Ian McEwan on Imagining the World After Disaster

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I'm David Remnick. The British author Ian McEwen has spent the last half century creating memorable characters who seem ordinary at first until their lives and maybe their minds start to unravel after some fateful event. In McEwen's early novel The Comfort of strangers, a couple whose relationship has grown stale are befriended by another couple, who turn out to be psychopaths of the highest order. In atonement from 2001, a man is falsely accused of rape, and that sets him on a path to prison and eventually a lonely death.

Early on reviewers had nicknamed McEwen Ian Macabre. Unfair perhaps, but these are not books that usually end happily. McEwen has done something a little different in his latest book, What We Can Know. It's a kind of speculative fiction set around a century in the future, and things are certainly looking dystopian, and in the wrecked world, the plot follows a scholar searching for a long-lost poem, an artifact from the time that we're living in now.

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