What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

I was fascinated by the first half of this book. Set 100 years in the future, it follows a literature/history professor as he tries to learn about a lost poem written in the early twenty-first century. He lives among both technological advancements and the consequences of climate change and nuclear war. McEwan’s world of the future feels realistic: it’s less optimistic than a sci-fi paradise in which technology has saved us, but also less depressing than a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Perhaps the most interesting part was that although the book is set in the future, it is not really about the future. It’s about our time, viewed from the future. The fictional professor longs to live in the past, our present. To him, our sense of infallibility causes us to lead lives that seem more creative, diverse, and full. But most of his contemporaries, including his students, view us less charitably, as greedy fools who wrecked the world and pushed the consequences down the line onto them. I think there’s truth in both perspectives.

The second half of the book pivots to be set in the present as it tells the story of the wife of the lost poem’s author. Though the professor of the future thought he knew both poet and wife intimately, he is, of course, wrong about so many things. I enjoyed the way that the wife’s story unfolds as a sort of mystery, filling in the gaps between what the professor had learned from news, journals, and private correspondence with her real story, which is much less polished – and much more interesting – than he had expected.

McEwan’s prose was enjoyable. I didn’t really notice it, to be honest, perhaps because it was neither particularly good nor particularly bad, or perhaps because I was too busy thinking about the story itself. I think that’s a good outcome, though, to write well enough that the writing just gets out of the way.