At Lunch With Ian McEwen

Sarah Lyall

Tuesday, March 24, 1998 | 1:50 a.m.

OXFORD, England - British novelist Ian McEwen is a careful person. He is careful in the way he makes salad dressing, using fancy olive oil (a gift from his Italian publisher) and mixing the ingredients until a precise consistency is achieved. He is careful in the way he places smoked salmon, in neatly spaced rectangles, on its serving plate.

And he is careful in the way he approaches his work, making sure that his characters, and his readers, know that he is firmly in charge. He is not the sort of novelist who will tell you that his characters rule their own lives, that his plots spin themselves or that his ideas bubble up from some subconscious level that he barely understands.

"I don't think it's enough to just tell an interesting story and hope that the themes will come off it like steam off a bog and that critics will be there handily telling you what they are," he said, serving a lunch he said he had quickly rustled up: a green salad colorfully dotted with red peppers and delicate quails' eggs; a bowl of room-temperature boiled new potatoes prepared with mint and balsamic vinegar; and the symmetrically organized salmon, almost too neat to eat.

In his latest work, "Enduring Love" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), McEwen sought, as he put it, to wrap a novel of ideas in a narrative designed to be as gripping "as an addictive drug." He had already written much of the book when a close friend told him a story gleaned from a German newspaper article, about an accident in which two men's efforts to stabilize an out-of-control hot-air balloon ended in a peculiarly tragic way. As he heard his friend speak, the author felt an image begin to coalesce and a puzzle begin to solve itself in his head:

"I saw four or five men running across a field, like a sort of geometry, like a billiard table, and there was something in the middle, and they were converging," McEwen said. "And I thought of fates converging." In his mind, the incident was recast to form the breathtaking beginning to "Enduring Love," a book about one man's obsessive, unrequited love for another and an exploration of the randomness of fate, the limits of reason and the many varieties of love that draw people together and drive them apart.

The book is subtler and less overtly shocking than McEwen's earliest work, which earned him his very own tabloid nickname, Ian Macabre, and which most American readers still associate with him. But if his first books, with their beautifully written modern Gothic descriptions of rape, incest and do-it-yourself burial, were an effort to break away from what the author says was a lonely, introspective adolescence, then his later work is the product of a mind set free to explore the most troublesome and universal themes of adulthood.

In their own way his more recent books, including "Enduring Love," are just as shocking as his earlier work - extended meditations set around a cataclysmic central event that pulls the plot along and keeps the reader hooked. In "A Child in Time," a toddler disappears during a trip to the supermarket with her doting father and is never seen again. In "Black Dogs," a couple on vacation confront two terrifying attack dogs who serve as metaphors for evil itself. And in "The Comfort of Strangers," a pair of tourists in Venice find their lives taken over and destroyed by a suave sadist.

"I know more of the world than my 20-year-old self did, and I've been learning on the job," said McEwen, who is now 49. He was sitting in the bright and very neat kitchen of his house in Oxford, where he spends about half his time. The other half is spent in London, at the house he shares with his new wife, Annalena McAfee, the literary editor of The Financial Times. His two sons, 11 and 14, live with him when he is in Oxford; as he spoke, one of them was reclining on a couch in the next room, recovering from an unhappy reaction to the Chinese food he had eaten the night before.

McEwen, divorced from his first wife after a long marriage and rocky separation, said he had reached a particularly happy juncture. "Work is going fantastically, and being married to Annalena is wonderful," he said. "I've got many immediate reasons to be happy." He met her when she interviewed him for an article, and the interview went on and on even as other reporters waited outside and the publicist kept prodding them to finish. They have the tape of that meeting, McEwen said, and are saving it as an important memento to be listened to when the right time comes.