The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. McEwan’s fiction is characterised by an economy of execution that has in the past had Booker juries flicking back through the rule-book to check the definition of a “full-length novel” ( Amsterdam won the prize in 1998 and On Chesil Beach was shortlisted in 2007 both are under 200 pages). The novel would mark a departure in other ways, too. His task would be to describe the “interpenetration of the private life and public events”.
Before embarking on the book, he jotted down a list: Suez, the Cuban missile crisis, the Chernobyl disaster episodes that “became part of something belonging to our shared reality that would have to be stitched into a fiction”. But in Lessons, McEwan set himself a specific task: to write to a “soundtrack” of “large-scale global events”. Such moments are familiar from his fiction, in which a ballooning accident ( Enduring Love) or a premature ejaculation ( On Chesil Beach) can have unforeseen and far-reaching consequences. This strangely liberating period of imprisonment is what one might call a “McEwan moment” – a hinge on which a life can turn. It was so exciting: I was so thrilled by this freedom and adventure… it partly informed my wish to become a writer and kept me very sceptical about ever tying myself down to any kind of job.” “I don’t think I understood until I wrote the novel just how important those few days were to me. More than half a century later, as he worked the episode into his new novel, Lessons, he realised that this had been a high watermark of happiness. McEwan had the run of the place, climbing up scaffold towers to visit the machine-gun crews, playing football on the full-sized grassless pitch, speeding around the camp on the back of a friendly lieutenant’s 500cc motorbike. In 1956, when the Suez Crisis broke, British women and children were sent to their nearest army base for protection. The family had been living for some years in Libya, where McEwan’s father, an Army officer, was posted. When Ian McEwan was eight, something happened that determined the course of the rest of his life.
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