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INTERVIEWER
The Child in Time begins with the abduction
of a child—one of those moments of life-changing drama that became
something of a hallmark.
McEWAN
Yes. I was still interested in writing at the edge
of human experience. But now I was beginning to take character more
seriously. These moments of crisis were to become a way of exploring
and testing character. How we might withstand, or fail to withstand,
an extreme experience, what moral qualities and questions are brought
forward, how we live with the consequences of our decisions, how memory
torments, what time does, what resources we have to fall back on.
At the time this was hardly a conscious choice or a systematic program;
it was simply how it came out in a number of novels, beginning with
this one. And of course, these scenes—the stealing of the child,
the black dogs, the fall from a helium balloon, and so on—offered
attractive fictional possibilities in themselves. They presented challenges
of pace, description, a sort of drumbeat of sentences, cadences you
can only get from action scenes. They also offered a means of exerting
a hold over the reader. And I could have action and ideas.
I developed a taste for these various elements over a period of time.
In 1986 I was at the Adelaide literary festival where
I read the scene from The Child in Time in which the little
girl is stolen from a supermarket. I had finished a first draft the
week before and I wanted to try it out. As soon as I was done, Robert
Stone got to his feet and delivered a most passionate speech. It really
seemed to come from the heart. He said, "Why do we do this? Why do
writers do this, and why do readers want it? Why do we reach into
ourselves to find the worst thing that can be thought? Literature,
especially contemporary literature, keeps reaching for the worst possible
case."
I still don't have a clear answer. I fall back on
the notion of the test or investigation of character, and of our moral
nature. As James famously asked, What is incident but the illustration
of character? Perhaps we use these worst cases to gauge our own moral
reach. And perhaps we need to play out our fears within the safe confines
of the imaginary, as a form of hopeful exorcism.
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