and should stay mostly dry and bright.

Further east, rather cloudy, cool breeze and scattering of showers.

As we go to the evening time, showers will linger on. Further

afield, to find sunshine, good luck if you're going to north western

parts of Europe, showers are around. The heat hangs on, particularly