What We Can Know by Ian McEwan [Reading]

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…