The Booker Prize-winning novelist is an explorer at heart.
September has seen the publication of "Lessons" by the Booker Prize-winning writer Ian McEwan. In an interview with the New Yorker, McEwan explained that he wrote "Lessons," with its narrative sweep across the decades since World War II, in the retrospective mood that took hold of so many of us during the pandemic. His remarks prompted me to look back over the decades I have been a McEwan reader. They don't amount to a time span quite as extensive as that covered by the new book, but I have been reading his work for more than 30 years.
I remember a gathering, circa 1990, at the home of a college friend. He showed us an early edition of McEwan's first book, "First Love, Last Rites." The author photo was a rare picture of a bearded McEwan. Someone said, "He looks like an explorer." Someone else replied, "He is an explorer."
