Messing around recently at their home in the Cotswolds, Ian McEwan and his wife Annalena asked the AI program Soniva Music to set Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘This Be The Verse’ (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…”) to country music. The results were shocking.
“What it turned out was rather beautiful,” McEwan tells me. “Then, Annalena asked it to do GK Chesterton’s poem ‘The Rolling English Road’, as sung by Frank Sinatra, and it was incredibly sophisticated, with orchestral backing and a voice that was Sinatra. I was impressed but also rather depressed. I don’t know where this is going to take us.”
On a lighter note, he half jokes: “We might be able to take some comfort from it if we’re getting two masterpieces a week in fiction, rather than one every 50 years. Then we should count ourselves lucky.”
AI-created books might be the least of our problems. In his new novel What We Can Know, McEwan looks into an imagined future shaped by humanity’s response to climate change and conflict. In his story, the global population has fallen, seas have risen, and biodiversity has declined – yet through it all, people endure and adapt.
The novel moves between different time periods, with Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs in 2119, working on a biography of Francis Blundy, a poet and climate change denier. Blundy famously read an epic poem, ‘Corona For Vivien’, at a dinner party in 2014. Beyond those guests, no one has ever heard it, and Metcalfe’s search for the truth drives the narrative.
McEwan uses this imagined future to reflect on the present. When we speak, his grandchildren are staying at their house. He says he is concerned about what future we are creating for these future generations. “We’re actually living through this transition now,” he says. “Back in the 90s, when we were talking about climate change, it was some sort of vaguely science fiction future. But now everyone can see it. It’s in our lives.”
“We know what to do,” he continues. “It’s not very difficult to transition to an electric economy and stop burning fossil fuels. Our future is very open.”
Born in 1948 in Hampshire, McEwan’s 19 novels include Enduring Love, Atonement and the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam, with his work often exploring the moral and technological questions of modern life.
Having long been concerned about the environment, he’s now noticing genuine signs of progress. “I recently read an article about the book Here Comes the Sun by the American environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben. It was so unlike any other piece I’ve read. McKibben says that we don’t notice that we’re about to turn a corner because it’s happening in China, whereas the United States has backed off from any opportunity of selling the world solar panels or wind turbines. We’re now at that point where we could defect the rise of greenhouse gas emissions. For a few days, I was walking around thinking ‘I feel completely different.’”
There’s a possibility that there are 1,000 points of light across the world in which all kinds of people are working on all kinds of projects, and we have not joined them up yet
McEwan also takes hope from conservation and rewilding projects, such as the Community of Arran Seabed Trust (Coast). “There are large areas off the coast of Scotland where nobody’s allowed to fish and no boats are allowed in, and it’s been like that for several years,” he says. “Marine biologists are absolutely astonished at the resurgence of biological life, not just fish and scallops but marine plants, seaweed and so on. Wherever we stop doing bad things, nature really pushes back.”
“Remember the ‘no-go’ zone around Chernobyl?” he adds. “It’s now one of Ukraine’s most biodiverse regions. There is a kind of inbuilt resilience to nature, if we just stop poisoning a place or screwing up a place. Some of that resilience is ours too. If you involve yourself in one small project, you will feel it yourself. We’ve been installing 51 solar panels in a field near our house. The satisfaction of sending current back up to the grid is an extraordinary feeling.”
These efforts, he believes, are the sparks of a broader shift. “There’s a possibility that there are, across the world, 1,000 points of light in which all kinds of people are working on all kinds of projects, and we have not joined them up yet. I keep some slender hope that we are going to deal with this, because, put simply, it’s not all that difficult. We just have to stop doing bad things and do good things.”
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan is out now, published by Jonathan Cape. See www.ianmcewan.com
Photography by Lydia Goldblatt
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