Ian McEwan in dialogue with George Orwell

Is there any reason at all to listen to what writers and artists have to say, asks Ian McEwan in the volume of essays “The Belly of the Whale”. The great observer of human fallibility, who achieved world fame with his novel “Atonement” and was awarded the Booker Prize for “Amsterdam”, follows the trail that George Orwell (1903–1950, “Animal Farm”, “1984”) ) in 1940 with the writing “Inside the Whale”. Under the blubber of the giant sea mammal, the biblical Jonah may perceive a warship, a storm that is devastating the world, as just a whisper.

Third class passenger

Orwell was an admirer of Henry Miller (1891–1980) – he did not hold it against the writing hedonist that he had hidden himself from all the horrors of contemporary history. Orwell considered “Tropic of Cancer” to be outstanding because in it Miller “writes about the man on the street”; it is the voice of “the third-class passenger.” And yet, in the same text that praised Miller’s novel, Orwell said: “Of course a novelist is not obliged to report on contemporary events, but a novelist who ignores them usually either has his feet on the ground or is simply an idiot. ” With Miller, however, the core of Miller’s aesthetic freedom was to refuse political commitment. Orwell himself not only wrote against totalitarian regimes, but also fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

Ian McEwan now intertwines Orwell’s theses with, among others, the ideas of Albert Camus (1913–1960, “The Artist and His Time”) and Henry James (1843–1916, “The Art of Poetry”). While Camus insists that “art lives by compulsion and dies by freedom”, James is convinced that “freedom is the basic prerequisite for any practice of art”.

McEwan currently has many reasons to leave the whale’s interior. While China would perfect Orwell’s totalitarian utopias with facial recognition and all-round surveillance, species extinction and climate change galloped. A delusional belief in conspiracy theories is rampant in the USA – and when US President Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway spoke of “alternative facts”, sales of Orwell’s “1984” skyrocketed. McEwan: “Shouldn’t we assume that there is no whale’s interior left, that this creature is stranded on the shore.” But writers who would deny themselves or others the freedom of their work are essentially inviting their own demise.

A damn clever book.

• Ian McEwan: “The Belly of the Whale”Diogenes, translated by Felix Gasbarra and Bernhard Robben, 128 pages, 22.70 euros