Ian McEwan

A satirical novel focusing on climate change, winner of the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

. . .  Ian McEwan reads ‘Solar’ ↓ [from count – 15 min]

. . . Ninety minutes later he was disturbed by the ring of his palmtop, and came properly awake with it already pressed to his ear as he listened to the voice of the girl whose existence he had done all he decently could to suppress. But here she was, Catriona Beard, as irrepressible as a banned book.

Daddy, she said solemnly. What are you doing?It was six o’clock on Sunday morning in England. She would have been woken by the early light and gone straight from her bed to the sitting-room telephone and pressed the first button on the left.

 

∇  Ian McEwan reads excerpt and is interviewed by Ian Brown at the 2010 Open House Festival in Toronto. ⇓

He got into the suit — it must have weighed twenty pounds — put on the dusty balaclava, squeezed his head into the helmet, put on the inner and outer gloves, then realized that he would not be able to put on the goggles while wearing the gloves, took off the gloves, clamped on the goggles, put on the inner and outer gloves, then remembered that his own ski goggles and gloves, hip flask and stick of lip salve on the seat next to him, would need to be stowed. He took off the inner and outer gloves, put his stuff in a pocket inside his jacket after much struggling with the zip of the outer suit, put on the inner and outer gloves again, and found that in the damp warm air of the lobby and with his own impatient perspiring, his goggles were fogging up. Hot and tired, an unpleasant combination, he stood suddenly in exasperation, turned, and collided with a beam or a column, he couldn’t see which, with a massive cracking sound. How fortunate it was that the Nobel laureate was wearing a helmet. No damage to his skull, but there was now a diagonal crack across the left eyepiece of his goggles, an almost straight line that refracted and diffused the low yellow light in the lobby. To remove the helmet, balaclava, and goggles and wipe the condensation from them he had to remove all four gloves, and now that his hands were sweating, these items were not so easy to dislodge. Once the goggles were off, it was straightforward enough to take them to the almost-cleared breakfast table and employ a crumpled paper napkin, used, but not much used, to polish the lens. Perhaps it was butter, perhaps it was porridge or marmalade that smeared the already scratched plastic, but at least the condensation was off, and it was relatively simple, after replacing the balaclava, to secure the goggles around the helmet and lower it over his head and put on all four gloves and stand, ready at last to face the elements.

His vision was much restricted by the new breakfast coating; otherwise he would have seen the boots earlier lying on their sides under his chair. Off with the gloves — he was not going to lose his temper — and then, after some fiddling with the laces, he decided he would see better without the goggles. Clear sight confirmed that the boots were far too small, by at least three sizes, and there was some relief in knowing that not all the incompetence was his own. But he was game, and thought he would give it one last try, and that was how Jan, entering the lobby with a blast of icy air, found him, trying to push his foot in its hiking boot into a fur-lined snow shoe.

Φ  →www.theguardian.com/2012/scienceofclimatechange-ianmcewan ⇐

⇑   [Listen  . . .   at the count of 17′]

He hurried across baggage reclaim, past the creaking carousels and bored crowds beneath the information screens, through deserted customs, past the sinister one-way glass and the stainless-steel examination tables like bare mortuary slabs, then out along the lines of dead-eyed drivers and their boards – Kuwait Balloon Adventures, Bishop Dolan, Ted of Mr Kipling – and crossed the departure hall, fully aware that he was not quite making a direct line to the stairs that led down to his train, nor was he quite aiming for the down-at-heel airport shop that sold newspapers, luggage straps and related clutter. Was he going to be weak and go in there as he always did? He thought not. But his route was bending that way. He was a public intellectual of a sort, he needed to be informed, and it was natural that he should buy a newspaper, however pressed for time. At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.

