Ian McEwan - What We Can Now (Random House, 2025) ****

"Our myopic little company. How hard to see straight when we felt so much" says one of the characters in the book. And that's the magic of Ian McEwan's novel "What We Can Now". The book consists of two large parts. The first one takes place in 2119, when the British Isles are largely inundated by the rising tide of the oceans, and many cities are no longer accessible because deep under the waterline. It is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, a literature professor who tries to find the only version of a poem by Francis Blundy, a unique poem called A Corona for Vivien, his wife, which he gave to her for her 50th birthday in 2014. Because he recited the peom in the company of friends, they know what the poem contained, even if no copy was ever shared, yet everyone agreed that it was the most wonderful and visionary text, deeply emotional and relevant for the world. 

"The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato's cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry. Any upstart version was a relegation to the abject humdrum real. My guess is that if ever the one true scroll were to be found, the excitement would not spread far beyond academia. Compressed diction, challenging imagery, the 'artful braiding within its pentameters of iambs and trochees' - H. Kitchener - and all the other demands of serious poetry would ensure the Corona's death before a larger public.

The imagined lords it over the actual - no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them." (p. 107)

In the second part, the actual situation in 2014 is described. To avoid spoilers, I will not continue writing, yet I think the title already gives some hint that there are things we can now and things we can't. Even in our own time, many people have their little secrets and private friendships and liaisons that nobody knows about, or even ideas and priniciples. How difficult can it be to recreate something that happened more than a century ago. 

McEwan is again a master of his trade, creating round characters in complex emotional relations with each other. But the novel is also about literature, about its impact, its quality and relevance, as it is a bleak picture of our human future. To give you an idea, by 2119 the United States is run by Warlords fighting each other, and Nigeria is the economic and technological hot spot of the remaining world. 

Happy reading!