McEwan and error

4 December 2013

Ian McEwan’s Hertford Conversation on Sunday evening took the entertaining topic of error as its central theme. McEwan read from letters from his readers identifying mistakes in his astronomy (Comfort of Strangers), his understanding of the Mercedes automatic gearbox and pre-operative rituals (Saturday), and of British military uniforms (Atonement). How far, he asked, do these communications allow the writer to maintain the ‘Golding defence’ (William Golding’s defence of the mistake about Piggy’s glasses in Lord of the Flies) – that this is a fictional world, and how far do they place the realist novel under unbearable versimilitudinal strain? There were a number of questions from the large audience. McEwan also intervened, but not decisively, into the controversy about the very last line of Solar which was a feature of ‘Hertford Reads’ last week. Did Beard have a heart attack? The author couldn’t entirely remember.