Writers have long been content to generate such insights on their own-somebody without the aid of a brain scanner came up with “revenge is sweet”-but McEwan is wary of relying too much on intuition.
“Her doubts could be neutralized only by plunging in deeper.”) Speaking of the way that the brain surgeon Henry Perowne, of his 2005 novel, “Saturday,” struggles with the impulse to take revenge on a man who invades his home, McEwan made reference to brain scanners: “When people take revenge, the same reward centers of the brain are activated that are associated with satisfying hunger, thirst, sexual appetite. (“She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction,” McEwan writes of Briony. After discussing his many duplicitous characters-such as Briony Tallis, the precocious adolescent of his 2001 novel, “Atonement,” who ruins two lives when she makes a false accusation of rape-McEwan pointed to a “study in cognitive psychology” suggesting that “the best way to deceive someone is first to deceive yourself,” because you’re more convincing when you’re sincere. On a recent hike through the woods surrounding his new country house-a renovated seventeenth-century brick-and-flint cottage, in Buckinghamshire-he regularly punctuated his observations about Homo sapiens with the citation of a peer-reviewed experiment.
One of McEwan’s goals is to “incite a naked hunger in readers.” Photograph by Steve PykeĪll novelists are scholars of human behavior, but Ian McEwan pursues the matter with more scientific rigor than the job strictly requires.
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