One of Britain's most successful novelists says the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States forced him to change the way he wrote fiction.
Ian Mc-Ewan said the attacks came as he was preparing to write a comic novel, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
"I had been knocked off course," he said. Fact had overcome fiction, he said, and he briefly considered abandoning fiction altogether.
But instead of abandoning fiction or continuing with comic fiction, Mc-Ewan decided to write a new novel that would "in part, be written by history," in which the author would permit a central character to "worry about the state of the world and let the world roll on."
The result was "Saturday," set on a single day in February 2003 when London saw its biggest peace demonstration. More than a million people took to the streets to protest the looming war in Iraq and British participation as the main ally of the United States.
"Saturday" will be published by Jonathan Cape in Britain in February 2005, and by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in the United States in March 2005.
© Copyright 2004 by United Press International
