Ian McEwan’s 2025 novel, What We Can Know, imagines Britain in 2119, as an archipelago of islands, the result of flooding caused by global warming and wars. You could say this is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel, and yet the feeling is rather cosy. The narrator is Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs. I found it reassuring that after global disaster there could still be literary types pottering about with their research – in this case, Tom’s obsessive study of fictional poet Francis Blundy who apparently wrote great stuff in the earlier twenty first century.

I did find it odd dealing with a fictional poet who was supposed to have written his best work by now, particularly as there are also references to the work of real contemporary writers. This did require some suspension of disbelief. Also the future world had a strange combination of advanced technological features – a national AI service – and a sense of regression – no aircraft and, apparently, no cars. People get about by electric boat or bike. I mean, I liked this scenario, being a keen cyclist, but it did not seem very likely. How do you build a university on the South Downs without some serious road transport?

On the up side, there is much interesting reflection on how people respond to disaster, cycles of growth and collapse, and how the study of history might be different in the future. The proliferation of electronic communication could leave a hugely increased amount of information to draw upon, for example. This last theme might seem rarified and academic, but it certainly takes an emotional presence in the second half of the book, when Tom finds a document which shows how close, or far away, he might have been from the truth in his previous years of research.

Overall, What We Can Know maybe included a few things that made its world a little less than believable, but putting those details aside, it remained a very interesting and compelling read.