The movement of Ian McEwan’s talk ‘The Levers of Fiction’ between science and narratology was perhaps appropriate to the annual Graham Storey Lecture, whose namesake studied Law and then English at Trinity Hall. McEwan’s analogies between the two were poignant at times, and fluid. He began with the concept of levers in classical mechanics, appropriating Archimedes’ famous quip, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth” to ask a question about the novelist: Where (or how) does the novelist stand to move the earth, or rather the reader?

For McEwan, answering this question meant analyzing modes of narration, citing the fictive realism of Mansfield Park, the Russian dolls of Heart of Darkness and the first person confrontation of Tristram Shandy, among others. McEwan himself, in his novels and in the talk, favours free indirect style, which features movement between objective narration and subjective consciousness. McEwan’s main point was the apparent ease with which people can deal with quite complex and implicit shifts in narration, without even being conscious of them. And whereas the first line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”, is usually read ironically, that it is actually the opinion of Mrs. Bennet – only she never could have put it quite so eloquently: that is the work of the narrator. This kind of stylistic mastery imposed upon minds that could not express themselves so well was also the task of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or indeed any novel that describes a child (eh-hem, Atonement), or even mental illness (the study of Asperger’s in Mark Haddon’s A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).

McEwan’s understanding of this concept, however, involved quite superficial declarations that “We are ingenious apes!” whose nature is to be social. Well, this may be true, but for all of McEwan’s detail in “fondling detail” (he advised, quoting Nabokov), his generalizations about ‘theory of mind’ and the importance of neuroscience were frustratingly, though admittedly, simplistic. Furthermore, free indirect style is in no way a panacea for the problems of narration, as even the best writer cannot presume to know the subjectivity of Asperger’s from the exterior, or that the movement between objective and subjective can misrepresent or misinterpret its own characters – a kind of hypocrisy within the text.

Altogether, McEwan’s was an unusually thought-provoking talk that can be forgiven for its ellipses, which included alluding briefly to concepts like altruism and A.I. But while I think that McEwan has too much faith that literature (which he knows a lot about) can conform immediately to the broadest concepts in evolutionary psychology (which he doesn’t know quite as much about), his project is an important one and he should be esteemed for his foray into interdisciplinary work.