Ian McEwan - Think Again Podcast - A King of Infinite Space

Hello, I'm Jason Gatson. You're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast. Since 2008, Big Think has been bringing you big ideas in small concentrated doses from some of the most creative thinkers around. On the Think Again podcast, we step outside of our comfort zone, surprising my guests and me, your host, with ideas from these archives that we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss.

Today, I'm very, very happy to be here with Ian McEwan. He's the best-selling author of 16 books, including Atonement, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the WH Smith Literary Award, and Amsterdam, which won the Booker Prize. His latest book, Nutshell, is a darkly hilarious, brilliant riff on Shakespeare's Hamlet, told from the point of view of an extremely articulate nine-month-old fetus viewing the unfolding plot through a glass darkly from the vantage point of its mother's womb. Welcome to Think Again!

Thank you, Daisy. I wonder, you know, just for the readers, and I guess spoiler alert, we're probably going to get into territory here that's going to give some things away. I mean, I want to kind of dance around it, but it hardly matters—everybody knows Hamlet.

Yeah, yeah. But your book does veer in directions. I mean, is there anything else you would say in introducing the book, aside from, you know, my kind of publicity blurb that I just gave?

Well, its essential spirit is playful. Once you've set yourself the task of a narrator in such an enclosed space, can't see a thing but come over here and learns about the world largely through his mother's sessions with the radio and with podcasters like your own, right? And also has a fairly privileged access to all her private conversations and intimate life with the man he discovers to be his uncle, right? With whom his mother is having an affair. So he's uniquely placed to witness their lovemaking.

Yeah, yeah. It's spirit as playful, as I said. But it also allows me to let my narrator speculate about the world he's about to join. In a sense, it picks up from the quote in Hamlet: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." The bad dreams are essentially the news of the world he's about to join. Right? Yet, at the same time, he's intellectually very lively, is full of curiosity, and even though he contemplates suicide by strangling himself with the umbilical cord, he also is consumed by the wish to know how it's gonna turn out—the 21st century.

Yeah. One thing that struck me is, you know, as you say, he's full of curiosity and enthusiasm and youth. He's nine months old. But in a way, because of the circumstances and because of his sort of, I don't know, pressed, he is denied innocence in a way. He's denied childhood in a way. Like, you know, he has to absorb all of this horror right away. You know?

Yeah, he knows an awful lot. I mean, he knows the news, he knows the international situation, he knows the problems that we all talk about when we talk about the state of the world—terrorism, nuclear arms race, the whole lot. At the same time, he has a streak of optimism about the world. He says he could recast all these thoughts into another construct, which is: never have so many people come out of poverty, there are more literate people than ever before, the conditions of modernity include anesthetics, reading lights, and oranges in winter. So we know he's not just a gloom merchant.

No, that's true. And the other side of him—well, there are two other things to say about him—is that he's listened to a 15-hour podcast called "Know Your Whining," and his mother's quite a drinker, against all medical advice. So he's quite an expert on when she takes a drink. He, as he says himself, he can't say no. He thinks that most of us would have forgotten what a good Sancerre tastes like when it's decanted through a healthy percenter.

And he can spot wine down to the last terroir.

Yeah, exactly. He's actually better informed than his mother is. She's forgotten some of her fine vintages that she just likes to glug as long as it's white and cold and knock it back. But his uncle, who in other respects is a man of enormous banality and sexual potency—a terrible combination, fatal—he seems to have access to some very expensive wines.

You start off with the narrator with a very restricted viewpoint.

Yes, yes. Slowly other opportunities present themselves. So, for example, if you take the view, as I do, that an emotional state is also a physical state, he has a direct line to the pulse rate of his mother's heart, which is loud and squelching, but also to what he calls the launderette din of her viscera. So he knows a great deal about the extent of what she's dissembling when her voice is cool and straight, and yet her whole body is deafening him with its turmoil.

He gets started with, you know, hormones and other.

