We’re delighted to announce the return of Ian McEwan to Norwich this spring as part of the Writers’ Centre Norwich Literature programme at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2010. He will be reading from his new novel Solar at the University of East Anglia on Tuesday May 11th, where he will also converse with Prof Jon Cook and take questions from the floor, before signing your books.
Solar, McEwan’s 11th Novel, features Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winning climate scientist with a chaotic life. When McEwan read from the work in progress in Norwich last year, the audience were kept well amused. The shift in tone in McEwan’s writing has been comprehensively covered in the press this weekend as Solar garnered juicy praise across the broadsheets:
“McEwan skilfully pilots around the platitudes and tedious debates, while making the point that he has done his homework on physics, photovoltaics and wind-turbines” says Tibor Fischer writing in the Telegraph this Sunday, who worried about triteness given the subject matter, and was pleasantly relieved.
The Times agreed:
“Ian McEwan’s new novel — a comedy every bit as brilliant as its title might suggest — takes readers into the mind of a Nobel prize-winning physicist. Readers should immediately be reassured, though, that this isn’t a painful experience…Blazing with imaginative and intellectual energy, Solar is a stellar performance.”
And the FT praised the humour and craft:
“On settling down to read Solar, two striking features of the novel are immediately apparent. First, that it is a stunningly accomplished work, possibly his best yet; and second, that the book does contain a truly shocking surprise – not that it deals with climate change, but that it is a comedy. This amounts to a revolutionary shift in tone, in his 11th novel, for a writer famed for his seriousness.”
McEwan has had a long connection to Norwich, having taken the first MA in Norwich in the 70s. That time was evoked in his interview in the Saturday Guardian:
“Determined not to have a proper job after having seen the civil service pay scale chart from entry level to retirement age, he spotted a new MA course at the University of East Anglia that allowed for the substitution of one module with a piece of original fiction. He phoned and was put straight through to Malcolm Bradbury. “I’d read a couple of his books and I was amazed that he was on the end of the line. But the world was emptier then. It seemed there was a limited amount of people on the planet, and you really could phone them all up.”
Despite having comparatively little contact with Bradbury, or his other supervisor, Angus Wilson, McEwan says he had ” a pretty amazing year” in which he wrote 30 short stories. “I just had the time and space to write some stories that would be read by someone, even though they would just say, ‘That’s great, carry on.’ There was none of the stuff that happens now, where kids get their stuff read by other kids. That can be quite ruthless and I’m not sure I would have survived it.”
After completing the course, McEwan set out on the hippy trail overland to Afghanistan. “Which was fantastic. But there came a point in the back of this bus, driving across desert tracks, with the sun beating down everywhere, when I began to dream of a tiny whitewashed room in Norwich…”"
Aah yes, he was dreaming of Norwich. So it seems fitting that he’s also here to help us celebrate our bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature.
You can book up for the reading and Q and A on the Norfolk and Norwich Festival website or by calling the box office on 01603 766400.
I look forward to seeing you there.
