{"id":62042,"date":"2025-10-05T09:48:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T09:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/62042\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T09:48:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T09:48:07","slug":"ive-been-following-politics-for-years-and-ive-never-felt-such-anxiety-about-the-chaos-the-lack-of-leadership-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/62042\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019ve been following politics for years, and I\u2019ve never felt such anxiety about the chaos, the lack of leadership\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI had this sense of total physical inadequacy,\u201d Ian McEwan<\/a> says about how he felt after appearing at this year\u2019s Edinburgh International Book Festival, in August. When he left the event, \u201cThere were four or five incredibly athletic guys doing splits on the carpet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had to step over these muscled legs and gleaming bodies. They were trapeze artists. They were about to hurl themselves through space. And I thought, Wow, I would rather have watched these guys!\u201d<\/p>\n

Others disagree. McEwan, who is now 77, is one of the UK\u2019s leading novelists, and he attracts big crowds. About 1,000 people came to his Edinburgh event; when I met him at Ennis Book Club Festival, in Co Clare, in March, he had an audience of 500.<\/p>\n

Appropriately, the value we place on writing is one of the themes in his new novel, What We Can Know. The book comes in two parts. In the first, set in 2122, an academic, Tom Metcalfe, is investigating a great lost poem by the fictional poet Francis Blundy.<\/p>\n

Blundy read the poem, A Corona for Vivien \u2013 a verse in 15 sonnets \u2013 to his wife at a dinner party in 2014, then presented her with the only copy. The poem was never heard nor read again. But Tom thinks he can find it. <\/p>\n

The second part of the book it would be wrong to reveal, but it highlights, as the title suggests, the gulf between what we think we know and what really happened.<\/p>\n

The setting of early-22nd-century Britain gives McEwan the opportunity to make some predictions for the next 100 years, from playful to menacing. On the one hand, acorn coffee is all the rage; on the other, universities have moved their archives to high ground, as the lowlands of Britain are flooded.<\/p>\n

It turns out that this is not straightforwardly about climate change<\/a>, although that is a factor. \u201cI\u2019ve been puzzling for years how we write a novel about climate change,\u201d McEwan says. \u201cPeople don\u2019t need to be warned, because it\u2019s already happening. Dystopias can cause false comfort.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the realist novel up to such a large subject? I\u2019m very much tied to this form, but the only way I could see back into the subject was to write from the point of view of the future, looking back with anger and scorn but also with energy.\u201d In the book, people view enviously the riches we enjoy now and that we are putting at risk.<\/p>\n

\"NovelistNovelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan. Photograph: Joel Saget\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

Does he feel as pessimistic as some of his scenarios envisage? For example, in the novel, nuclear war has made a comeback. <\/p>\n

\u201cShortly after I finished the final proofread of this novel, India and Pakistan were at it again \u2013 two nations armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. They backed off, but I think it\u2019s an open question whether we get through the 21st century without an exchange of [nuclear] weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in a new arms race, with the added element of AI being brought into weapons systems, because decisions need to be made very quickly, and it\u2019s possible that these things will move out of our control.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just India and Pakistan, though: other global players seem equally febrile. \u201cI\u2019ve been following politics for 50, 60 years, and I\u2019ve never felt quite this level of anxiety about the chaos, the lack of good leadership. Very large power blocs who have little consideration for human rights, and America drifting into a kind of madness that 10 years ago would have been very hard to predict.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day from that direction there\u2019s something that shocks me profoundly. The latest one was hearing President Trump praising the leader of North Korea. Is [Trump] just a passing thing or is it all going to collapse, the end of the American republic?\u201d<\/p>\n

But your friend Julian Barnes, I say, argues that we tend to overstate how bad the world is as we get older, because it makes us feel better about leaving it soon. \u201cI think one has to always bear that in mind,\u201d McEwan agrees. \u201cFrank Kermode published a book called The Sense of an Ending, and oddly Julian [later] published a novel with the very same name.<\/p>\n

You do need some self-scepticism, and you don\u2019t find that in Trump and you certainly don\u2019t find it in Putin.<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Ian McEwan<\/p>\n

\u201cKermode\u2019s point was that we want to make sense of our lives, and it doesn\u2019t suit us to think we were born in the middle of things and we\u2019re going to die in the middle of things. We always think we\u2019re at the end of time. But I can\u2019t shrug it off. I think there\u2019s a sense that we\u2019re somewhat out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, What We Can Know takes the long view of human history, and predicts that, even if our civilisation does collapse, we will rise again: \u201cEach time we fail,\u201d the narrator writes, \u201cor calamities overwhelm us, we will come back from a slightly higher place.\u201d <\/p>\n

McEwan agrees, if not entirely enthusiastically: \u201cMy guess is that we\u2019ll scrape through.\u201d<\/p>\n

The losses in the book are not only generational but also personal. One character has advanced Alzheimer\u2019s disease. These passages seem deeply felt. Has he personal experience of dealing with this?<\/p>\n

