Writer discusses rationality and the controversy over Islamic fundamentalism he later became involved in Ed Pilkington in New York
In the folklore of English letters, the literary friendship between the four dominant voices of the modern British novel - Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes - is already the stuff of legend. That was even before we learnt that for two of them the bond even extended to offering safe haven against the threat of state-sponsored assassins.
Twenty years almost to the day after Rushdie had a death sentence declared against him by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, it has been revealed that he was offered shelter by McEwan in a cottage in the Cotswolds. There the two writers hid away shortly after the fatwa was issued on 14 February, 1989.
This intimate detail is contained in a long profile of McEwan published in next week's issue of the New Yorker. Written by an editor at the magazine, Daniel Zalewski, it explores McEwan's growing commitment to science and rationality as a factor, alongside the Rushdie affair, behind the controversy over Islamic fundamentalism in which he later became embroiled.
The Cotswold encounter came days after the fatwa was issued, when Rushdie was at the start of many years of internal exile. "I'll never forget - the next morning we got up early," McEwan tells the New Yorker. "He had to move on. Terrible time for him. We stood at the kitchen counter making toast and coffee, listening to the eight o'clock BBC news. He was standing right by my side and he was the lead item on the news. Hezbollah had put its sagacity and weight behind the project to kill him."
Until the dispute over The Satanic Verses and its supposed blasphemy against Muhammad erupted, McEwan had been regarded by several of his friends as leaning towards a more spiritual view of the world. The writer Christopher Hitchens tells the magazine: "He was teasable as someone who had this slightly mystical view of things."
Amis recalls a trip that he made with McEwan in 1972 along the hippy trail through the Khyber Pass. "Ian was more of a hippy than I was," Amis says. "I was an opportunistic hippy - more velvet suits and flowered shirts. He was more ... 'Afghanistan, yeah'. He had several kaftans, you know. And beads, I think."
McEwan disputes this version of events, denying he owned any kaftans and saying that he had always been interested in science. "I explored mysticism as much as I could, but it never added up for me."
Certainly, though, his view on religion has hardened, specifically after the outrages committed in the name of Islam. "Faith is at best morally neutral and at worst a vile mental distortion," he tells Zalewski. "The powers of sweet reason look a lot more attractive post-9/11 [than] the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal scales."
In recent times he has been dubbed part of the "clash-of-civilisations literary brigade" after he lent his public support to Amis following the flak his friend took for declaring in an interview that there was an urge to say "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".
Leaping to Amis's defence, McEwan said that he too despised Islamism because of its illiberality. He also came under fire within the British press, an experience that left him rattled. "Look at the Islamist websites. They want me dead," he said.
The New Yorker crowns McEwan as "England's national author", remarking that he is now pursued by the British media with an avidity otherwise reserved only for Amy Winehouse.
Fans of McEwan's novels will be interested to learn that before he finishes any book he has it read by three friends - Amis firmly not being one of them. "I don't want a novelist reading my work, thank you very much!" McEwan says.
The three are the Oxford historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash, the poet Craig Raine, and the philosopher Galen Strawson. Garton Ash persuaded him to drop the "An" from the title of his novel An Atonement. Raine berates him whenever he slips into cliche, as he once did with the phrase "flickering log fire" - they now have a running joke of marking f.l.f. in the margins of each other's work.
The spirit of constructive criticism is not always happy. When they met to discuss The Comfort of Strangers, Raine told McEwan: "Listen, love. It's complete crap, and you should put it in a drawer and forget it." McEwan refused to speak to him for almost two years.
The author relates to Zalewski how he came to settle on climate change as the background to his novel in progress. He'd gone walking on a frozen fjord in the Arctic, purely, he insists, for the hiking. He was initially sceptical that global warming was the stuff of novels. Then he saw well-meaning people in his group squabbling over their possessions in the confined space of the boat.
"People were losing stuff, stealing things. Meanwhile, we'd be ... talking about how we were going to save the world. I thought, Ah. The interesting thing here is human nature. Global warming suddenly wasn't an abstract issue, because humans had to solve it - untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans."