From an interview with this noted author…
The central character is a brain surgeon, so I've been going and watching very closely major brain surgery. I've got a lot more of this fascination with work and its pleasures, the slight abandonment of self that complete immersion in work can bring, the focus. It needn't be work, actually — it could be in a tennis game or cooking a meal — but there's a certain kind of hard-to-describe, selfless elation that comes occasionally with writing, for example, certainly not all the time, but in moments, half hours, two-hour stretches, when you don't even know you exist. You're only doing the thing you're doing and you're not even aware of the clock or what you're going to do next or where you are in the story of your existence.
I was looking for a kind of work that might have to draw on this kind of resource daily, and I decided that surgery would fit the bill. And it's turned out to be absolutely correct. The man I'm shadowing is never happier than when he's operating on someone's brain. He's transported. That's what he lives for, to get back in there.
Books by McEwan