\u201cAbsolutely. My mother died of vascular dementia. My brother-in-law had Alzheimer\u2019s. My sister has it. Quite a few friends have it. The subject is very alive for me.\u201d <\/p>\n

It makes sense for the book, too, he adds, because \u201cif you watch someone slowly lose their memory, and therefore their identity, you have a really close analogy of how important it is to have some historical sense.<\/p>\n

\"NovelistNovelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan. Photograph: Joel Saget\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, my mother died long before she died. She wasn\u2019t there. She didn\u2019t know who she was. It\u2019s particularly tough on those who care for Alzheimer\u2019s patients. We currently have going through [the UK] parliament [the Assisted Dying Bill], with the possibility of people ending their lives by their own choice \u2013 but we\u2019ve excluded all possibilities of mental illness. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut maybe this is just a first step. Opponents of the Bill say this is the thin end of the wedge. My point is that I hope it is the thin end.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Patrick McCabe: \u2018This whole idea of making money out of novels started in the 1980s with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

To return to the book, it\u2019s notable that we never get to read any of Blundy\u2019s poems. Did McEwan ever contemplate including them, as Anne Enright did in The Wren, The Wren<\/a>? <\/p>\n

\u201cFrancis Blundy is a great poet,\u201d McEwan says. \u201cI\u2019ve been a novelist for just over 50 years. I think in that time I\u2019ve written one villanelle and one other poem. They\u2019re not very good.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t take poetry lightly. I read a lot of it, and Martin [Amis] and I used to sit around, and we talked about poetry more than we talked about fiction. We decided it was the Senior Service; it was the highest expression. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I did write one or two lines [for Francis\u2019s poems]. And they just weren\u2019t good enough. TS Eliot said anyone seriously wanting to be a poet needs to start at 22 and give their life to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

We haven\u2019t bettered the novel yet. I don\u2019t buy into all that [talk about] collapsing attention spans<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Ian McEwan<\/p>\n

The influence of poetry, and McEwan\u2019s own rich prose, remind me of a line about another writer character in the book, the novelist Mary Sheldrake, whose writing is \u201cso impenetrably bland\u201d that readers \u201cmistook it for the hard gleam of modernist profundity\u201d. That sounds like a dig at plain prose. Is it?<\/p>\n

\u201cAbsolutely. I\u2019m not going to name any names, but there were certain contemporary figures I had in mind who seem to have no ear \u2013 or it\u2019s more like a decision. You just write it down as it comes. You type it out. You correct a bit of grammar and it\u2019s done. No ear for the music.<\/p>\n

\u201cMartin and I shared a huge regard for [Vladimir] Nabokov. It was the attention to the surface of the prose that we would find missing in a lot of our contemporaries. The great point of divergence between us was who wrote the better prose, [John] Updike or [Saul] Bellow.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, he adds, \u201cI think Bellow was not a good influence on Martin. Bellow\u2019s prose was a specifically American idiom, and that didn\u2019t sit well on top of an educated English literary voice.\u201d <\/p>\n

What about Amis\u2019s novel Money, widely regarded as his best, where the English and American influences achieve a great synthesis? \u201cYeah, but it\u2019s set in the States.\u201d True. (Well, partly true: it\u2019s set in England and the US.)<\/p>\n

Speaking of educated voices brings me to a comment made by one character in What We Can Know that an education is important to democracy because \u201cthose with minimal education were more easily influenced by subtle input\u201d and, as he bluntly puts it, \u201cearly school-leavers make bad decisions\u201d. <\/p>\n

Does McEwan agree, given what democracy has recently delivered?<\/p>\n

\u201cYes. I say that with caution because Lenin was an educated man, and within six months he was running a paranoid state that was picking off its enemies. But it does need some historical sense. You do need to understand how we might be wrong about things. You do need some self-scepticism, and you don\u2019t find that in Trump and you certainly don\u2019t find it in Putin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eliot said a poet needs to give their life to poetry; McEwan has given his to the novel. It has been, he says, a great privilege. And he sees a future for the novel. \u201cWe haven\u2019t bettered it yet. I don\u2019t buy into all that [talk about] collapsing attention spans. When people say, \u2018Oh, he\u2019s up in his room, he\u2019s never got his face off the screen, he\u2019s not socialising\u2019, well, someone reading a novel isn\u2019t socialising.\u201d<\/p>\n

So at least in one aspect, that of our literary culture, and despite war, despite climate change, despite Trump and everything else we\u2019ve discussed, McEwan concludes, \u201cI am an optimist.\u201d<\/p>\n

What We Can Know is published by Jonathan Cape<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI had this sense of total physical inadequacy,\u201d Ian McEwan says about how he felt after appearing at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62043,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[42848,969,93,24952,61,60,42849],"class_list":{"0":"post-62042","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-anne-enright","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ian-mcewan","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-martin-amis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}