- I've read and hugely enjoyed most of Ian McEwan's novels over the last few decades. This new one is absolutely one of his best by far. It's a detailed examination of personal relationships between close friends and partners.
- There are two parts, one set in the future in 2119 (Part One), and the other in our current world, the early 2000's. It's an unashamedly literary work, obviously a total indulgence for McEwan and his loyal readers like me. Most of the characters are literature academics, and he obviously relishes their discussions and arguments. His prose is congested at times, but delicious. It has a biographical flavour to it as it digs deep into his main characters' predicaments, fascinations, passions, and multitudinous love affairs. It's very insightful, and dotted with comments on everyday human behaviour, (‘The mind was our most erotic feature').
- Part One, in 2119, is rich and confronting as McEwan describes what's left of the world after the ravages of climate change and wars. The 21st century was a global heating catastrophe: the deadly and destructive ocean rises, the new inland seas, scores of vanished cities (Glasgow, New York, Lagos for example), the collapse of the global economy, the collapse of heavy industry and fossil fuel use, the population of earth having declined to below four billion (half what it was a century earlier), a shattered Germany incorporated into Great Russia, a totally isolated Scotland. The ‘Derangement’, the period was called, a 'Metaphysical Gloom', the fading of a belief in progress.
- As well there were nuclear wars costing more than 200 million lives: India and Pakistan - over a million killed; Israel and Iran; the US and China; a Russian nuclear bomb dropped into the Atlantic flooded cities, including London and Paris. Britain became an archipelago, its population halved.
- Thankfully post-nuclear global cooling was encouraging a new spirit of optimism. ‘When the rising curve of global temperatures met the descending curve of population numbers and industrial activity, nature seized the moment and pushed up through the ruins.’ Students in 2119 ‘cannot believe that pre-Inundation people…were at all like themselves. Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts...social media was run for profit not as a public service...The stupidity and waste…the self-serving short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders - take your pick - and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations...the accumulated victims of global heating, nuclear battles, drowned cities, ruined economies, shattered ecologies, untamed viruses.’
- A century earlier, pre-Inundation, Vivien, our main character, is married to her second husband Francis Blundy, a celebrated poet and national icon, and climate change denier. They live on a rural estate. He composes a poem (a corona) on vellum, rolls it, secures it with a ribbon. At a party with their circle of friends, he reads it and they toasted it. It was a classic, they said, utterly brilliant, 'a glorious love poem, a hymn to Vivien'. As one guest reflects: ‘poetry, not the novel, was literature’s indispensable form…The novel was the froth of recent centuries….to meet the needs of intelligent, privileged women excluded from formal education and meaningful work…It took modernism to shake the novel up’. Vivian retained the only copy. But it disappeared and was never found again. And that mystery is at the heart of the novel.
- A century later in 2119, Tom, our narrator, is a humanities researcher at Oxford University. He's a huge fan of Francis Blundy's poetry, and is determined to find the poem. He's convinced it must be hidden somewhere, most probably on their rural property, which is now old and abandoned. ‘Vivien’s love of poetry was too fierce to let her consign the poem to oblivion. It was somewhere and I would find it’.
- Part Two is all about Vivien and her first marriage to Percy, who suffered early onset Alzheimer’s. It is hard for her to abandon her academic career and care for him. He had no interest in books or poetry, but he was an excellent musician and tradesman.
-Her problem was that she ‘had a partner and a playmate, but I also wanted a thought-mate’.
- She meets the famous poet Francis at a launch, and is immediately, and sexually, attracted to him. Percy, however, is still alive, although his mental faculties by now are virtually non-existent. He lingers...and lingers.
- McEwan has written another brilliant novel. It is highly challenging, and thought provoking, and so very relevant to today's personal, social, and political realities. An absolute joy to read.
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