He knew this shop too well, and it seemed he was walking directly towards it now. He was simply going in to take a look, test his will, buy a newspaper and nothing besides. If only it were pornography that he was trying to resist, then failure could do him no harm. But pictures of girls or parts of girls no longer stirred him much. His problem was even more banal than top-rack glossies. Now he was at the counter, sorting the pound coins from euros in his hand, with four newspapers under his arm, not one, as if excess in one endeavour might immunise him in another, and as he handed them across for their bar codes to be scanned, he saw at the edge of vision, in the array beneath the till, the gleam of the thing he wanted, the thing he did not want to want, a dozen of them in a line, and without deciding to he was taking one – so light! – and adding it to his pile, partly obliterating a picture of the prime minister waving from the doorway of a church.

It was a plastic foil bag of finely sliced potatoes boiled in oil and dusted in salt, industrialised powdered foodstuffs, preservatives, enhancers, hydrolysing and raising agents, acidity regulators and colouring. Salt and vinegar flavoured crisps. He was still stuffed from his lunch, but this particular chemical feast could not be found in Paris, Berlin or Tokyo and he longed for it now, the actinic sting of these thirty grams – a drug dealer’s measure. One last jolt to the system, then he would never touch the junk again. He thought there was every chance of resisting it until he was on the Paddington train. He stuffed the bag in the pocket of his jacket, took up his burden of papers and his wheeled luggage and continued across the concourse. He was thirty-five pounds overweight. About his future lightness he had made many general resolutions and virtuous promises, often after dinner with a glass in his hand, and all parliamentary heads nodding in assent. What defeated him was always the present, the moment of vivid confrontation with the affirming tidbit, the extra course, the meal he did not really need, when the short-term faction carried the day.

The flight from Berlin was a typical failure. At the start, as he lowered his broad rear into his seat, barely two hours after a meaty Germanic breakfast, he was forming his resolutions: no drinks but water, no snacks, a green-leaf salad, a portion of fish, no pudding, and at the same time, at the approach of a silver tray and the murmured invitation of a female voice, his hand was closing round the stem of his runway champagne. A half-hour later he was ripping open the sachet of a salt-studded, beef-glazed, toasted corn-type sticklet snack that came with his jumbo gin and tonic. Then there was spread before him a white tablecloth, the sight of which fired some neuronal starter gun for his stomach juices. The gin melted his remaining resolve. He chose the starter he had decided against: quails’ legs wrapped in bacon on a bed of creamed garlic. Then, cubes of pork belly mounted on a hill-fort of buttered rice. The word ‘pavé’ was another of those starter guns: a paving slab of chocolate sponge encased in chocolate under a chocolate sauce; goat’s cheese, cow’s cheese in a nest of white grapes, three rolls, a chocolate mint, three glasses of Burgundy, and finally, as though it would absolve him of all else, he forced himself back through the menu to confront the oil-sodden salad that came with the quail. When his tray was removed, only the grapes remained.

÷            ÷            ÷

¤  Ian McEwan introduces  ↓  ‘Sweet Tooth’  [2012]

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight goes on, especially in the cultural sphere. Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a ‘secret mission’ which brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage – trust no one.

•  Ian reads an excerpt from his latest book ↓ ‘Sweet Tooth’

• Chapter #1 . . .1

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.

I won’t waste much time on my childhood and teenage years. I’m the daughter of an Anglican bishop and grew up with a sister in the cathedral precinct of a charming small city in the east of England. My home was genial, polished, orderly, book-filled. My parents liked each other well enough and loved me, and I them. My sister Lucy and I were a year and a half apart and though we fought shrilly during our adolescence, there was no lasting harm and we became closer in adult life. Our father’s belief in God was muted and reasonable, did not intrude much on our lives and was just sufficient to raise him smoothly through the Church hierarchy and install us in a comfortable Queen Anne house. It overlooked an enclosed garden with ancient herbaceous borders that were well known, and still are, to those who know about plants. So, all stable, enviable, idyllic even. We grew up inside a walled garden, with all the pleasures and limitations that implies.

The late sixties lightened but did not disrupt our existence. I never missed a day at my local grammar school unless I was ill. In my late teens there slipped over the garden wall some heavy petting, as they used to call it, experiments with tobacco, alcohol and a little hashish, rock and roll records, brighter colors and warmer relations all round. At seventeen my friends and I were timidly and delightedly rebellious, but we did our schoolwork, we memorized and disgorged the irregular verbs, the equations, the motives of fictional characters. We liked to think of ourselves as bad girls, but actually we were rather good. It pleased us, the general excitement in the air in 1969. It was inseparable from the expectation that soon it would be time to leave home for another education elsewhere. Nothing strange or terrible happened to me during my first eighteen years and that is why I’ll skip them.

