What happens if our faith in novels falters, if we find ourselves unable to suspend disbelief? Ian McEwan on when the 'god of fiction' deserts him – and how he finds his way back to the fold
Like a late Victorian
clergyman sweating in the dark over his Doubts, I have moments when my faith in
fiction falters and then
comes to the edge of collapse. I find myself asking: am I really a believer? And
then: was I ever? First to go are the disjointed, upended narratives of
experimental fiction. Ach well … Next, the virgin birth miracle of magical
realism. But I was always low church on that one. It's when the icy waters of
scepticism start to rise round the skirts of realism herself that I know my long
night has begun. All meaning has drained from the enterprise. Novels? I don't
know how or where to suspend my disbelief. What imaginary Henry said or did to
non-existent Sue, and Henry's lonely childhood, his war, his divorce, his
ecstasy and struggle with the truth and how he's a mirror to the age – I don't
believe a word, not the rusty device of pretending the weather has something to
do with Henry's mood, not the rusty device of pretending.
This is when I think I will
go to my grave and not read Anna
Karenina a fifth time, or Madame
Bovary a fourth. I'm 64. If I'm lucky, I might have 20 good reading
years left. Teach me about the world! Bring me the cosmologists on the creation
of time, the annalists of the Holocaust, the philosopher who has married into
neuroscience, the mathematician who can describe the beauty of numbers to the
numbskull, the scholar of empires' rise and fall, the adepts of the English
civil war. A few widely spaced pleasures apart, what will I have or know at the
end of yet another novel beyond Henry's remorse or triumph? Will a novelist
please tell me why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers
mass on fundamental particles, or how morality evolved or what Salieri thought
of the young Schubert in his choir. If I cared just a little about Henry's
gripes, I could read a John Berryman 'Dream Song' in less than four minutes. And
with the 15 hours saved, linger over some case law (real events!), as good
a primer as any on the strangeness and savagery of the human heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment