A SINNER8217;S TALE

Deborah Solomon talks to Ian McEwan about Atonement, atheism and other things

Your novel Atonement8212;the story of Briony Tallis, a novelist who tells a lie in her girlhood and hurts her older sister in a way for which she can never atone8212;has been made into a film, and you are the executive producer. Most novelists run from film, afraid that the care they lavished on their prose will be squandered.
Well, it will be squandered whether they run or not.

So why are you the executive producer?
So I could stay involved. I refused to write the screenplay. I didn8217;t want people sitting around a table8212;a producer, a director8212;telling me that I hadn8217;t fully understood these characters.

The film is bleaker than the novel.
It8217;s a love story. Like all love stories, the love has to be threatened8212;it8217;s only the novelist who has brought the lovers together. In real life, they have been separated by war.

The impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist.
Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience as people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It8217;s a little easier if you8217;ve got a God to forgive you.

Your own life has not lacked for dramatic plot. Just a few years ago you discovered you had an older brother whom you8217;d never met, a bricklayer. Are you in touch with him?
Most months we talk, or have a drink, or sometimes some food in a pub.

And now you have two grown sons of your own.
They8217;re much nicer to me than I was to my parents. I was managed as a child. I don8217;t think anyone ever said to me, 8220;Are you happy?8221; I was once on a plane flying from North Africa back to boarding school in England, and a man sat next to me and said, 8220;Do you believe in God?8221; For the next two hours he engaged me in a conversation about God. I was only 10. I was absolutely thrilled to be taken so seriously by a grown-up.

Your fellow novelist Martin Amis is being shredded in the British press after criticising various aspects of Islam.
All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, 8220;I find some ideas in Islam questionable8221; without being called a racist.

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Which ideas do you mean?
Well, the idea that any apostate should be punished is revolting. This is completely hostile to the notion of free thought and everything we hope to stand for.

Are you working on a new novel?
Yes.

Can you tell us what it is about?
No, it8217;s too soon. I don8217;t even tell myself yet.

Is it set in the present?
Broadly. Now you8217;ve ruined it. I8217;ll have to come up with a new one.

New York Times