Left to myself I would have chosen to do a lazy English degree at a provincial university far to the north or west of my home. I enjoyed reading novels. I went fast—I could get through two or three a week—and doing that for three years would have suited me just fine. But at the time I was considered something of a freak of nature—a girl who happened to have a talent for mathematics. I wasn’t interested in the subject, I took little pleasure in it, but I enjoyed being top, and getting there without much work. I knew the answers to questions before I even knew how I had got to them. While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew. Obviously, an exam in maths was far less effort than one in English literature. And in my final year I was captain of the school chess team. You must exercise some historical imagination to understand what it meant for a girl in those times to travel to a neighboring school and knock from his perch some condescending smirking squit of a boy. However, maths and chess, along with hockey, pleated skirts and hymn-singing, I considered mere school stuff. I reckoned it was time to put away these childish things when I began to think about applying to university. But I reckoned without my mother . . .

. . .  more reading  [in Denmark]⇒

It was a pleasant break in routine to travel down to Brighton one unseasonably warm morning in mid-October, to cross the cavernous railway station and smell the salty air and hear the falling cries of herring gulls. I remembered the word from a summer Shakespeare production of Othello on the lawn at King’s. A gull. Was I looking for a gull? Certainly not. I took the dilapidated three-carriage Lewes train and got out at the Falmer stop to walk the quarter mile to the redbrick building site called the University of Sussex, or, as it was known in the press for a while, Balliol-by-the-Sea. I was wearing a red mini-skirt and black jacket with high collar, black high heels and a white patent leather shoulder bag on a short strap. Ignoring the pain in my feet, I swanked along the paved approach to the main entrance through the student crowds, disdainful of the boys – I regarded them as boys – shaggily dressed out of army surplus stores, and even more so of the girls with their long plain centre-parted hair, no make-up and cheesecloth skirts. Some students were barefoot, in sympathy, I assumed, with peasants of the undeveloped world. The very word «campus» seemed to me a frivolous import from the USA. As I self-consciously strode towards Sir Basil Spence’s creation in a fold of the Sussex Downs, I felt dismissive of the idea of a new university. For the first time in my life I was proud of my Cambridge and Newnham connection. How could a serious university be new? And how could anyone resist me in my confection of red, white and black, intolerantly scissoring my way towards the porters’ desk, where I intended to ask directions.

I entered what was probably an architectural reference to a quad. It was flanked by shallow water features, rectangular ponds lined with smooth river-bed stones. But the water had been drained off to make way for beer cans and sandwich wrappers. From the brick, stone and glass structure ahead of me came the throb and wail of rock music. I recognised the rasping, heaving flute of Jethro Tull. Through the plate-glass windows on the first floor I could see figures, players and spectators, hunched over banks of table football. The students’ union, surely. The same everywhere, these places, reserved for the exclusive use of lunk-headed boys, mathematicians and chemists mostly. The girls and the aesthetes went elsewhere. As a portal to a university it made a poor impression. I quickened my pace, resenting the way my stride fell in with the pounding drums. It was like approaching a holiday camp.

.    .    .

With a pearly pink painted nail I tapped lightly on the door and, at the sound of an indistinct murmur or groan, pushed it open. I was right to have prepared myself for disappointment. It was a slight figure who rose from his desk, slightly stooped, though he made the effort to straighten his back as he stood. He was girlishly slender, with narrow wrists and his hand when I shook it seemed smaller and softer than mine. Skin very pale, eyes dark green, hair dark brown and long, and cut in a style that was almost a bob. In those first few seconds I wondered if I’d missed a trans-sexual element in the stories. He wore a collarless shirt made of flecked white flannel, tight jeans with a broad belt and scuffed leather boots. I was confused by him. The voice from such a delicate frame was deep, without regional accent, pure and classless.

