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Ian McEwan gets funny

Many authors are superstitious about sharing works in progress. But there’s an upside to offering fans some sneak previews: you may save yourself some considerable embarrassment. As The Australian reports, Ian McEwan recently appeared at a festival in Wales and read from a novel he’s working on.

The episode involved the novel’s main character, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, eating a packet of crisps on a train and being shocked when a muscular young man starts eating from the same packet and staring straight at him.

The scientist, Michael Beard, feels threatened by this audacity but keeps eating from the packet and eventually musters up the courage to respond aggressively to the young man.

It is only after leaving the train that the scientist realises his crisps are in his pocket, meaning he had in fact been eating from the other man’s packet. When the audience member insisted during the question-and-answer session after McEwan’s reading that he had read a version of the incident involving biscuits rather than crisps, McEwan said he did not realise it had ever been written before, and said he had come across the story by overhearing a conversation.

Turns out the same story appeared in a Douglas Adams novel – as well as roughly 632 TV sitcoms and, um, about every third urban legend ever told.

Whether this bodes well for McEwan’s next novel is anyone’s guess. But this could be a whole new direction for his fiction. Quillblog, for one, would very much enjoy reading one of McEwan’s typical minutely detailed psychological character studies applied to, say, the tale of a young couple on vacation whose room is burgled of everything except their camera and their toothbrushes….

(Thanks to Ed Champion for the link.)

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