Yes, when she feels an upsurge of joy, he has to resist feeling it too because she is involved in a dastardly plot to kill his father. And he doesn't have a great deal of agency. And like most other fetuses, as he points out, "My fetus, not many of you will know what it's like to have your father's rival's penis inches from your face." And it does worry that at some point, Claude's gonna burst through and penetrate his soft skull and fill his brain with the teeming banality that his claw.

So it's not only paranoia. I mean, I think I would fear such a...

Yeah, it's terrifying, truly. So I want to touch a little bit on the relationship—you know, the kind of playful relationship that you have with Shakespeare's Hamlet. One example I wanted to give was for listeners who may not know this speech—a fairly famous speech from Hamlet, often called the "What a piece of work is man" speech. It's Hamlet explaining his, I don't know, existential despair and depression in a sense, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who have been sent to help him. And he says in the beginning, "I have of late, though wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory." And he talks about how wonderful humanity is, how amazing we are, and at the same time how meaningless it all is to him. And this is recast in a very different way here.

Yeah, I mean, it is a remarkably modern speech, written right at the beginning of the 17th century. It's a description of what a psychiatrist would now call anhedonia—unable to take pleasure, quint, and depression. A little depression because he's not giving a cause. He's not saying, "I'm depressed because my father has died and I suspect he'd been murdered." He's actually going deeper than that and saying, "I'm depressed." And that's just one of the most, I think, one of the many remarkable points about Hamlet as a work of art. It bursts onto the scene with a specificity. Hamlet doesn't represent a virtue or a vice like so many characters do right up to the end of the sixteenth century. He is only himself and no one else—modern man. He is the beginning of, I think, modern selfhood.

So, yeah, I'll pick it up here. "But lately, don't ask why, I've no taste for comedy. No inclination to exercise, even if I had the space to delight in fire or earth, in words that once revealed a golden world of majestical stars, the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason. These admirable radio talks and bulletins, the excellent podcasts that move seem at best hot air, at worse a vaporous stench. The brave polity I'm soon to join, the noble congregation of humanity, its customs, gods and angels, its fiery ideas and brilliant ferment no longer thrill me. A weight bears down heavily on the canopy that wraps my little frame. There's hardly enough of me to form one small animal, still less to express a man. My disposition is too stillborn. Sterility then, to dust."

This is the only time it's interesting. No one else has asked me to read that. It's the only time when I really narrowed in on a famous piece of Shakespearean prose because actually it's, "What a piece of work is a man." It's not... it doesn't necessarily scan in iambic, so I tried to fit every single word of that speech and turn it around into that prose passage before me, and I just put a pencil mark through each significant word.

Yeah, I was wondering about, you know, sort of your relationship to Hamlet as you wrote this. And were there times when you felt hemmed in by the narrative or, you know, and like, "Oh, I'm supposed to do this now," and "Wait a minute, I refuse to do that," or how did you relate to Hamlet as you wrote this?

I've always been close to that play anyway. And I recently reread it, and it was there from the start. I don't think I even took a conscious decision to tell the plot of Hamlet through the mouths of a fetus. It was just on my mind, and before I even knew it, it had penetrated the whole enterprise.

Oh, for real? So you started writing this book, and then how far in were you when you realized Hamlet was there?

A couple of months.

Wow! I had the first line: "So here I am, upside down, in a woman," and thought, "Hmm, I could do something with that."

Interesting. I wanted to talk to you about artifice a little bit and this idea that like all good stories have already been written. Like, from the standpoint of a novelist in terms of plotting—like when you're coming up with a plot, does that ring true to you? Do you believe that basically all the good plots have been written and everything is a variation on them?

No, I don't. I mean, it's well... like, you'd think there'd be no room left for any more tunes, you know? 12 notes, right, on a romantic scale. And yet, amazingly, I know there are books saying there are basically only seven plots, or someone's even proposed there are only two plots. But this is a kind of conceptual reasoning that doesn't really help us with individual plots. Mine emerge rather than are mapped out, and they tend to emerge through the exercise of character and situation. Once the scene is set up, a plot follows. Here, I have no problem with a plot.

Because, you know, there was Hamlet. But of course, with the fetus, somewhat different. The amount of agency he has is down to two or three things. One is he can kick his mother, waking her in the middle of the night so that she turns on the radio. He can attempt to strangle himself with the umbilical cord, as I said. And he can get born. He does, which he has to do at the end to at least make a gesture towards revenge.

Right, okay. So, I mean, I guess... so a thing I want to ask about: one of my great pleasures when I was 23 or something was reading Nabokov. I read straight through most of his books. And I have to say that reading this book sparked a similar pleasure—that same playful humor, the same kind of ability to tell a gripping tale and at the same time let the seams show.

I mean, yes, yeah, yeah... I don't know. Like, well, I'm flattered by that. Of course, it's true that Nabokov is the supreme master of the verbal surface as well as the moral implications and the curiousness of the story he's telling there. What I mean, he is the ultimate stylist. I mean, but I would also name Updike, John Updike, and Saul Bellow to that extent. In many ways, that kind of novel writing has faded from us. What we tend to get is a highly subjective outpouring onto the page with little attention to the delight in the sentences. Because I feel like there's a drive toward authenticity—there's this hunger for immediacy and authenticity or whatever it is that has happened.

I think the other... but that rejected. I mean, Nabokov himself was always getting critiqued for being too artificial somehow.

Yeah, I'd like to... misses the point. Like, I stole reviews of Updike's work saying it was too good. The prose is too good.

Prose can never be too good.

Wow. So, yeah, so I think let's get to the second part of our show where we have these totally unexpected thought starters. I have not seen them. I don't know what they are, okay? And we just take them as we find them.

Okay, you go where we go.

This is Charles Duhigg, who is a journalist, and it's something about keeping your mind focused nowadays. It’s incredibly hard to stay focused. There are so many distractions that are around us at any given moment. Your pocket vibrates at any given moment because we care getting 10 new emails, and on social media there are all these new notifications, and the phone is ringing, and your kids need help, and your colleagues are coming up because you are working in an open office plan, and they're asking you to chime in on some memo.

Maintaining focus nowadays is harder than ever before, but in some ways, it's way more critical to. One of the things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive companies is that they create ways to enhance their focus. And the way that they do this is by what's known as building mental models. You're sitting there and you're juggling the kids and dinner, and suddenly your phone vibrates, and it's this email that causes the spike of panic. Our instinct at a moment like that is to react immediately, to type something that we end up regretting later on.

Why are some people so much better at maintaining their focus and not reacting and not getting distracted by all these things? It's because ahead of time they've envisioned what they expect to occur. So, on the subway when they're writing to work, they think about what is this day gonna be like? I know that I'm going to this meeting, what do I expect to occur at that meeting? And so when they walk in and their boss asks an unexpected question, their brain almost subconsciously says, "I didn't expect that question to occur. This isn't matching the picture in my brain of what I anticipated. So I need to put that question off. I need to say, ‘Can we take that offline and I'll answer that later?’”

I think there's some useful truth in that. I, too, get between 60 and 70 emails a day. And because I work in so many spheres, you know, we're just making two movies at the moment. I've written the screenplays from based on previous novels. I'm here on book tour, twelve other countries are waiting for me to come there and their arrangements. So, you know, it's a tidal wave of stuff that's requests where you have to me, Anna's request is, you know, “Will you come up to lecture? Will you speak for this charity? Will you help raise funds?” So it is then. And I think the case for a lot of writers—a lot of responsibilities flow out of publishing a book.

So even though I'm not a business person, I sense the importance of managing this. The best way, I think—and it's true to think ahead—is useful, no doubt about that.

