Ian McEwan. “I didn’t publish anything for 6 years because I was passionate about raising my children”

Sometimes all it takes is one event to change the course of a life forever. This was the case with young Briony Atonementand the same for the hero Roland Lessons, Ian McEwan’s new novel and masterpiece. The great English writer virtuosoly moves back and forth between the past and the present, from the threat of Chernobyl to the Second World War, to tell us a trajectory with a unique power of emotion and compassion. a turn-of-the-century man, his double, who would not have become a writer, but would have had a life worthy of a (magnificent) novel nonetheless. Interview:

Two narrative threads

Ms. Figaro: Can you tell us a few words about the background? Lessons ?
Ian McEwan. I listed historical events in a notebook that had an impact on my life, from the Suez crisis to Covid and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was just a list, but a month later, when I passed the pen over the same notebook, I found myself writing the first three pages of a book, the story of an eleven-year-old boy at an English boarding school. whose piano teacher is about to make a sexual initiation. This part was completely made up, but I recognized the places. everything happened in the institution’s music room, where I sat by myself. I thought that the reason these pages were so strong for me, so rich in possibilities, was that I was going to write this child’s life, and that this life would sometimes coincide with mine, sometimes radically diverge…

You then thought of the list‘events that happened a month ago.
Yes, and I understood that it would form the chronological framework of this story. I’ve always been interested in how big political and cultural changes can affect one’s personal life… Certain episodes of Roland’s life are truly autobiographical, such as my father’s motorcycle accident or the feeling of freedom during the Suez crisis when we were in a camp in Libya. , and my parents didn’t follow me anymore… I quickly realized that I was going to weave two narrative threads, one dedicated to life and family life in particular, and the other as a whole. artistic. Roland is an alter ego of who I would be if I hadn’t discovered writing…

Roland‘not really a writer, but the woman becomes one and decides to leave her and their child…
One of the great obsessions of British literary culture is literary biography. And I’ve read so many stories of a famous writer who leaves his wife and children to devote himself not only to his work but to a younger woman that I thought I’d like to change this pattern. So there are very few women left. Everyone remembers Doris Lessing, and no one has forgiven her, as we continue to mention this fact when we talk about her in the literary world. There are two standards in this matter… And beyond the question of gender, to take one’s own existence into one’s hands, with such ruthless determination that it can cause so much pain to others, but is perfectly embedded in the search for what we want. acquisition at any cost is not given to everyone. We are not brave enough or too kind.

A family secret

Can we say that?‘Alice makes a decision, while Roland’s life is guided by chance, luck, misfortune?
We have the illusion of exercising our free will. As Kierkegaard said, I believe we are free to choose anything except what we like. Let’s be who we are. It seems to me that free will is a necessary illusion: neither public life nor the legal system can function without it. We did not choose our parents, our genes, the society in which we develop, but we must believe in free will. Alisa makes a decision, and Roland, although the victim, realizes that in the chaos of this first birth, it is impossible to write in a small house with a seven-month-old baby… No one warned us that: it would be so difficult that fatigue would become our daily lot, that it was a miracle that the human race could perpetuate itself. I myself did not publish anything between 1981 and 1987 because I was too tired, but also too interested and passionate; for my part, I really enjoyed raising children…

You found out late that your parents had a son before you. Why did you want to include this family secret in your novel?
I needed that. My brother wrote a beautiful book about it, which I have foreworded (Complete surrenderby Dave Sharp, released in 2008). He broke through the past like breaking an egg, revealed the lie of my parents, which they had always hidden from us, and explained my mother’s sadness with it. My father was an authoritarian man who could move forward without looking back, but my mother was not… My brother is not bitter; In Lessons, I have changed some factual settings, but everything is emotionally accurate. The great sadness of this affair is that he went to my mother to speak to her; only he had lost his head, and no reconciliation was possible. He tried his best to remind her who he was. But it meant nothing to him anymore. If he had come to see her eighteen months ago, or even a year, maybe… It’s terribly sad. I am sure that he would have died more peacefully.

Lessons by Ian McEwan, translated from English by France Camus-Pichon, ed. Gallimard, 656 p., €26.