Here's something you wouldn’t know if you had met Ian McEwan only on dust jackets: he is charming. The grim, seemingly-aloof-even-while-smiling Brit you had seen on photographs is nothing like the amiable novelist who tucked into a Rajasthani thali with gusto or who surprisingly remembered strangers who said a hesitant “Hello Mr McEwan” the other day. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, the arguably greatest living British novelist was the star of the show. Coming on the heels of seven Oscar nominations for Atonement, McEwan was happy that he didn’t write the script. “It is like the child of my child,” said the 59-year-old Booker Prize winner, as screen writer Christopher Hampton, who won a nomination for Atonement’s screenplay, looked on amused. “Like with all grandchildren, I got all the fun and less of the hands-on stuff.” After a special premiere of the brilliant adaptation of his novel, McEwan went on, “It is a long, slow waving goodbye actually. You accept it is not yours anymore. As my job got tapered, I wandered around the sets eating bacon sandwiches!” But he is used to it, having had three novels turned into movies. “Well, for one, they help pay the mortgage,” he laughed, “but I love movies, the sets, the whole long, tortuous process.”If he was not in the least misanthropist or Mr Macabre, which critics variously called when stonewalled by sadomasochism and violence in his early novels, nor were his recent works. “I have come back to the conventional English novels,” said the angriest young novelist of the Seventies. “I don’t want the world to go to hell anymore because my children would be in it.” The man of measured prose said it wasn’t an easy job. “I write with great difficulty, great reluctance. It is important to see your desk as an angry employer who asks, ‘Where were you? It is 10.30!’ But once I get going, it is different.” But what comes next from McEwan is not a novel. It is an opera, For You, with music by Michael Berkeley. “It has got a bit of Amsterdam and Enduring Love in it,” revealed the man who once said he wouldn’t mind being the lead guitarist in a rock band. And he had only one condition: “We must have people singing sextets in English.” After his first visit to India, a Jaipur haveli could replace Chesil beach. “There’ll be something wrong with me if India doesn’t come into a novel.” He wandered around Jaipur and walked with his wife through the galis of Old Delhi. “I’ve never been among so many people. And I was relaxed, we walked as if we were invisible.”
