Ian McEwan may be 77, said John Self in The Times, but he doesn’t seem to be “slowing down”. His hugely ambitious latest novel, a “richly imagined” work of “curious charm”, brings together “poetry, dementia, social and personal memory, the progress of human development, murder and more”.
The year is 2119, and England is “now an archipelago, with low land under water”, having been ravaged by “catastrophic flooding” – partly produced by climate change, but also by a Russian nuclear attack in 2042. Tom Metcalfe, the narrator, teaches English at the University of the South Downs, specialising in the literature of the early 21st century – a period now called “the Derangement”. In particular, he is fascinated by a poet named Francis Blundy, whose most notorious work was a sonnet sequence written for his wife Vivien, which he recited at a dinner party in 2014. Those present attested to its genius – but afterwards the only copy disappeared. Metcalfe’s research into the events of that night – which mainly takes place in a Bodleian Library, now located in Snowdonia – leads him to believe he can recover the lost manuscript.
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