Article about Ian McEwan from The New York Times. Have read most of his books - enjoy his darkness, the sense of terror just under the surface of everyday life. My favourites are "A Child in Time" (the ultimate horror - a child disappears in a supermarket and is not found again) and his early work "The Cement Garden". "Enduring Love" has one of the most dramatic and terrifying openings of any novel - I had to reread it several times before I could move on to the rest of the story, but the rest of the book doesn't match its intensity at all - and from the reviews I've read, this could also be a problem with the film. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
The New York Times > Books > Ian McEwan Hints at a Coming Novel
Intersted in this piece on the whole question of factual accuracy which McEwan mentions:
Asked about his job, he said he was a novelist. "What kind of novels do you write, fact or fiction?" his questioner inquired.
The point was not just to poke fun at his interrogator. Rather, it led to a lengthy explanation of his belief in factual accuracy to underpin and nourish the novelist's imagination. Indeed, he said, as a schoolboy of 13 he had discovered that a description of a Punch magazine cover in L. P. Hartley's 1953 novel "The Go-Between" was in fact completely accurate. "If there was a moment when I decided to become a writer, that was it," he said.
I believe that writers should go to such lengths or credibility is destroyed. I remember one online writing buddy telling me that she was unable to go on reading a book by John Grisham after she read that the main character went into a bakery she knows well (the place was named) and bought a bagel. "It doesn't sell bagels!" she said, annoyed that the writer had failed to check out an easily verifiable fact.
Margaret Atwood went so far as to take a tape measurement to the bridge mentioned at the beginning of "The Blind Assassin" so that she could work out exactly how many times the car rolled when it fell from the bridge ...
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