Meeting Ian McEwan

Considering the multifarious connections between the great writer Ian McEwan and myself (previously documented in Ratatouille #4), I had really no choice but to attend the reading he was giving at Toronto's downtown Church of the Holy Trinity last night.

The still-proliferating links between us barely even come as a surprise any more. My first mention of McEwan came in Ratatouille #3, the same piece that discussed the ostensibly unrelated case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman about whose case at least six neuroscientists have testified before the courts. Later I encountered Henry Perowne, the protagonist of McEwan's just-published Saturday, who works as.... Indeed. A neurosurgeon. And what physical sport does that neurosurgeon play? Mine -- Squash. At 17 pages, the novel's depiction of a squash match is probably the most extensive ever seen in fiction.

So it was reasonable to expect something cosmic as I arrived to see and hear McEwan for the first time.

Another novelist was also on the programme -- Camilla Gibb, who was also going to be reading from a new novel.

My initial reception suggested an incipient Canadian screwup of the sort referred to in my Ratatouille pieces. On breaching the crowd clustered by the church entrance, I espied the ticket handlers just inside, to the left and to the right. I chose the left. They directed me to the right. Then as I reached the right, the handlers there were gone. Then one of them reappeared ... and directed me back to the left. I patiently acquiesced, but politely pointed out the inconsistency to the people on the left. Was I on a waiting list, I was asked. No, I answered firmly, I had a real reservation. A consultation between left and right took place. Then it was all sorted out, and I was given my ticket. (Apparently my method of making a reservation -- phoning a week ahead and presenting my credit card info as requested -- was quite unusual. Don't ask me how the other 400 attendees did it.)

I'd arrived only about 5-10 minutes before the 7:30 PM start time and most seats were already taken. I found a single seat in one of the middle rows, but just then the organizer at the mike asked people to raise their hands if they had an unused seat beside them -- and I relocated to the second row.

There was a pleasant-seeming woman to my left, another to my right. We had only a minute or two to wait, and then the organizer began the proceedings by introducing Camilla Gibb.

Then Gibb took the podium, gave some prefatory remarks, and read from her Sweetness In The Belly.

It dawned on me about a minute or two into Gibb's talk that the back of the head 18 inches before me was McEwan's.

When McEwan took the podium, he said he'd been very impressed by Gibb's talk but felt that in some respects he'd gone about the job of inventing stories in the opposite way. She'd described to the audience how she'd drawn on her experiences doing fieldwork in Ethiopia for her Oxford University Ph.D. in social anthropology, during which she lived in very penurious circumstances with a host family as an equal member, fighting like the others for her part of the bone marrow in the meatless stew they all had to share. McEwan, by contrast, far from travelling to the ends of the earth and living among people of different cultures, had chosen as his setting for Saturday not just his own neighborhood but his own house. He felt, he told the audience to laughter, like quite a "slouch."

He then read the passage from Saturday in which Dr. Perowne visits his mother, whose mind is gravely impaired by Alzheimer's, in her nursing home.

Afterwards, he took 5 or 6 questions from the audience. Mine was the first.

I stood and told him: "First, I'd like to say ... I love your books!"

I said I'd only discovered him a month ago when, not having read any fiction for 6 or 12 months, I by chance picked up a paperback edition of Atonement while browsing in a Toronto bookstore. Since then I'd read that, Amsterdam, Saturday, and had just finished The Innocent a couple of nights before. (McEwan's novels listed here.)

I did have a question. I wanted to ask -- there's a passage in Saturday, I don't remember it exactly, where Perowne, reflecting on the news being dispensed to the citizenry in the run-up to the Iraqi war, has the sense that he's playing a part that's been contrived for him -- the ignorant citizen and news consumer. That's how I remembered it, anyway. And perhaps -- I told McEwan I wasn't sure he'd intended the parallel -- Perowne was as oblivious as his mother about what was really going on in the news.

So, I told McEwan, my question for him was: As a master writer of fiction himself, did he sometimes get the sense that the news we receive is also fiction?

I sat down.

McEwan said he'd repeat the question for those who hadn't heard it. "Briefly ...."

There was some laughter and applause from the back. Apparently some people felt my question had been a mite long-winded.

"No," he said in my defense, "it was a very nice question...."

After recapping the question, McEwan quipped about his astonished senses when Fox News aired as he lay sprawled out half-asleep on hotel beds. Al Jazeera's news coverage too, he added, at the other end of the spectrum, often seemed questionable.

"However," he went on -- McEwan was evidently not on a mission to savage the mainstream news media -- "there are certainly some journalists who are considerably more serious and responsible than others."

And he moved on to other questions.

Afterwards, when he sat to extended applause, I gambled that he was a squash player and leaned forward to suggest that he might care to have a squash game during his visit to Toronto.

Alas, he was leaving the next day. But anyway, he added, "you'd probably thrash me ... you look quite fit."

Not merely a brilliant writer. An excellent gentleman too.

