Reply to May 2026 - What are you reading?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just finished Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, and not sure what I think of it.

Set 100 years into the future after climate disaster has struck, but really about the lives of an imaginary poet and his wife from our times. The first half of the book focuses on the two academics of the future who are researching the poet/wife. Although the story should have hit all my buttons (speculative fiction, literary puzzle, check, check), the characters were all fantastically boring—left me wondering if this was intentional? The second half went back to focus on the wife and I guess served as a bit of a twist—certainly more interesting—but left me wondering what the point of her story was. Altogether I am not sure I “got” the book, and the whole thing read sort of like a rough draft.*

*Sort of an echo/draft of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which, however, succeeded in compellingly depicting the banal everyday surface of a horrifying future, was that the point here too?
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I had mixed feelings about it. I've read all of Ian McEwan's books, and every time I read another one, I kind of wonder why. Agree that the characters were "all fantastically boring." [/quote]

I loved it.  But then again I work in a field related to climate and I just thought it was relaly genius.  I loved the premise of what you relaly can know looking back at history.  I love thinking about what peple in the future will think of this time.

[b]I do think the characters were boring, but I think intentionally so.[/b]  The main character was stuck in the past so much so he could'nt even see all the things he didn't know.  And I think he mourned for birds and wildlife and all the things that were lost.  [/quote]

I don't think that was a wise choice. But I have spent far too many years picking apart writer's choices and can overthink things. [/quote]

Yes, I'm the original poster, and the fact that McEwan is obviously a deft writer, the characters were not hackneyed or stereotypical, and the "present day" figures became so much more interesting in the second half when we were actually brought into their interior lives--makes me wonder if it was intentional. As one PP says, the future people (certainly the main academic) lived this odd backwards-looking existence, sort of a vestigial limb to our present day, perhaps it makes sense to the story that they do not seem fleshed out or interesting.

That said, if intentional, it certainly was a gamble, and made the book a bit of a slog.[/quote]

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