Ian McEwan: ‘Literature is an ocean in which we’re all swimming’

Ian McEwan doesn’t really do jokes. In interviews he is focused, reflective and sombre, reacting to journalists’ attempts at levity with an expression remarkably similar to that of a cat watching a moth fluttering foolishly about within reach of a set of ultrasharp claws.

And yet, as he talks about his new novel, The Children Act, an unexpectedly playful element hovers at the edge of the conversation. "I'm about to become a grandfather," he says when we're about halfway through. His son's partner is expecting a baby, and it's a week late. "I've told them to phone me the moment she goes into labour."

McEwan is also uncharacteristically forthcoming about what he calls the book's Irish connections. The song of the WB Yeats poem Down By the Salley Gardens plays a central role in the story, he points out, adding that the end of the novel pays homage to James Joyce's story The Dead.

If you are starting to hear alarm bells of the overheated, stage-Oirish kind, fear not. The Children Act is poised, restrained, pared back; autumnal, even. Hardly surprising from an author who, at 66, has 15 published volumes on his literary shelf. But autumn brings sudden, swirling gusts whose consequences can be unpredictable, even devastating – the kind of narrative weather in which McEwan has, in the past, revelled.

A storm is signalled on the first page of the book, which finds a high-court judge relaxing with a glass of Scotch at home on a Sunday evening. Fiona Maye is “supine on a chaise longue”, gazing at her recessed bookshelves and Renoir lithograph, her Bokhara rug and baby grand. The scene is described in 13 crystalline sentences whose rhythm is as precise and crisp as the opening of a Bach prelude. The tone is harder to pin down. Smug? Affectionate? Ironic? The 14th sentence is the clincher. “And Fiona was on her back, wishing all this stuff at the bottom of the sea.”

There is, it turns out, trouble in the judge’s comfortable paradise. Her husband has just informed her that he’s unhappy with their sex life and is about to embark on an affair. And as her personal life is unravelling, so her professional life is moving into its most complicated gear.

Jehovah’s Witness

The book, McEwan explains, grew out of his friendship with Sir Alan Ward, a high court and court of appeal judge, now retired. “I got interested in reading some of his cases, and then reading other cases, and thinking about the law. He presided over a particular case in the year 2000, in which a Jehovah’s Witness teenage boy needed a blood transfusion and was refusing it on the grounds of his religion, backed by his parents.

“Alan went to the boy’s bedside, having suspended court proceedings, and then went back and ruled in favour of the hospital, who wanted to treat the boy. Having seen a number of cases in which religious differences – especially in divorces – played a strong part, I began to think that this particular case was probably the starkest confrontation between the law courts, whose imagination is generally secular, and sincerely held religious belief.”

What made McEwan think that such an abstract philosophical conundrum – one of the great confrontations of our time, admittedly, but often played out in polarised shouting matches of wearisome shrillness – would make a good starting point for a novel?

“The thing that was presenting itself to me out of the reading I was doing,” he says, “was that a huge determining factor was the personality of the judge in a particular case. Besides what might be there in statute, or might be there in the accretions of common law, the personality of the judge plays a huge part for the outcome and the course of a case.

“So my starting point was to think of a woman, Fiona Maye. She slowly took place in note form, and once she was apparent to me, much else became clearer. I guess one of my premises was that a childless woman – a judge, very rational, very compassionate, rather self-contained – would see in this boy, while she wouldn’t admit it to herself, the child she’d never had.”

The conversation about the limits of rationality and the nature of faith, and what happens when the two come face to face, is one that, McEwan says, he has been having with himself for many years. He explored it in his books Black Dogs and Enduring Love. But this close encounter with the legal world is new to him. Did he not find its rarefied language daunting?

“It often is,” he says. “I sat in on some hearings, and there is this extraordinary sort of shorthand – quite elegant, in its way. I’ve often written about work, getting involved with other people’s expertise. And with that expertise always comes a language. You sort of half learn it. So writing the judgment that Fiona gives at the end of her visit to the hospital did require taking on board a certain kind of style, and certain phrases – yes, difficult to some extent, but also attractive.”

For the reader The Children Act is a total contrast to McEwan's previous book, the spy thriller Sweet Tooth. Does he deliberately set out to produce something different every time?

“I’m bad at setting out on anything,” he says. After each novel there is a long fallow period where he doesn’t even think of himself as researching. “Then a novel begins to develop. And how it’s written is entirely dependent on the kind of material it’s using, and the vague emotional cloud that hangs around it.”

A cloud of potentiality? “Yes. Something with possibilities that are hard to name; a set of feelings that are so vague that you can’t even write them down, because you might ruin them.”

And then journalists and critics come along and want to file it in a particular place among his oeuvre. Does he find that irritating? He says not. “For me these things, once they’re finished, they’re done. I hope that some people will love it, and I also accept that there’s no novel that everyone is going to love. I know very well, from publishing books over the years, that you could have two highly educated and seemingly intelligent people in the room and that one would love and one would loathe the same book. There’s no way round that.”

War in Iraq

After McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, was published, a huge amount of anger was directed at him for what was regarded as his stance in support of the war in Iraq. Does he anticipate a heated reaction to The Children Act, given that it takes on the topic of religious versus secular approaches to medical and ethical issues?

"I think the anger for Saturday was completely misplaced," he says. "People, first of all, confused me with the hero, Henry Perowne. By the end of it, having had a huge row with his daughter Daisy – who was actually on the anti-war march, and who has all the best lines in the book – he suddenly understands the law of unintended consequences. Just as he has set in motion terrible things by the way he behaved, now he's aware of the armies gathering in Kuwait."

McEwan says he'll be surprised if The Children Act inspires comparable vitriol. "I've met quite a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses, and I think they're used to being somewhat on the edge of most people's beliefs. I wanted to represent both the father and the son as sympathetically as possible – within the limitations of this belief that I can't possibly share.

“I’m sure Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t be pleased at being reminded that their proscription against blood transfusions unnecessarily wastes many lives. But there it is. It’s what they’ve decided for themselves.”

Down by the Salley Gardens

In the book an unlikely bond is forged between the judge and the teenage boy through poetry and music. How, of all the songs he might have chosen for them to sing together, did he land on Down By the Salley Gardens?

“Well, it’s such a lovely poem,” he says. “It’s such a strange line. Such a long line. It has six beats to it – an alexandrine, I guess. It has always been a favourite of mine. I love the Britten setting. As a short lyrical poem about lost love, it’s hard to beat.”

The final pages of the novel are a deliberate invocation of the closing section of The Dead, whose 15 pages McEwan says he has always thought of as one of the finest pieces of prose fiction. It's a mark of his confidence as a novelist that when I ask whether it isn't a little dangerous to invoke Joyce, he replies coolly, "How would you think it might be dangerous?"

I find myself doing the moth-like fluttering again. Irish novelists tend to get freaked out by comparisons with Joyce, I mumble. “Oh. Well, you know, over here we’ve got Shakespeare. Literature is a vast ocean in which we’re all swimming, and we’re beneficiaries of the past, and there are things that we owe. And I owe many things to Joyce. So, no. I think it’s correct now and then, especially as you get older, to acknowledge and pay homage.”

The Children Act is published by Jonathan Cape