I couldn't agree more. But also to compartmentalize, to not just write emails all day intermittently, but to say between 2:00 and 3:00 o'clock I'm gonna sit down, write emails. Between 7 and 8 o'clock I'm gonna commit wholeheartedly to cooking dinner, right? And drinking red wine.

Are you consistent about that? Are you good at actually keeping those boundaries secure?

More or less. Obviously, there are ongoing urgent situations, but on the whole, most of the emails you write are relatively unimportant. But still, they must be done. They're part of the business of being alive, right? It is a blessing because we now spend far less time on the phone, I think so, nor do we have so much time opening letters—which, also, we were responsible, you know, replying to a letter in longhand, like most of us used to do, was, I think, quite a burden. You know, I’ve forgotten what a burden it was, well then in finding a stamp in an envelope and a post box; it was quite a deal.

Yeah, so there's some convenience here, but if you could just say for the next 15 minutes, I'm gonna pay bills. Right? And when I get to the end of a few minutes I'll stop. And if there's some more bills paid, I'll do that in the next session. And it's this hiving off. I think the other thing is I keep a journal.

That's a good way of bringing the immediate past into focus. It's perfectly possible to live a busy life and forget you exist, right? You just need one thing after another and there's no moment for the core of your selfhood to be examined. But sit down and just write three sentences about a conversation you had yesterday that enables the kind of focus.

It's really important.

Yeah, I mean, I find that as far as journaling goes, the way it works for me is more like the various things that are happening around me and in my life, they build up, and they sort of rattle about. And if I sit down to do something creative, write a short story or something, some days I need to journal first. They're like, yeah, half an hour just to kind of clear the submitting the air and clear the decks.

Yeah, that's useful. But he's right about thinking ahead into situations. There's a lot of the time you can just drift into them.

Yeah.

And improvise. You can't ever quite know what's gonna happen or what's gonna be asked for or what's gonna be presented to you, right? But just imagining it ahead of time is a very useful exercise. It's a bit about to get a bit philosophical about it. I mean, it's sort of about power and agency. It's about the world demanding things of you, and you can either be sort of the passive servant to all of these demands or take control of your own time and do with it what you want.

Absolutely. The other important element, I think—and this is to close down literally, physically throw the switches on your computer, right? Lots of people I know have a program that closes down. You set it for how long you want it off; you contact it once you put it on. Once you click this for three hours, you can't use it.

Nice. It just disables all communication functions on your computer.

Absolutely. Yeah. So, Peter becomes like a 1991 computer. It's a standalone device, right, with no inputs. And I think that's the hard thing, I think, for us writers is the machine that we're writing on—which used to be a typewriter—the machine we're writing on is now the source of everything from pornography to your closest friend’s illness.

Yeah. Its tendrils reach in every direction.

Yeah. So turning it off, turning off the phone, not even going near the newspaper. I mean, that's a great thing about—I hike a lot—and that is it. I never take a phone with me just to be in the moment and enjoying the rock that we happen to inhabit and its beauty.

Yeah. And also the pleasures of getting lost sometimes. You walk in a deep wood; there’s a long dit, it’s quite possible to lose your way. I’ve got a problem to solve. Alicia’s to solve a problem and, yeah, and come out.

I want to ask you, you know, just about writing. I mean, with all of these, you know, as you schedule these things, and obviously some things are unpredictable, how do you ensure that you as a novelist feel that you're on track and in with the book? You know, that you're not getting, you know, swept away? And how do you carve out that time?

And I think the crucial word to deploy in most instances is the word "no." I mean, I mostly say no with apologies, and I say yes to one percent. And that still seems a fast amount, but you cannot say yes to everything, sure, sure. I mean, there is a literary festival around the world at any day of the year, and they have their lists of writers. And you know, you’ll be on them, and they’ll be asking you, "You've got to transcend the guilt."

So for a long time, I was so flattered to be asked to kill and do something and in pain about saying no, right? You've got to get beyond that point, right? Because any arts administrator, new novelists, you know, let's have him in or her in. And if that person doesn't come, we'll ask someone else.

