A Novel of [Bad] Manners.(Ian McEwan discusses his latest novel "Atonement" and winning the Booker Prize)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Ian McEwan began his career in the mid-'70s in Britain with a series of short, sharp shocks. His unimaginably dark, chilling stories and novels (like "Homemade," about a 14-year-old boy who loses his virginity by molesting his 10-year-old sister) make "Lord of the Flies" look like a weekend retreat. McEwan has long since left the macabre behind--in 1998 he won the Booker Prize for a mordantly comic novel about creativity, morality and middle age, titled "Amsterdam." But no one could have predicted how far afield he would travel for his latest novel, "Atonement," which has spent the past seven months on best-seller lists in England. "Atonement" is a rich, meditative World War II-era novel about a headstrong 13-year-old girl named Briony Tallis who witnesses a rape at her wealthy family's country house, sends an innocent working- class man to jail and ruins more than one life in the process. Recently NEWSWEEK's Jeff Giles spoke with the author. Excerpts:

GILES: Based on the articles I've read, journalists seem scared to meet you because you wrote such unsettling stuff early on--and then they seem shocked that you're just a nice intellectual.

McEWAN: Yes. They're all disappointed that I'm not, you know, dripping in blood.

Did you ever figure out what drew you to such dark material as a young man?

I can't give you a very profound answer. What I can say is that there was something quite reactive about those early stories. In my early 20s, when I was reading a lot of contemporary English fiction, I felt very stifled. It was so nicely modulated and full of observation about class and furniture. And round about that time I started to read, quite intensively, a number of American writers: William Burroughs, Philip Roth, Henry Miller.

That'll loosen you up.

Yeah. Also Bellow and Updike. And I was really struck by the sort of vigor and sexual expressiveness--even obscenity. So then I saw what I wanted. I wanted much more vivid colors. I wanted something savage. I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock. I did feel impatient with the kind of fiction that was being written in England. It seemed to lack all ambition. All these freedoms won for fiction by people like Joyce and Lawrence and Virginia Woolf seemed to me forgotten.