Salman Rushdie

The author's new novel explores how global events shape individual lives – but nothing prepared him for this 'dark moment'

Every village more or less is connected; in every town, if you walk to the edge of it there is a footpath.” He often hikes with a close friend with a bottle of good red wine in his rucksack. I wanted to write a novel that was in part the story of a woman who is completely focused on what she wants to achieve, and has the same ruthlessness but is judged by different standards,” he explains. As a boy in Libya, growing up “in an obscure crevice of history”, as he puts it in the novel, the Suez crisis gave the young McEwan his first taste of freedom and adventure, when he spent a “rapturous two weeks” at a military camp, an experience he gives to Roland. Billed as “the story of a lifetime”, it is in many ways the story of McEwan’s life. [discovery in 2002](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jan/17/books.booksnews) of a brother, David Sharp, a bricklayer, was so powerful an illustration of the novel’s central idea that he found he “couldn’t step away”. “I wanted to write it from the point of view of the victim, to show the consequences for the rest of the life,” he says. He wasn’t aiming to write the British equivalent of the Great American Novel: “We don’t have that phantom bearing a whip that American writers have.” Instead he wanted to show how the actions of those “all too human gods”, our political leaders, can wreak havoc on mere mortals: “a piece of dust as it were from their heels flies in your eyes”. “It is a novel of the backwards look.” “It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech,” he says. Lessons is teasingly alert to the perils of being “white, hetero and old” as a writer today. “It is horribly consonant with the times,” he says. “The tragedy of this is Salman always wanted to get back to having an ‘ordinary’ writing life, and that seemed to have happened,” McEwan says on a video call a week after the incident.