“Let me clear these things away so you can sit.”

He shifted some books from an armless soft chair. I thought, with a touch of annoyance, that he was letting me know that he had made no special preparations for my arrival.

“Was your journey down all right? He said Would you like some coffee?”

The journey was pleasant, I told him, and I didn’t need coffee.

He sat down at his desk and swivelled his chair to face me, crossed an ankle over a knee and with a little smile opened out his palms in an interrogative manner. “So, Miss Frome …”

“It rhymes with plume. But please call me Serena.”

He cocked his head to one side as he repeated my name. Then his eyes settled softly on mine and he waited. I noted the long eyelashes. I’d rehearsed this moment and it was easy enough to lay it all out for him. Truthfully. The work of Freedom International, its wide remit, its extensive global reach, its open-mindedness and lack of ideology. He listened to me, head still cocked, and with a look of amused scepticism, his lips quivering slightly as though at any moment he was ready to join in or take over and make my words his own, or improve upon them. He wore the expression of a man listening to an extended joke, anticipating an explosive punchline with held-in delight that puffs and puckers his lips. As I named the writers and artists the Foundation had already helped, I fantasised that he had already seen right through me and had no intention of letting me know. He was forcing me to make my pitch so he could observe a liar at close hand. Useful for a later fiction. Horrified, I pushed the idea away and forgot about it. I needed to concentrate. I moved on to talk about the source of the Foundation’s wealth. Max thought Haley should be told just how rich Freedom International was.

Everything I had said so far had been the case, easily verified. Now I took my first tentative step into mendacity. “I’ll be quite frank with you,” I said. “I sometimes feel Freedom International doesn’t have enough projects to throw its money at.”

“How flattering then,” Haley said. Perhaps he saw me blush because he added, “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“You misunderstand me, Mr Haley …”

“Tom.”

“Tom. Sorry. I put that badly. What I meant was this. There are plenty of artists being imprisoned or oppressed by unsavoury governments. We do everything we can to help these people and get their work known. But, of course, being censored doesn’t necessarily mean a writer or sculptor is any good. For example, we’ve found ourselves supporting a terrible playwright in Poland simply because his work is banned. And we’ll go on supporting him. And we’ve bought up any amount of rubbish by an imprisoned Hungarian abstract impressionist. So the steering committee has decided to add another dimension to the portfolio. We want to encourage excellence wherever we can find it, oppressed or not. We’re especially interested in young people at the beginning of their careers …”

“And how old are you, Serena?” Tom Haley leaned forward solicitously, as if asking about a serious illness.

I told him. He was letting me know he was not to be patronised. And it was true, in my nervousness I had taken on a distant, official tone. I needed to relax, be less pompous, I needed to call him Tom. I realised I wasn’t much good at any of this. He asked me if I’d been at university. I told him, and said the name of my college.

“What was your subject?”

I hesitated, I tripped over my words. I hadn’t expected to be asked, and suddenly mathematics sounded suspect and without knowing what I was doing I said, “English.”

He smiled pleasantly, appearing pleased at finding common ground. “I suppose you got a brilliant first?”

“A two one actually.” I didn’t know what I was saying. A third sounded shameful, a first would have set me on dangerous ground. I had told two unnecessary lies. Bad form. For all I knew, a phone call to Newnham would establish there had been no Serena Frome doing English. I hadn’t expected to be interrogated. Such basic preparatory work, and I’d failed to do it. Why hadn’t Max thought of helping me towards a decent watertight personal story? I felt flustered and sweaty, I imagined myself jumping up without a word, snatching up my bag, fleeing from the room.

Tom was looking at me in that way he had, both kindly and ironic. “My guess is that you were expecting a first. But listen, there’s nothing wrong with a two one.”

“I was disappointed,” I said, recovering a little. “There was this, um, general, um …”

“Weight of expectation?”

Our eyes met for a little more than two or three seconds, and then I looked away. Having read him, knowing too well one corner of his mind, I found it hard to look him in the eye for long. I let my gaze drop below his chin and noticed a fine silver chain around his neck.

