‘I feel like the same person. The world has changed’

Ian McEwan returns in top form with The Children Act. The novelist talks about mortality, the news cycle and the future of Scotland

In his crackling new novella of a novel The Children Act (Jonathan Cape, 224 pages), Britain’s master storyteller is back in top form after less successful recent forays, with all the narrative grandness of Amsterdam (for which he won the Booker in 1998) and the emotional heft of Atonement. In just 55, 000 words, Ian McEwan brings his classic boil of tragedy, suspense and human error to bear on the world we inhabit today; full of uneasy truces between modernity, convention and that ultimate truth of eventual obliteration. The multiple award-winning author of 15 books trades best in this kind of elemental confrontation, and like Amsterdam’s composer Clive Linley, Saturday’s neurosurgeon Henry Perowne and Solar’s physicist Michael Beard before her, leading High Court judge Fiona Maye hurls into the fray.

Admired for her sage judgements and keen intelligence, accomplished Fiona is feeling rather brittle; she is dealing with the fallout of unplanned but inevitable childlessness at 59 and a crisis in her marriage of three decades. Her tale begins with a confrontation with academic husband Jack, ‘padded in for an argument’ and asking for her permission to transgress and fulfill his lust elsewhere. As Fiona reflects, ‘sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice’. But she has stoppered up her passions, Jack reasons, not knowing that it is the physical vulnerability she feels which holds her body back from him; she has just ruled on Siamese twins who must be separated to preserve one’s life. Now, she must decide whether a child will live or die: Adam Henry, a beautiful young boy of 17, is refusing urgent blood transfusions because he is a Jehovah’s Witness and this procedure goes against his creed. Fighting between urges to save him and to remain impartial—as well as a fainter one that calls up the life left behind her and before her, sounding far offstage in the autumn of her existence—Fiona finds herself singing with Adam in his hospital room, even as her husband begins his intended affair.

Transgressions, we know, will follow.

“It began really with forming a very good friendship with a judge, Alan Ward. We have a shared taste in chamber music, and I started to read his judgements. They can be read online, and are superb to read: love, the end of love, destinies of children, fortune, illness, death. The humane character of a judge is crucial in any judgement,” says McEwan over the phone, from England. “Then, there was a famous case of a Jehovah’s Witness who was refusing a blood transfusion on religious grounds, in 2000 and later on. The struggle between parents having to sacrifice a child and the court—there was a degree of tension here.”

Thus began the story of Fiona. “I began with an elderly judge, 60, and she had to be a woman; a childless woman. I don’t think childlessness affects men in the same way,” he explains. “Fiona doesn’t easily speak about emotion, she is self-contained. When she finally weeps… ”

As she plays the ‘demanding fugue’ that begins when she visits the hospital to decide the young boy’s ability to choose his fate—and begins to receive letters from him, addressing her admiringly as ‘My Lady’—Fiona is full of surprises, and wonderful pronouncements. ‘She had squandered enough gravitas already’ she says, during her visit to the hospital, and on the subject of Melanie, the statistician Jack intends to bed: ‘Not so remote from the name of a fatal form of skin cancer.’ There are even funny comparisons of the couple’s toenails (hers tellingly fungal, his perfect), in one of those awful registers of intimacy that ring truest.

Most of all, Fiona is full of endearing doubt despite her steely manner. Writing a letter she will never post to Adam, who is questioning his faith for the first time, she pauses: ‘When she looked at her short letter a day later, it wasn’t the friendliness that struck her, it was the coolness, the dud advice, the threefold impersonal use of one, the manufactured recollection. She reread his and was touched again by its innocence and warmth. Better to send nothing at all than cast him down.’ Yet, the connection between two utterly different people persists, as faith, youth and ennui square off in a perverse duel.

Is she a favourite, and are there others? “Yes, her, and the narrator in Enduring Love,” says McEwan. “The central character in Black Dog mirrored many of my doubts at the time. Briony in Atonement, you see her throughout her life; she was born on the page, walked out of a mist.”

His characters are often contained, even phlegmatic people, fixated on a single undertaking or moral compulsion. You may have to work to understand them, and they may inspire awe. “I don’t think Fiona has all the answers. She steps over the line. There is an investigation of the moral issue,” says McEwan. “The friends I like the most are the ones who reveal themselves slowly. It’s my English habit.”

McEwan, awarded the CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2008, is indeed fond of his very British characters, principled figures unburdening themselves violently of the stereotypical stiff upper lip. We met while he was in India in 2008, and he was full of wit, merry, about to go hiking in the Himalayas, a journey which he remembers now as “stunning”. Today, he is pensive, at times as solemn and wry as Fiona.

“I feel like the same person,” he says. “The world has changed. It is less private. The general noise is louder, and I am also addicted or I’d turn every machine off. Habits are too strong, they shape your consciousness and become part of the white noise, the 24/ 7 of the internet. There is a dark news cycle, and we have had a very dark summer; Ebola, Syria, Ferguson… ” He lists more recent events, moving on to the pressing issue of Scottish independence. “This could be positive or negative,” he says. “I’m very torn. I’m half Scottish and half British; I am the United Kingdom.”

As his kind of writer, he is of course also necessarily part of this cycle. “There is a kind of unfolding story, a sense that we might be living in fundamental change that everyone feels in their time, a fractured dispensation. I suppose everyone at some time imagines they are living at the worst time; but this doesn’t mean it is not. And now, there is war on our eastern borders; old ghosts are returning in new form. All interesting literature pursues the human condition in adversity. If you want to know what joy is like, turn to poetry. We have to live our life through time and change; the novel does this. One puts one’s characters through trials and tests, explorations of the daily condition.”

Now on his sixteenth book, McEwan is well into an accomplished career and writing on. “It doesn’t get any easier, but it doesn’t get any harder either. When you start a new book, you know it’s going to be long, and you wonder, are you going to have the stamina and the inventiveness to get it done? But also, might you be on to something fresh and new that will energise you? I’ve been doing this 45 years. At half past 9, I’m at my desk with my second cup of coffee.”

While some of the themes of his morality tales—his ‘wilful narrative sadism’ as critic Catherine Taylor once called it—may seem too heavyhanded on repeat, McEwan is the master of the pivotal moment. A kiss can spin an entire story. The explanation around these brilliant juxtapositions is often almost beside the point; in Atonement, it stretched on for the length of a book. Here, the explanations are minimal (though some might have cut back even more). Back in the territory of early gems like First Love, Last Rites (1975, his first), McEwan is paring down.

In The Children Act’s penultimate moment, Fiona plays Mahler with stunning proficiency—the book is, typically, full of beautiful and beautifully rendered music—after receiving news of a tragedy she set in motion, managing to achieve ‘what was second nature to first-rate pianists and coax from certain notes above middle C a bell-like sound.’

Listen, and you will hear McEwan’s plangent music.

AtonementIan McEwanThe Children Act