Sure. It's no great pain for them. I had a... I used to have this formula: the only reason you're asking me is because I've said no in the past to people like you. In other words, I've gotten on with writing.

Right. Right. So all these people want to stop your writing. They don't really want to stop me writing, but no, that's the total effect.

Yeah. If you went to it, if you went to everyone, yeah, you’d never write.

I could be at a literary festival around the world every day—in that formulation of Philip Larkin of pretending to be myself.

Yes, yes. So you've got to be a bit tough-minded about it, I guess. Last question about this—In terms of focus and productivity, when you write, like, I'm sure you've been asked this 80 billion times, but like, is there a certain time of day? Are you—you have to be in a particular room? Have you got to the point where you can actually write on an airplane because you travel so much?

I try not to travel so much. I live in the country. My study is a huge converted barn, okay? And it's got lots of bookshelves, two desks—one for longhand, one is an enormous old kitchen table, about 10 feet, 12 feet long—and holds a big screen. And two chairs between alternately those two spaces.

Gotcha.

So I’m very lucky. Sometimes longhand, sometimes on the computer. I think they fit very well together, actually. I'm generally in, feel grateful for the machines we now live with. I think typewriters were terrible machines; longhand and computers were with a kind of simulacrum of human memory, sent more accurate, I think, it's a delight. I love the idea when I’ve started something written maybe 5000 words, I haven't printed any of it out, but it's held in secret, in a memory that's not my memory. I like all that.

So, I try to work in the mornings, but if things are going, I just—I never let go, because other days it won't be going so well. So I tend to try and ride that wave, knowing for well, it's Monday now—by Friday I might have run out of the sort of creative possibilities of the scene. So best to work on into the night if disaster.

And if you sit down and it's not going well, like your head's not in the right space, like what do you do? Do you just get up and go do something else?

Eventually. But I think your duty is to turn up. You try.

Yeah.

You’ve got to turn up. Oh, it's no good saying, "I don’t feel like it," over breakfast. You know, you’ve got to go and be there at least before you allow yourself to go and do something else.

I don't believe in writer's block. I think it's just nonsense that's been foisted on writers. I think hesitation is of crucial element in creativity, but you do have to turn up. Kate Tempest, you know her as a poet, and she came here and she said that writer's block is just the fear of writing badly.

Yeah.

And that's a youthful fear you should welcome it.

Yeah, that was lovely. Let's see where the next, what unexpected direction the next one takes us in.

Okay, this is Glenn Cohen, who is a bioethicist, and it is called "Abortion and Personhood: What the Moral Dilemma is Really About." And we can go any way with this; it needn't be tedious, so let's see. In the 1970s, we had the Roe v. Wade decision in the United States. It was a decision relating to a woman's right to have an abortion. It introduced the trimester framework; it basically allowed first trimester abortions, made it very difficult to have third trimester abortions.

And essentially, this was really met very quickly thereafter with the sort of backlash. And really the last 40 to 50 years of American history have more or less been a backlash against Roe v. Wade—a struggle to kind of criminalize abortion in all sorts of interesting ways without overturning the decision facially. So that's kind of a legal playing field, and we can talk about some of the specifics.

But the more interesting question, I think, is thinking about the morality of abortion. And I'll say that I think abortion is an extremely difficult question. So one of the first questions people have to think about is: Are fetuses persons? And that's a very important linguistic question. Persons? I didn't say human beings; I didn't say alive. Those are three different issues. Right? Something can be alive but not be a person. Your dog is a good example. You love your dog; it's a wonderful thing. But it's not a person. Something can be human and potentially not be a person.

Right? Some people think the early embryo, for example, before 14 days, or stem cells being derived are members of the human species, but may not be persons. So what do we mean by persons? We mean something that has a certain set of moral and/or legal rights, the most important of which is a right against inviolability—they can't be killed or destroyed or harmed without very good reason. And we have the attitude that we are all persons, right?

