Ian McEwan still a virtuoso in playing on readers’ fears

Ian McEwan isn’t filled with dread -- just his books are.

Which isn’t to say that the 56-year-old British author, whose creepy and timely “Saturday” has just been published in this country, doesn’t have the kinds of fears common to most people. Walking home at night on a deserted city street and watching five rowdy males coming toward you. Wondering why your teenage son, who’s traveling overseas, hasn’t called for a week. Feeling the unwanted attention of someone you barely know.

“I don’t think I’m particularly more fearful than anyone else,” says McEwan, “but I can imagine my way into these situations.”

That he can. Considered in some circles to be England’s greatest contemporary novelist, McEwan has become famous, and rich, thanks to a series of works filled with violent set pieces, perverse sexuality and the feeling that at any moment the world is going to give his characters a cosmic sucker punch. “Enduring Love” opens with a man falling to his death in a balloon accident, then becomes a tale of religious and sexual obsession. “The Comfort of Strangers” features a couple on holiday in Venice who become involved in a sadomasochistic murder. In “Atonement,” a false accusation of rape ruins a young man’s life. Now in “Saturday” -- which received mostly rave reviews and is already on the bestseller lists here -- a minor auto accident becomes a horrific encounter pitting civilized man against the forces of darkness with the post-Sept. 11 insecurity serving as a psychological backdrop.

“I want something to happen in my stories, and I want to sort of push them to the edge,” McEwan says of his penchant for the literary gut shot. “I like to prompt a sort of curiosity in the reader as to outcomes. Most threats in life, tsunamis apart, come from other people. So threat is located in the unpredictable, random, cruel behavior of other people. And literature has always been about human conflict.”

“Saturday” opens with lead character Henry Perowne, a successful, happily married London neurosurgeon, gazing out his window early one morning and watching a plane with one wing on fire making an emergency landing at Heathrow. The date is Feb. 15, 2003, shortly before the beginning of the Iraq war, and a massive antiwar demonstration is about to take place. Perowne wonders if the plane signifies a terrorist attack on England (it doesn’t; it’s just a cargo plane with engine trouble), but mostly he’s occupied with quotidian thoughts about the day ahead: a squash game with a colleague, visiting his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother at her rest home, preparing for a dinner with his family. Then Perowne gets into a fender-bender with some street thugs, and the day evolves into one long nightmare.

As Michael Gorra put it in his Los Angeles Times review of “Saturday,” “the bad things coming [the car crash] might stand as Henry’s own personal 9/11.” The event certainly sets the rational against the psychotic, and in that sense is a metaphor for all the anxieties of our age.

McEwan was working on a comic novel about tabloid journalism when the twin towers fell but abandoned that project because, he says, “I no longer felt very funny.” A year later he decided to write “Saturday” because “it became clear after the invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of rumblings of an invasion of Iraq, [there was] the general sense of an era having finished. Everything had shifted, the whole focus of international politics. The general sense of people’s well-being in the U.S. wasn’t interrupted, but it was deeply troubled. I began to feel this was a subject, the shift in consciousness.”

McEwan had recently moved back to central London and wanted to write a London novel. “Atonement,” his most recent book, was historical, so he wanted to deal with something contemporary. And he decided to take the micro-view of post-Sept. 11 syndrome since “the only way in for a novelist is a sort of bottom-up approach; you have to start with individual lives. It makes no sense to deal with this on any other level; you’ve got to be psychological.”

McEwan says he also wanted to create in Perowne a character who is “fundamentally happy,” then mix in his “bafflement or fear or paranoia” about the world at large. He also decided to have a little fun with his major player, making him a man whose daughter is a published poet yet who is utterly clueless about anything literary and absolutely recoils from the choice of books she encourages him to read. “No more magic midget drummers,” says Perowne to his daughter at one point, referring, of course, to Gunter Grass’ classic novel “The Tin Drum.”

This is McEwan being droll, much as he is in person. A slim man with thinning, sandy hair, he speaks in a low voice and has a sense of humor as dry as an aged Burgundy. He loves blues music and English Premiere League football, always stocks parmesan cheese, pancetta and basil in his refrigerator, and is reading “A Tale of Two Cities” because after a lifetime of hearing the novel’s famous opening line quoted just about everywhere(“It was the best of times ...”), McEwan finally became curious enough to check out the rest of the book.

Son of a British army officer, McEwan was raised in Singapore, North Africa, and several English garrison towns. A shy child who was eventually educated in boarding school, his peripatetic background meant, he says, “when I started writing, I had not come from the usual roots of the English class or educational system. It was a very fractured background in that respect, and I think my early fiction was unlike mainstream British fiction in that it wasn’t located in place. You can see it as a benign form of exile.”

McEwan has always been interested in what “is strange and subterranean about human nature.” The effects of Sept. 11 seem to fill the bill in this respect, but McEwan also has a much more personal interest in the matter. He was briefly barred from entering the U.S. in March 2004 because of an error on the part of U.S. Customs. Even though that agency later apologized to him, he now finds himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare of sorts: the initial mistake is still in the agency’s computers, making it extremely difficult for McEwan to obtain a travel visa for the U.S. It took him nine months of trying this time around, and the visa was granted just hours before he was due to leave for his American book tour.

“I only got in this time by the skin of my teeth,” McEwan told Reuters. “It is a matter of enormous irritation.”

Yet even this bureaucratic bumbling is not what bothers McEwan the most about the contemporary mind-set. A key subtext in “Saturday” is how totalitarianism, particularly religious fundamentalism, has altered our lives. An unabashed materialist -- he has called materialism “the most freeing of world views” -- McEwan is a rationalist who is intensely suspicious of spirituality.

In “Saturday,” when Perowne is asked by his daughter what he would call a religion if he were to construct his own, the neurosurgeon replies “evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter.”

“I feel distinctly uneasy with revealed truth, with people who want to live their lives by a sense that their morality is given and prescribed rather than it being something we rather brilliantly and messily had to make,” says McEwan. “I like the idea that we take more responsibility for ourselves. I balk at the religious notion that this or that god is the source of ethics.”

In this respect, then, the Dark Prince of Dread actually sees “Saturday” as a work of hope and transcendence. Although the novel ends on a delicious note of moral ambiguity, it also contains the seeds of love and beauty.

The message of “Saturday,” says McEwan, “is to feel that in a godless world you can have a rich, warm view of life. I think the world’s future lies in the hands of rational, secular, material, sensible, forgiving people.”