After I wrote so much about suspense last time, I found an interview with the fabulous British fiction writer, Ian McEwan, in the New Yorker. He’s one of my very favourite writers, so I was excited to find the following extract on the subject – and to see that he also believes that suspense stems from withholding information, rather than giving too much:
At a moment when the hardback novel seems endangered, McEwan’s work is almost scandalously popular. Although his novels headily explore ideas, and his gift for visual detail approaches that of John Updike (Briony’s cousin, fondling a suitcase: “The polished metal was cool, and her touch left little patches of shrinking condensation”), his international success has a lot to do with an old-fashioned talent for creating suspense. His plots defy what he calls the “dead hand of modernism.” (Even “Saturday,” which takes place in a single day, has enough incident to rival “24”: a plummeting plane, a car crash, a break-in, a tumble downstairs, lifesaving surgery.) McEwan said that one of his goals was to “incite a naked hunger in readers.” He discussed his technique reluctantly,
as if he were a chemist guarding a newly filed patent. “Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information,” he said.
McEwan is a connoisseur of dread, performing the literary equivalent of turning on the tub faucet and leaving the room; the flood is foreseeable, but it still shocks when the water rushes over the edge.
That’s how it is with the hounds that descend upon a woman in the 1992 novel “Black Dogs”; the orgiastic murder in the 1981 novel “The Comfort of Strangers”; the botched sexual initiation in “On Chesil Beach.” At moments of peak intensity, McEwan slows time down— a form of torture that readers enjoy despite themselves. In “The Child in Time,” from 1987, a man’s little girl is kidnapped at the supermarket, and his rising panic is charted with the merciless precision of a cardiogram. In “The Innocent,” a 1990 tale of espionage in postwar Berlin, McEwan spends eight pages conjuring a corpse’s dismemberment. And “Saturday” keeps the reader jangled for nearly forty pages, wondering along with Perowne if an airplane descending on London has become a terrorist missile. Martin Amis says, “Ian’s terribly good at stressed states. There’s a bit of Conrad that reminds me of Ian. It’s ‘Typhoon,’ when the captain is heading into this terrible storm and Conrad is in the position of first mate. Going into the captain’s cabin, he notices that the ship is yawing so that the captain’s shoes are rolling this way and that across the floor, like two puppies playing with each other. You think: Wow, to keep your eyes open when most people would be closing theirs.
Ian has that. He’s unflinching.”
Jo-Anne Richards is the author of four novels. Her latest is My Brother’s Book, published by Picador. Order it from Kalahari
She lectures in journalism and writing skills at Wits University, besides running workshops in literary skills, narrative journalism and Romance writing. She supervises Masters students in the Creative Writing Masters programme at Wits.
She is co-founder of allaboutlove.net, a website dedicated to good reading and writing. The site publishes novels and short stories, and runs interactive online writing courses in romance writing. It includes a basic lesbian romance writing course – thought to be unique.