So we have an index case. We’re pretty clear we’re persons, and the question is, who else is a person? I will say that although I am fiercely protective of Roe v. Wade and the, you know, our right to have abortions, I do find it morally problematic, if you come down to...

You know, if you come down to the—I don't think it's easily solved. Do we consider the potentiality of something like of a fetus or an embryo to be more important than that of just some sperm or egg? You know, it's not easy. I don't think.

No, it isn't easy, and I think that's the core of what he's saying.

Well, I mean, yeah, we're discussing this in the context of a novel in which a fetus is talking. So that... you haven't chosen this out of nowhere.

Well, I'm okay. I don't think that I don't even think that my producers are chosen, knew that.

Okay, all right. Well, that's all the more charming. Let me say from the beginning that my novel is not a serious contribution to a highly sensitive and morally complex debate. And friends, you know you're in Europe when I said, "Well, I've just been speaking to the first two or three American journalists to talk to me down the line or down the phone about Nutshell." And their first questions are: "Is this a pro-life novel?" And it had never crossed my mind for a moment is my country's notable lack of irony and awareness. And I throw some eyes. I said, "You just have to unwrap for me that question so I can understand it." He said, "Well, you have a fully conscious fetus, and it would be very difficult to kill this person because he seemed so real and so he clipped." And I said, "Listen, this person is talking; he breaks all the rules of physics and biology and does not exist and cannot usefully contribute to this debate."

We didn't hear the whole of his talk. I'm aware that this is sensitive in the United States in ways that it is not—they're remotely to the same degree in Britain or Europe for that matter, even in Catholic countries, because you have less sort of fundamentalist religion. I mean, he's setting up, I think, very beautifully and astutely, the moral ethical dilemmas here, but he's not yet mentioned religion.

And I guess where I would part company with a lot of one side of the American debate is the notion of the soul and that even the blastocyte, you know, six days, has a soul. I don’t think we have any evidence for this. I don’t think a soul is a useful concept, Brett, but it informs a great deal of American passion at least on one side of this.

I mean, if you look, if you believe that God makes every embryo and that intends that to become a human being and has a plan for it, then the arguments over... like you can't possibly support... but God also makes every pigeon and earthworm; we have to take that into account. So it's very hard to actually enter into any kind of useful exchange with what I think is the core of the so-called pro-life faction in the United States.

The other thing to say is, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "Opinions do not come as single spies." So if you are pro-life, you're probably to the right of the spectrum. If you're pro-choice, you're to the center, to the liberal end of the spectrum, and with it comes a whole set of other attitudes about the economy, about nuclear weapons, about fouls, and other things, right, are all glommed onto this little...

Yeah, but you're bringing... fetus, right? And if we don't—but if we don't allow it—which is difficult to smuggle in all of that politics and kind of, you know, identity and so on—like, I think it's very hard to be comfortable with abortion on any level, even if you support people's right to do it.

You know, it's very hard.

Absolutely, because, yeah, we should be, first of all, in no doubt, everyone I know, everyone I know who's had an abortion has had to go through a terrible ordeal. It's like terrible.

Yeah, yeah. The use of abortion as a means of contraception, I think, is deeply problematic and, yeah, to some extent abhorrent. I would say that clearly somewhere along the line in those 40 weeks, we’re looking at a spectrum of possibility of individuation, selfhood, sure, and actually birth is not a breaking off point.

We know that white matter in the brain goes through an extraordinary amount of connectivity in the first years of life, right? And out of that emerges personhood.

The neuroscientist who was saying something like 6 million neuron connections per second—that's between birth and age 6. It's impossible to lay down memory. I mean, how would all Dolly claim to remember being in the womb? I think because not have the biological apparatus that degree of connectivity, especially in a hypothalamus to lay down memories.

His ego may have exactly in the world, and projected. I think those dodgy recovered memory on the social side, we know that when jurisdictions forbid abortion, absolutely vast amount of human misery follows.

