Ian McEwan

Up By His Bootstraps To the Booker

More than 11 books and countless awards into his career, novelist Ian McEwan seeks ever new ways to probe the human condition.

It was in the mid-1970's that Ian McEwan broke through what he calls "that layered linguistic density" with his first volume of short stories, First Love, Last Rites. It burst onto the literary scene to both popular and critical acclaim and, in the quarter century since that early success, he has scarcely laid down his pen.

There are few genres at which he has not tried his hand. Novels followed short stories -- and both have at various times been filmed. Not one to be outdone by Hollywood hacks, McEwan has also made a name for himself as a scriptwriter, drawing both from his own works and on those of other writers. Cinema, television, radio –- they have all been enriched by the McEwan touch. He even wrote an oratorio, "Or Shall We Die?", which was performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall and at Carnegie Hall in New York during the mid 1980’s.

No wonder, then, that he has been awarded prize after prestigious prize and added two honorary doctorates to the degrees he earned while studying at the Universities of Sussex and East Anglia in Britain. His stellar literary career continues to surprise this son of hard-working parents, both of whom left school at 14.

An army brat travels the world

Born in 1948 in Aldershot, Britain, Ian McEwan spent his childhood traveling the world -- from England to the Orient to North Africa -- thanks to his father's service in the Army. His father, a man who yearned to be educated, was forced by poverty to give up the scholarship that would have given him that chance. This “lack of formal education,” says McEwan, “sat unhappily all his life with his ferocious intelligence.” Eventually, McEwan senior was commissioned from the ranks. Bravado -- "he was a regimental sergeant major with one of those sticks to measure a man’s pace and a very fierce moustache," says his son. And his affection for “spit and polish” carried him through. But McEwan's mother had a harder time of it.

From early on, young Ian was acutely aware of language as he listened to his mother struggle, and fail, to polish up her linguistic skills to fit in with the other officers' wives.

"My mother never owned the language she spoke,” he recalls. She regarded it as "something that might go off in her face … a word bomb." From his mother, McEwan learned to use language cautiously. During his teens, his Suffolk boarding school supplied the literary materials that began to give his language shape and style, and by his early 20’s he was writing seriously.

Initially McEwan used short stories to explore the fundamental human issues of identity, morality and sexuality, viewing them through the eyes of adolescence as in the book First Love, Last Rites, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1976. Other times he viewed them through the more mature prism of full-fledged adulthood as in the tome In Between the Sheets and Other Stories. But it was only within the structure of a novel that he was able to range fully among the complex emotions and behaviors that make up human nature

Relationships were, from his earliest years, a source of endless fascination. "I remember how I liked to loll unobtrusively on the floor behind the sofa when my mother had a friend round," he says. "I would listen in to these roaming, intimate heart-to-hearts … how compelling they were … and, with so many bad people in the world, what a lucky six-year-old I thought I was when my mother and her friends were always on the side of the good."

A domineering father figure

But his father was another matter. McEwan describes him as "a kindly man, but he was domineering too, with a Glaswegian working man’s love of the pub." His mother was always afraid of him and "so," admits McEwan, "was I." The elder McEwan’s marriage had all the elements of conflict and dramatic tension essential for a powerful story, but the young writer was leery of autobiographical writing. "Writers who fictionalize their childhoods, I declared in my first interviews, bored me," he says. "The business is to invent."

And invent he did -- families who lived lives of high drama and grew separately, together or not at all -- as a result. His first novel, The Cement Garden, published when he was 30, was a huge success. This book and several that preceded and followed it -- First Love, Last Rites, The Comfort of Strangers and The Innocent -- were also made into films.

In each of his works, McEwan takes a fresh look at the same fundamental question: "What is human nature capable of doing?" and tries to "find the fusions, the melting points, between thought and feeling." In doing so, he has struck a chord with his readers over and over again -- perhaps most brilliantly in his newest novel, Atonement.