Not to mention.... Thrashing an acclaimed writer like McEwan would certainly lessen the sting of being unpublished myself.

I cast about for a witty rejoinder (or I might have fallen back on protesting that, no, he looked far fitter than I) but an instant later the crowd was upon him, and there was no opportunity to prolong our exchange.

I hung about a bit, but there didn't seem to be any blazing debates going on about McEwan's works. (This is Toronto.) So after a while I strolled out of the church to go home.

Up ahead I saw a fellow I'd noticed in the very short queue, consisting of 2 or 3 people, at the table where Camilla Gibb had been signing copies of her book. About 100 people had been queuing for McEwan's signature. (It's funny how we impose the dullest chores imaginable on the greatest achievers of imaginative feats.)

"I guess you didn't have too long to wait," I called out.

We fell into a little discussion. McEwan had mentioned in his talk that the protagonist's mother in Saturday was patterned on his own mother, who'd also had Alzheimer's. He'd given the character his mother's middle name. McEwan's talk had also referred to another Saturday character, a dangerous criminal who suffers from Huntington's disease, a rare disease that also leads to dementia.

My new companion had gotten himself under the misapprehension that the mother character, as well as McEwan's own mother, had suffered from Huntington's disease.

He added that the offspring of people afflicted with Huntington's have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease, but that since McEwan appeared to be in his 50's and the disease was usually manifest before that, McEwan was probably safe.

"No no no no," I corrected him. "The mother merely has Alzheimer's. It's a totally different character, the bad guy, who has Huntington's."

The fellow hadn't yet read Saturday ... but, no, he begged to differ, he was rather persuaded from McEwan's talk that the mother character had Huntington's. Moreover, he'd read that in an article about McEwan.

(Was this focussing of my attention on the two mothers another cosmic McEwan connection? A month earlier I'd written about Two Trailer Park Moms, another real/fictional mother duo.)

"I assure you," I told the fellow. "Look -- I just read the book about a week ago. I remember quite distinctly -- it's a totally different character who has Huntington's."

"Well, he did say the mother character was based on his own mother. And McEwan's mother died of Huntington's. I read it in Eye magazine" (a free Toronto weekly). "Here, maybe there's an Eye newsbox around here...."

What a preposterous delusion the fellow was under!

Do you remember Woody Allen's 1977 film, Annie Hall? Alvy, the character played by Allen, is waiting in line to see an art film. Some pretentious know-it-all in the queue, a few positions ahead of Alvy, is self-importantly expounding to his date about the writings of deep thinker and enigmatic celebrity scholar Marshall McLuhan. Alvy gets more and more fed up until, having had enough, he interrupts the fathead to tell him he's completely wrong about McLuhan. The man heatedly defends his views. Then comes the classic moment: Alvy takes a few steps ... the camera rests on what had been an unnoticed post ... and from behind it, Marshall McLuhan himself emerges. (McLuhan acted the bit part himself.) McLuhan goes up to the man together with Alvy and backs Alvy up, telling the man: "You know nothing of my work."

I was shortly to have a slightly similar moment.

The fellow with the Huntington's delusion was looking up and down Bay St. for an Eye box. He'd intended to turn east at Gerrard St. but walked a bit further along my route, wanting to prove his point. Then he spotted a box across Bay St., on the west side.

Humoring him, I accompanied him as he went up to the box and fished out an issue. He opened it up and promptly found what he was looking for. He drew my attention to this passage, in the page 32 story about McEwan:

[Dr. Perowne] encounters a menacing thug named Baxter and inwardly diagnoses him with Huntingdon's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder like the one Perowne's mother suffers from. As it turns out, McEwan's own mother died of Huntingdon's, and vascular dementia appears to be a preoccupation of his -- it afflicts characters in his two previous novels as well. "It's a savage thing," McEwan says. "It has the nature of fate about it. There's nothing you can do; it was always going to happen. It's fixed somewhere in your genome. It has something of the quality of an abstract curse, such as a character in a Greek play might see."

[The longest day, by Mike Doherty, Eye Weekly, March 31, 2005.]

The words were crystal clear: "McEwan's own mother died of Huntingdon's."

I felt a momentary trill of empathy for the fathead.

Back home I searched the web. (I didn't drag the fellow home with me.) No one else speaks of McEwan's mother having had Huntington's. (Incidentally, both spellings seem widespread.)

But the passage is still there at Eye's website.

On the matter raised in my question to McEwan, consider a couple of undeniable facts: #1 -- the Eye story, which I didn't even know about when I posed the question; #2 -- one of the most influential news purveyors of all -- I refer of course to The New York Times -- whose front page headline on Sunday, the day before McEwan's talk, declared the pope "gravely ill."

The pope's death had in fact been announced by 3:00 PM EDT on Saturday.

McEwan's response to me was necessarily discreet. The media was presumably covering the event.

But I know. He and I see eye to eye on this one too.

More occurrences at Uriel's next lecture: Bolt from the Blue Smites Book Critic.