“So you were saying, writers at the beginning of their careers.” He was self-consciously playing the part of the friendly don, the teacher coaxing a nervous applicant through her entrance interview. I knew I had to get back on top.

I said, “Look, Mr Haley …”

“Tom.”

“I don’t want to waste your time. We take advice from very good, very expert people. They’ve given a lot of thought to this. They like your journalism, and they love your stories. Really love them. The hope is …”

“And you. Have you read them?”

“Of course.”

“And what did you think?”

“I’m really just the messenger. It’s not relevant what I think.”

“It’s relevant to me. What did you make of them?”

The room appeared to darken. I looked past him, out of the window. There was a grass strip, and the corner of another building. I could see into a room like the one we were in, where a tutorial was in progress. A girl not much younger than me was reading aloud her essay. At her side was a boy in a bomber jacket, bearded chin resting in his hand, nodding sagely. The tutor had her back to me. I turned my gaze back into our room, wondering if I was not overdoing this significant pause. Our eyes met again and I forced myself to hold on. Such a strange dark green, such long child-like lashes, and thick black eyebrows. But there was hesitancy in his gaze, he was about to look away, and this time the power had passed to me.

I said very quietly, “I think they’re utterly brilliant.”

He flinched as though someone had poked him in the chest, in the heart, and he gave a little gasp, not quite a laugh. He went to speak but was stuck for words. He stared at me, waiting, wanting me to go on, tell him more about himself and his talent, but I held back. I thought my words would have more power for being undiluted. And I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to say anything profound. Between us a certain formality had been peeled away to expose an embarrassing secret. I’d revealed his hunger for affirmation, praise, anything I might give. I guessed that nothing mattered more to him. His stories in the various reviews had probably gone unremarked, beyond a routine thanks and pat on the head from an editor. It was likely that no one, no stranger at least, had ever told him that his fiction was brilliant. Now he was hearing it and realising that he had always suspected it was so. I had delivered stupendous news. How could he have known if he was any good until someone confirmed it? And now he knew it was true and he was grateful.

As soon as he spoke, the moment was broken and the room resumed its normal tone. “Did you have a favourite?”

It was such a stupid, sheepish excuse of a question that I warmed to him for his vulnerability. “They’re all remarkable,” I said. “But the one about the twin brothers, called “This Is Love”, is the most ambitious. I thought it had the scale of a novel. A novel about belief and emotion. And what a wonderful character Jean is, so insecure and destructive and alluring. It’s a magnificent piece of work. Did you ever think of expanding it into a novel, you know, filling it out a bit?”

He looked at me curiously. “No, I didn’t think of filling it out a bit.” The deadpan reiteration of my words alarmed me.

“I’m sorry, it was a stupid …”

“It’s the length I wanted. About fifteen thousand words. But I’m glad you liked it.”

Sardonic and teasing, he smiled and I was forgiven, but my advantage had dimmed. I had never heard fiction quantified in this technical way. My ignorance felt like a weight on my tongue.

I said, “And ‘Lovers’, the man with the shop-window mannequin, was so strange and completely convincing, it swept everyone away.” It was now liberating to be telling outright lies. “We have two professors and two well-known reviewers on our board. They see a lot of new writing. But you should have heard the excitement at the last meeting. Honestly, Tom, they couldn’t stop talking about your stories. For the first time ever the vote was unanimous.”

The little smile had faded. His eyes had a glazed look, as though I was hypnotising him. This was going deep.

“Well,” he said, shaking his head to bring himself out of the trance. “This is all very pleasing. What else can I say?” Then he added, “Who are the two critics?”

“We have to respect their anonymity, I’m afraid.”

“I see.”

He turned away from me for a moment and seemed lost in some private thought. Then he said, “So, what is it you’re offering, and what do you want from me?”

“Can I answer that by asking you a question? What will you do when you’ve finished your doctorate?”

“I’m applying for various teaching jobs, including one here.”

“Full time?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like to make it possible for you to stay out of a job. In return you’d concentrate on your writing, including journalism if you want.”

He asked me how much money was on offer and I told him. He asked for how long and I said, “Let’s say two or three years.”

