Ian McEwan, author of Saturday, On Chesil Beach and Nutshell, likes to talk about sex and death. “I make no special claims for myself, I was just an average 23 year-old and it (sex) loomed. And now, of course, I’ll be 70 next month and what looms is mortality. Sex and death, they are opposites. No one dead has a good sex life.”
Ever since the first short stories he wrote, he has delved into the human experience, oscillating from the past to the future, allowing the present moment to smack you in the face when you least expect it. “I was accused, by many critics, of writing to shock and I always denied it but, I was lying,” he said, “I did want to shock. Like many young people, I wanted to say, ‘I am here!’”
When he took to the lectern to indulge the audience in a reading from a yet-to-be-published piece, his sentences moved from love-making to technology, hinting at politics, conjuring laughs and referencing philosophy along the way. His work, he said, was a constant search for “that nugget that will just lift your heart again and make you think ‘this is a worthwhile expense of your brief span’.”
If you missed this event, you might also like to see
Tony Parsons talk to Dylan Jones, at 4pm on Monday, May 28th