Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Booker Prize-winning novelist (Amsterdam) and author of acclaimed novels including The Cement Garden, The Child in Time, and Black Dogs.
On the island
Eight records
Well, as a castaway I'm sure the first thing I'd miss would be city life, and so um I'd uh keep the memories alive with something that lives between Swing and Bebop but of Lester Young.
Pilar Lorengar, Hermann Prey, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti
We sang all the way through Mozart's Magic Flute because everyone was involved in putting it on at the end of term. I had no idea it was Mozart. I just thought these were school songs.
These boys at Wolverstone Hall were very, very savvy about music, and long before. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were making their cover versions of American blues and R and B songs. They were playing this kind of music, Chicago blues.
In the early seventies I lived with Elaine Streeter, who was a marvellous pianist, and once she took me upstairs to the practice rooms in the Wigmore Hall, and she played to me the aria from the Goldberg variations, and from that time on I've always adored this music.
Vladimir Ashkenazy, Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell
Well this next record uh combines what I think is. Something unique in my musical experience and taste, and that is. Sweetness and profundity. in equal measure.
One of the uh recurrent pleasures of my life is t um to be in the United States, on the open road, driving. ... And the last time I did it. I did it with my wife Annalina, and we went looking for Cajun music.
Van Morrison has been a real source of delight to me over the last ten years. He really comes to me through my very close hiking friend, companion, neuroscientist, Ray Dolan.
Gösta Winbergh, Orchestra and Chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Gabriele Ferro
Both beautiful but rather self-mocking.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:05Writing is a solitary business, Ian. Is it still exciting? Does it go on being exciting?
Well, there are good days and bad days, obviously, but yes, in fact I'd have to say that it's it gets better. I think when I started I used to sweat for so long over one sentence that I sometimes rather denied myself the pleasure. Uh but yes I do find when things go well, when things are unwinding. Um and you're giving yourself surprises day by day that it isn't extraordinary.
Presenter asks
4:54You were brought up, Ian McEwan, you said, in an atmosphere in which I quote, you didn't speak up and you didn't speak your mind. Why not?
Well, I I rather think children growing up in the fifties didn't. Um children and adults lived in separate nations, separate worlds. Um sometimes I'm Engaged in conversations with my children, especially when they were younger, and uh I'm very aware that this kind of thing didn't go on. In my family or in the families of my friends.
Presenter asks
5:31But your father was a company sergeant major. I mean, were you frightened of him or intimidated by him?
I was rather frightened of him, yet he was the most he was a very kindly, very loving father. But The soldiers that he trained really feared him, so I think I had a reasonable excuse at the age of two or three to go scuttling behind the sofa when he appeared at week ends.
The keepsakes
The book
James Joyce
I think what I'd miss on a desert island would be ordinary life, and I can think of no other book in which daily life, ordinary life and and poetry meet in in such a sort of effortless fusion. … Turning the pages of that, it doesn't have to be read sequentially. I think that would keep me company.
The luxury
Italian hand stitched leather hiking boots
I would like a pair of uh Italian hand stitched leather hiking boots to get me up on to those ridge walks.
Presenter asks
6:51There's a scene in your novel, The Child in Time, in which the main character is a boy in an aeroplane wiping away tears as he waves to his parents... Is that you?
A rare autobiographical moment in in in a novel of mine, but this was me being put on a DC three in Libya in nineteen fifty nine uh to go off to boarding school in Suffolk. And uh It was a a very terrible moment, really. And the beginning of a rather low time in my life, I think, um, swapping this Extraordinary sunlit time in in North Africa. For the rigours of boarding schools.
Presenter asks
15:41Where did all that [early reputation for the macabre and savage short stories] come from?
I think i I'd been this rather quiet, bottled-up person and uh It it it's odd to use a word like g joyous, but um w when I set about writing these stories. I had no awareness of a reader apart from either Angus Wilson or Malcolm Bradbury, and they never put any constraints upon me at all. ... I thought writing as I saw it sort of late in the century, nineteen seventy, um all the battles over what could and could not be said in contemporary literature had been fought and and won. ... it it was possible to say anything and write anything and go anywhere in your mind. And I went into some very strange places, but I thought I was free to imagine, and I imagined darkly
Presenter asks
30:01What's the next novel about?
Ah well, it's always very difficult to talk about that. But I think my next novel is about atonement. It's about a deed committed in the past. and how it can be put right.
“Patience and luck and turning up at your desk every morning. Even when nothing is going on. You've got to turn up. If you're not there, nothing will happen.”
“The best thing you can do for a child, forget the education or the motorized scooter. Is to give them a gift of love. And it's not only. being able to love, but to accept love too.”
“I think you do need sceptical friends to give you the benefit of a truthful opinion.”