Yeah.

So we've got to find a middle way and I think the earlier we push this—especially now we have more medical means, sophisticated means of making life viable at say 32 weeks and so on—that has to be taken into account.

I would say that you’ve got to look at the point at which the neural groove folds in upon itself and becomes the spine and the beginnings of some rudimentary central nervous system is where you want to be thinking roughly the cutoff point. The trouble is biology runs on a spectrum; the law has to be sort of discrete and digital.

Right? Yes. So, know this point, 12 weeks, 18 weeks. But that is where it becomes a irresolvable problem. I mean, the definition of personhood is by nature, I think, an unsolvable philosophical problem. Unresolvable, but the law must resolve it.

Yeah. What is the position? So, you're never gonna get a perfect law. You're always gonna run roughshod over someone or something. But I would be cautiously pro-life, pushing it as early as possible too, and making it, therefore, available as early as possible, free—in other words.

Yeah, I know runs against much American policy in health—free to everyone of whatever means. But really, really early, before we have too much of the central nervous system connecting itself up.

I mean, we have to, we also have to accept—you know, I mean, the other side of this is that adults have to make complex moral choices. Like, you know, that it might be better rather than raising a child to adulthood if you're not able to do it or sending them off into foster care or whatever.

Yeah, even that's very difficult because your baby in the book has to think about that, right? Like what if, you know, he might be shipped off to, yeah, it's either—that'll go to prison with his mother, right? He hasn't done anything, as he says.

So this liberal policy of allowing imprisoned mothers to take their babies to jail, in his view, is, "Well, babies haven't been arrested. They've not done anything. What are they doing in jail?" But they want to be with their mothers.

I guess that's the payoff. They must—this is, he does he, it doesn’t, he ultimately resolve that he’d prefer, I mean, settle on the idea of foster care that he’d rather be free.

Yeah, I mean, he ends up in, he's going to do his thing—that's the price he must pay for stopping them fleeing to Paris.

This is what you—the cruel novelists have done to him.

Yeah. I don't know whether your speaker there gets to the business of the soul because, yeah, we should say this is a seven-minute video.

Yeah.

We didn't have time to... I mean, in many of the debates about taking stem cells from embryos, for example, a great deal of objection has been about the fact that as soon as an ovum is fertilized, it becomes sacred. Now, that's a faith, and it's very difficult to argue on the same terms once you're in the supernatural.

But interestingly, this speaker grounds for raising this as a difficult moral problem and let's stop pretending that it isn't, because on the liberal side of the equation, I think they can be accused of that.

Right? Just thinking, "Oh, well, this is crap. It's all feminism, and it's dead right. And it's a woman's right."

To ironic... The rest of you could go and take a running leap, ironically. I would say given that the liberal, you know, the left is often accused of caring too much, being too emotional, being too empathetic, you know, with suffering and yet you're not able to empathize with...

Well, they're running into a real dilemma. On the one hand, there are the demands of women who say we want control of their own bodies, right? I don't want patriarchal structures to be telling them what to do. On the other hand, there are awkward questions to ask and answer about personhood.

Yeah, but I think he sets out the core of the problem without religion right, extremely well. I think we'll leave it there, Ian McEwan. I have really enjoyed talking with you today and highly recommend your book, Nutshell. And I highly recommend it to my audience. It's about 200 pages long and incredibly gripping, and you will not probably stop reading it from the moment you open it until you are done.

Thanks so much for being on Think Again today.

Thanks for having me.

And that's it for this week's episode of Think Again with author Ian McEwan. The fall is publishing season, so after a summer in which we did a number of mixtapes looking back on the past year, we have a lot of exciting new conversations coming up for you. Please take a minute, if you haven't done so already, to rate or review the show in iTunes or Stitcher or Podcast or any one of the million other places that you may be listening to this show.

And please join us next week when my guest is Alton Brown, who has a lot to say about a lot more than just food.

See you then!