A leading thinker recommends five books about his or her field of interest. This month, Ian McEwan picks books that have helped shape his work. This interview is published in collaboration with TheBrowser
What Science Offers the Humanities
Edward Slingerland
This is a rather extraordinary and unusual book. It addresses some fundamental matters of interest to those of us whose education has been in the humanities. Most of us in the humanities carry about a set of assumptions about what the mind is, or what the nature of knowledge is, without any regard to the discoveries and speculations within the biological sciences in the past thirty or forty years.
Slingerland wants to say that science is not just one more thought system, like religion: it has special status because it’s predictive and coherent and does advance our understanding of the world. So rather than just accept at face value what some French philosopher invents about the mirror stage in infant development, Slingerland wants to show us where current understanding is, and where it’s developing, in fields such as cognition, or the relationship between empathy and our understanding of evil. Slingerland believes that there are orthodox views within the humanities which have been long abandoned by the sciences as untenable and contradictory.
Collected Poems
Philip Larkin
Larkin’s style is deceptively conversational; narratively, it’s extremely and artfully compressed. Perhaps that’s why prose writers admire him so much. T.S. Eliot said that aesthetic revolutions in poetry are about the return to the rhythms of everyday speech, and Larkin fulfils those terms with clarity and restrained dark humour. How does this affect my prose? There’s something in those cadences. It can be something so small, like a sentence that seems to miss its final beat in order to deliver something a little flat. There’s one other element too—a kind of morose scepticism, Larkin’s reluctance to be moved. And when he is moved, as in ‘High Windows,’ the effect is all the more powerful.
Martin Amis and I used to meet up before going out in the evenings in the 70s, and spend an hour downing a bottle of wine, reading aloud and celebrating Larkin. I’m sure Martin would also acknowledge the curious power of Larkin in his work.
Rabbit at Rest
John Updike
Updike has been a very important writer for me, the one I’ve admired most, read most, and returned to most often. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was an inspiration for Michael Beard, the principal character in Solar. I crouched in Updike’s shadow when I set myself the problem of having an unsympathetic hero, and enticing a reader to stay in his company for the length of a novel. With Rabbit, Updike showed us how this is achieved. Grumpy, irritable, bigoted in some respects, somehow Updike succeeds in making Rabbit the prism through which forty years of American social change is observed. How does he do this? In short, Updike makes Rabbit interesting. He might not be good, but he’s interesting, and we travel with him for that reason alone.
Updike was an extraordinary noticer; a great fondler of details, to use Nabokov’s phrase. He had a huge comic gift, finding its supreme expression in the Bech trilogy. He reminds us that all good writing and good observation contains a seed of comedy. His gift was to render for us the fine print, the minute detail of consciousness, of what it’s like in a certain moment to be another person, to inhabit another mind. When I feel my faith flagging in the whole enterprise of fiction—and all writers experience this—a few pages of Updike will restore my energies and optimism.
The Pursuit of the Millenium
Norman Cohn
This celebrated book has been in print for over half a century. It’s a historical account of the fanatical millenarian sects that swept across Europe from the 11th to 15th centuries: sects that were driven by certainty of the world coming to an end. And when the world ended there would be deliverance for the elect. Your enemies would be damned just as you would be saved.
In his final section, Cohn notes that the two great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century derive their momentum from the millennial movements of the Middle Ages. One of these was Nazism, with its deliberate echoes of the Book of Revelation. The other was Soviet communism: the State will wither away, the proletariat will be the elect, the enemies—the bourgeois, the kulaks—will be destroyed. We now live in a kind of dazed, post-totalitarian world. You see little reawakenings, in the more extravagant and radical forms of Islam, and in even tinier groups within Christianity. But basically those two great movements consumed so many in the fire that we’re still recovering—the smoke still hangs in the air.
Cohn’s book found its way into conversations in On Chesil Beach, in the context of the nuclear arms race, and it’s present in Solar, when Beard reflects sceptically on the environmental movement.
Einstein
Walter Isaacson
This book had a direct influence on Solar, but it is also a biography that happens to be a treatise on creativity. It shows us the creative exuberance of a man with an extraordinary visual imagination, able to recast certain problems in surprising ways. During two particular episodes in his life he fundamentally rewrote our understanding of the physical world. During four months in 1905, his annus mirabilis, Einstein wrote four papers—on light quanta, size of molecules, Brownian motion and Special Relativity, and started a revolution in physics. Again, in 1915, in a matter of weeks, he formulated in his theory of general relativity what Paul Dirac said was the greatest discovery ever made.
What’s impressive about this biography is that Isaacson—who is not himself a scientist but a biographer and journalist—does a very good job of setting out for the layman the central ideas in Einstein’s work, and without resorting to mathematics. I also included this book in my list because I think it’s a knowing exposition of the nature of human ingenuity. It’s the kind of book that makes me feel—to come back to our starting point—that there could exist a mental realm in which we could blend sciences and the humanities in the joys of creativity.
