SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ian McEwan's new novel may make you wonder what really lasts. It's set in Britain a century from now, an island state that has become an archipelago, partly submerged by rising seas. Tom Metcalfe is an academic who's devoted his working life to finding a poem, "A Corona for Vivien," that the great poet Francis Blundy composed and read for his wife at a dinner in 2014. But the poem has never been found. What did it say? What did it say of them? How did it disappear? "What We Can Know" is the 19th novel from Ian McEwan, the Booker Prize-winning author of "Amsterdam" and other acclaimed works, including "Atonement." And he joins us now from London. Thank you so much for being with us.
IAN MCEWAN: Well, great pleasure.
SIMON: Tell us about this world a century from now where the diet seems to be acorn coffee and protein cakes. What's happened?
MCEWAN: What's happened is the 21st century has been a long, tough journey. We've limped from crisis to crisis - two or three nuclear wars, colossal migration, and population has roughly halved. And England is a rather sleepy archipelago, as you said. But life goes on, and it's rather dull and rather conventional. Universities are still holding out, and interest persists in our time. They look back on us. They see a great deal of craziness, dereliction of duty to the future but, also, risk-taking, highly inventive. And my scholar, Tom Metcalfe, is full of envy for our time as he researches into the life and milieu of this poet and the search - quest - for this missing poem.
SIMON: What does he envy?
MCEWAN: Envy for the variety of cultural expression, rock concerts, gay pride marches, orchestras, operas - you name it - cheese rolling competitions, two guys playing golf on the moon, people going 4 or 5,000 miles for a week's holiday. And he keeps thinking back on all the things that could have been saved and weren't, like biodiversity, getting our minds properly around climate change.
SIMON: What makes the poem "A Corona for Vivien" so hard to track down?
MCEWAN: Well, he reads it aloud, as you said, at this dinner for friends and family, and he presents it to her. He's destroyed every other single draft, every single note about it. He's written out a fair copy on vellum, on parchment. He hands it to her after the reading, and we don't know what she did with it. Well, we have to wait for, more or less, the last sentence of the...
SIMON: Yeah.
MCEWAN: ...Novel to find out.
SIMON: And what makes the past so difficult to uncover for the society you're describing?
MCEWAN: Well, that question really takes us to the heart of my title, "What We Can Know" - what we can know about the past, what we can guess about the future and what we can know about each other is crucial to the unfolding of this novel. So Tom Metcalfe has access to tens of thousands of items of information about Francis Blundy's life - his daily emails, his texts, all his interviews, all his lectures, everything. But to what extent does that actually bury the truth?
I mean, I like to compare it to, say, a scholar researching the 19th century, where he might be looking at Napoleon's letters. He wrote about 3,000 words a day in letter form, Darwin's letters also. Right up until the 19th and three-quarters of the way through the 20th century, letter writing was usually much more thoughtful, much more depth to them than the kind of things we send each other like, you know, I'm on my way, or see you at 11.
SIMON: You up? Yeah.
MCEWAN: Help me doctor. My tooth hurts. You know, he has to wade through a great deal, and part of the pursuit of this novel is precisely as the title says. And the second half of the novel is taken up by a completely different narrator, someone...
SIMON: Yes.
MCEWAN: ...Who is contemporary to us. I'm not going to say too much about that, but we see a completely different side of everything that we've learned so far.
SIMON: May I ask, given the intellectual and moral effort you went through to write this novel and a vision of the future, staggered against what kind of world we live through now, is there a future for art, music, stories?
MCEWAN: In my account of this, yes. In other words, you know, life goes on. And that's more or less, you know, if you take the first half of the 20th century. I was born in the shadow of the war - second world war - and at my back were somewhere 80 and 90 million dead. But I belong to that generation - you know, we had rock 'n' roll. We had cheap paperback books. We had a lot of access to kids who normally would not have expected to be at university - kids like myself, in fact. And we were rather tired of our elders, parents going on about the war and the Great Depression.
So I think when we speculate about the future - and this is speculation, not prophecy - I mean, I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow. I guess many of the novels I see about the future are classed under science fiction. This is science fiction without the science. I'm sort of more interested to know, what is the future of history? What is the future of universities? What is the future of thinking and loving and daily life? When Francis Blundy reads his poem, which is a long poem and in a rather difficult form, I have the privilege of going around the table and entering the minds of all his listeners and what they're thinking. And, of course, a lot of them are daydreaming. And they've had quite a lot to drink, a lot of wine, several gin and tonics. So they don't quite stay on the poem itself.
Now, that's the kind of access we do not have in real life and why one often has to point out that fictional realism, which can enter other minds, is an extraordinary artifice. And we haven't yet found another instrument quite as fine-tuned as the novel to measure fates through time, the rise and fall and pulse of thought and feeling and the relationship of individuals to their surroundings, to their societies. And when we do, I guess the novel will be dead, but we haven't found it yet.
SIMON: Before we let you go, Mr. McEwan, may we ask you to hear something from our editor, Martin Patience?
MCEWAN: Sure.
MARTIN PATIENCE, BYLINE: Hello there, Sir.
MCEWAN: Hi.
PATIENCE: I guess the reason I'm here is literature makes a difference. Literature can change lives. In fact, it changed my life very profoundly. I'm actually getting a wee bit a bit emotional. I read one of your books. I'd split up with my girlfriend. I didn't see her for more than three years. And I read one of your books, and it was called "Chesil Beach" (ph).
MCEWAN: Ah, yes.
PATIENCE: And the end of that book floored me. As you well know, it's about long-term regret.
MCEWAN: Yeah, yeah.
PATIENCE: And so in that moment, I got in contact with a woman I hadn't seen for three years, and I said, I'm coming to New York to see you. And she said, I don't want to see you.
ARPAN MUNIER: I think my specific sentence was, I don't know if I'll have time for you. But I was there to pick him up at the airport.
MCEWAN: Yeah.
PATIENCE: We now have a son.
MUNIER: And...
MCEWAN: Wonderful.
MUNIER: Yeah.
MCEWAN: Great. Good outcome
MUNIER: Fourteen years.
MCEWAN: Very pleased to hear that.
SIMON: Oh, my word.
MCEWAN: Rekindled love, I think, is the term for it. Rekindlers are people who loved once, part from each other, meet again and fall in love again and stay together. So you are rekindlers if you didn't know what you were.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Martin Patience and Arpan Munier.
MCEWAN: Don't ever leave each other again.
SIMON: Ian McEwan - his latest novel, "What We Can Know." Thank you so much for being with us.
MCEWAN: Been a great pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE END OF THE OCEAN'S "VERSES FROM OUR CAPTAIN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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