“And if I produce nothing?”

“We’d be disappointed and we’d move on. We won’t be asking for our money back.”

He took this in and then said, “And you’d want the rights in what I do?”

“No. And we don’t ask you to show us your work. You don’t even have to acknowledge us. The Foundation thinks you’re a unique and extraordinary talent. If your fiction and journalism get written, published and read, then we’ll be happy. When your career is launched and you can support yourself we’ll fade out of your life. We’ll have met the terms of our remit.”

He stood up and went round the far side of his desk and stood at the window with his back to me. He ran his hand through his hair and muttered something sibilant under his breath that may have been “Ridiculous”, or perhaps, “Enough of this”. He was looking into the same room across the lawn. Now the bearded boy was reading his essay while his tutorial partner stared ahead of her without expression. Oddly, the tutor was speaking on the phone.

Tom returned to his chair and crossed his arms. His gaze was directed across my shoulder and his lips were pressed shut. I sensed he was about to make a serious objection.

I said, “Think it over for a day or two, talk to a friend … Think it through.”

He said, “The thing is …” and he trailed away. He looked down at his lap and he continued. “It’s this. Every day I think about this problem. I don’t have anything bigger to think about. It keeps me awake at night. Always the same four steps. One, I want to write a novel. Two, I’m broke. Three, I’ve got to get a job. Four, the job will kill the writing. I can’t see a way round it. There isn’t one. Then a nice young woman knocks on my door and offers me a fat pension for nothing. It’s too good to be true. I’m suspicious.”

“Tom, you make it sound simpler than it is. You’re not passive in this affair. The first move was yours. You wrote these brilliant stories. In London people are beginning to talk about you. How else do you think we found you? You’ve made your own luck with talent and hard work.”

The ironic smile again, the cocked head – progress.

He said, “I like it when you say brilliant.”

“Good. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.” I reached into my bag on the floor and took out the Foundation’s brochure. “This is the work we do. You can come to the office in Upper Regent Street and talk to the people there. You’ll like them.”

“You’ll be there too?”

“My immediate employer is Word Unpenned. We work closely with Freedom International and are putting money their way. They help us find the artists. I travel a lot or work from home. But messages to the Foundation office will find me.”

He glanced at his watch and stood, so I did too. I was a dutiful young woman, determined to achieve what was expected of me. I wanted Haley to agree now, before lunch, to be kept by us. I would break the news by phone to Max in the afternoon and by tomorrow morning I hoped to have a routine note of congratulation from Peter Nutting, unemphatic, unsigned, typed by someone else, but important to me.

“I’m not asking you to commit to anything now,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I was pleading. “You’re not bound to anything at all. Just give me the say-so and I’ll arrange a monthly payment. All I need is your bank details.”

The say-so? I’d never used that word in my life. He blinked in assent, but not to the money so much as to my general drift. We were standing less than six feet apart. His waist was slender and through some disorder in his shirt I caught a glimpse below a button of skin and downy hair above his navel.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll think about it very carefully. I’ve got to be in London on Friday. I could look in at your office.”

“Well then,” I said and put out my hand. He took it, but it wasn’t a handshake. He took my fingers in his palm and stroked them with his thumb, just one slow pass. Exactly that, a pass, and he was looking at me steadily. As I took my hand away, I let my own thumb brush along the length of his forefinger. I think we may have been about to move closer when there was a hearty, ridiculously loud knock on the door. He stepped back from me as he called, “Come in.” The door swung open and there stood two girls, centre-parted blonde hair, fading suntans, sandals and painted toenails, bare arms, sweet expectant smiles, unbearably pretty. The books and papers under their arms didn’t look at all plausible to me.

“Aha,” Tom said. “Our Faerie Queene tutorial.”

I was edging round him towards the door. “I haven’t read that one,” I said.

He laughed, and the two girls joined in, as if I’d made a wonderful joke. They probably didn’t believe me.

********

• Read another excerpt: → http://www.npr.org/2012/10/16/163024825/exclusive-first-read-ian-mcewans-sweet-tooth