Interview by Alec Ash
Read this interview in full at The Browser's FiveBooks section
For more photography by Chris Boland, click here
What Science Offers the Humanities
Edward Slingerland
This is a rather extraordinary and unusual book. It addresses some fundamental matters of interest to those of us whose education has been in the humanities. Most of us in the humanities carry about a set of assumptions about what the mind is, or what the nature of knowledge is, without any regard to the discoveries and speculations within the biological sciences in the past thirty or forty years.
Slingerland wants to say that science is not just one more thought system, like religion: it has special status because it’s predictive and coherent and does advance our understanding of the world. So rather than just accept at face value what some French philosopher invents about the mirror stage in infant development, Slingerland wants to show us where current understanding is, and where it’s developing, in fields such as cognition, or the relationship between empathy and our understanding of evil. Slingerland believes that there are orthodox views within the humanities which have been long abandoned by the sciences as untenable and contradictory.
Collected Poems
Philip Larkin
Larkin’s style is deceptively conversational; narratively, it’s extremely and artfully compressed. Perhaps that’s why prose writers admire him so much. T.S. Eliot said that aesthetic revolutions in poetry are about the return to the rhythms of everyday speech, and Larkin fulfils those terms with clarity and restrained dark humour. How does this affect my prose? There’s something in those cadences. It can be something so small, like a sentence that seems to miss its final beat in order to deliver something a little flat. There’s one other element too—a kind of morose scepticism, Larkin’s reluctance to be moved. And when he is moved, as in ‘High Windows,’ the effect is all the more powerful.
Martin Amis and I used to meet up before going out in the evenings in the 70s, and spend an hour downing a bottle of wine, reading aloud and celebrating Larkin. I’m sure Martin would also acknowledge the curious power of Larkin in his work.
Rabbit at Rest
John Updike
Updike has been a very important writer for me, the one I’ve admired most, read most, and returned to most often. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was an inspiration for Michael Beard, the principal character in Solar. I crouched in Updike’s shadow when I set myself the problem of having an unsympathetic hero, and enticing a reader to stay in his company for the length of a novel. With Rabbit, Updike showed us how this is achieved. Grumpy, irritable, bigoted in some respects, somehow Updike succeeds in making Rabbit the prism through which forty years of American social change is observed. How does he do this? In short, Updike makes Rabbit interesting. He might not be good, but he’s interesting, and we travel with him for that reason alone.
Updike was an extraordinary noticer; a great fondler of details, to use Nabokov’s phrase. He had a huge comic gift, finding its supreme expression in the Bech trilogy. He reminds us that all good writing and good observation contains a seed of comedy. His gift was to render for us the fine print, the minute detail of consciousness, of what it’s like in a certain moment to be another person, to inhabit another mind. When I feel my faith flagging in the whole enterprise of fiction—and all writers experience this—a few pages of Updike will restore my energies and optimism.
The Pursuit of the Millenium
Norman Cohn
This celebrated book has been in print for over half a century. It’s a historical account of the fanatical millenarian sects that swept across Europe from the 11th to 15th centuries: sects that were driven by certainty of the world coming to an end. And when the world ended there would be deliverance for the elect. Your enemies would be damned just as you would be saved.
In his final section, Cohn notes that the two great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century derive their momentum from the millennial movements of the Middle Ages. One of these was Nazism, with its deliberate echoes of the Book of Revelation. The other was Soviet communism: the State will wither away, the proletariat will be the elect, the enemies—the bourgeois, the kulaks—will be destroyed. We now live in a kind of dazed, post-totalitarian world. You see little reawakenings, in the more extravagant and radical forms of Islam, and in even tinier groups within Christianity. But basically those two great movements consumed so many in the fire that we’re still recovering—the smoke still hangs in the air.
Cohn’s book found its way into conversations in On Chesil Beach, in the context of the nuclear arms race, and it’s present in Solar, when Beard reflects sceptically on the environmental movement.
Einstein
Walter Isaacson
This book had a direct influence on Solar, but it is also a biography that happens to be a treatise on creativity. It shows us the creative exuberance of a man with an extraordinary visual imagination, able to recast certain problems in surprising ways. During two particular episodes in his life he fundamentally rewrote our understanding of the physical world. During four months in 1905, his annus mirabilis, Einstein wrote four papers—on light quanta, size of molecules, Brownian motion and Special Relativity, and started a revolution in physics. Again, in 1915, in a matter of weeks, he formulated in his theory of general relativity what Paul Dirac said was the greatest discovery ever made.
What’s impressive about this biography is that Isaacson—who is not himself a scientist but a biographer and journalist—does a very good job of setting out for the layman the central ideas in Einstein’s work, and without resorting to mathematics. I also included this book in my list because I think it’s a knowing exposition of the nature of human ingenuity. It’s the kind of book that makes me feel—to come back to our starting point—that there could exist a mental realm in which we could blend sciences and the humanities in the joys of creativity.
Interview by Alec Ash
Read this interview in full at The Browser's FiveBooks section
For more photography by Chris Boland, click here
