As he will tell me: "The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish." For my part, a leap of imagination is required. There follows a brief pause while he considers what brought an end to this low-level insurrection, and I attempt to match up the 70s McEwan, hair trailing his cheesecloth collar, with the 21st-century version, who is today wearing tastefully crushed pale linen. There was this line in it that went something like, 'We walked north out of London in order not to have the sun on our faces.' I thought: that's real freedom. I remember reading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. I was restless, excited and a touch reckless. At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year."īut what about the chaos? The piles of rubbish, the power cuts, the bodies left unburied? "Oh, the crises didn't trouble me at all. There were no machines everyone needed, apart from a hi-fi. The occasional review for the TLS, the occasional piece for Radio Times, and I could very easily pay my rent, buy a few books, make a weekly trip to the launderette.
I had a huge apartment in south London and it cost me £3 a week. "It was very easy not to have a job, to live the life of a full-time writer. Honestly! "I had the time of my life," says McEwan, with a fervent smile. Luckily, this was the early 70s, when it was very bliss to be alive. I was going to spend the next 35 years working my way through this table." The aspiring author's riding-a-camel-over-a-sand-dune fantasies were thus brought to a sudden and rather feeble end. I looked at it and it filled me with horror. On the other was your expected salary at any given age. On one side was your age, all the way up to 65. He already knew that he wanted to be a writer, but perhaps, he thought, this could be done in combination with a parent-placating job: "I had read Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the one thing I could imagine being was an Arabist diplomat, the kind of man who would wear a dinner jacket one evening and a keffiyeh the next." The careers office gave him a pamphlet. T owards the end of his third year at Sussex, Ian McEwan, somewhat reluctantly, visited the university's careers office.
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