This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The British author Ian McEwen has spent the last half century creating memorable characters who seem ordinary at first

until their lives and maybe their minds start to unravel after some fateful event.

In McEwan's early novel, The Comfort of Strangers, a couple whose relationship has grown

stale are befriended by another couple who turn out to be psychopaths of the highest order.

In atonement from 2001, a man is falsely accused of rape,

and that sets him on a path to prison and eventually a lonely death.

Early on, reviewers had nicknamed McEwen, Ian McCobb.

Unfair, perhaps, but these are not books that usually end

happily. McEwen has done something a little different in his latest book, What We Can Know.

It's a kind of speculative fiction set around a century in the future, and things are certainly

looking dystopian. And in the wrecked world, the plot follows a scholar

searching for a long-lost poem, an artifact from the time that we're living in now.

I spoke with Ian McEwen at an event for the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

So if I were interviewing a songwriter, the idiot question would be, what comes first, the lyrics

or the music?

When you're writing a novel, what generally comes first in this, and in this case, the thematic

concerns that you want to get at, or some version of the music, the voice of the book?

It varies.

I've got awfully good over the years at not writing,

and I quite like an extended period between books

and keeping alive a notebook which offers the liberation of longhand.

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