How Ian McEwan validates his novels before publication:
Fans of McEwan’s novels will be interested to learn that before he finishes any book he has it read by three friends – Amis firmly not being one of them. “I don’t want a novelist reading my work, thank you very much!” McEwan says.
The three are the Oxford historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash, the poet Craig Raine, and the philosopher Galen Strawson. Garton Ash persuaded him to drop the “An” from the title of his novel An Atonement. Raine berates him whenever he slips into cliche, as he once did with the phrase “flickering log fire” – they now have a running joke of marking f.l.f. in the margins of each other’s work.
The spirit of constructive criticism is not always happy. When they met to discuss The Comfort of Strangers, Raine told McEwan: “Listen, love. It’s complete crap, and you should put it in a drawer and forget it.” McEwan refused to speak to him for almost two years.
McEwan is of course the author of Saturday, recently reviewed here.