When Ian McEwan was eight, something happened that determined the course of the rest of his life. The family had been living for some years in Libya, where McEwan’s father, an Army officer, was posted. In 1956, when the Suez Crisis broke, British women and children were sent to their nearest army base for protection. McEwan had the run of the place, climbing up scaffold towers to visit the machine-gun crews, playing football on the full-sized grassless pitch, speeding around the camp on the back of a friendly lieutenant’s 500cc motorbike. More than half a century later, as he worked the episode into his new novel, Lessons, he realised that this had been a high watermark of happiness. “I don’t think I understood until I wrote the novel just how important those few days were to me. It was so exciting: I was so thrilled by this freedom and adventure… it partly informed my wish to become a writer and kept me very sceptical about ever tying myself down to any kind of job.”
This strangely liberating period of imprisonment is what one might call a “McEwan moment” – a hinge on which a life can turn. Such moments are familiar from his fiction, in which a ballooning accident (Enduring Love) or a premature ejaculation (On Chesil Beach) can have unforeseen and far-reaching consequences. But in Lessons, McEwan set himself a specific task: to write to a “soundtrack” of “large-scale global events”. Before embarking on the book, he jotted down a list: Suez, the Cuban missile crisis, the Chernobyl disaster; episodes that “became part of something belonging to our shared reality that would have to be stitched into a fiction”. His task would be to describe the “interpenetration of the private life and public events”.
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