Transcript
A (0:02)
Hey there. It's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Chloe Veltman filling in for Andrew Limbong. This week, Ian McEwen has a new novel out. It's his 19th, and it has been reminding commentators of the works the novelist wrote in his early years, like the Cement Garden and his short story collection First Love, Last Rites, books that earned the now 77 year old author the nickname Ian Macabre. What we can know tells of planet earth in the 22nd century. It's a world decimated by climate change, populist leaders and unchecked artificial intelligence. And yet somehow it's still turning. As McEwan tells Scott Simon in this interview, life goes on. Be warned, reading the novel might elicit pangs of weird nostalgia for the times we're currently living in. Here's Scott.
B (0:48)
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C (1:21)
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 Vivian, 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. He joins us now from London. Thank you so much for being with us.
D (2:06)
Well, great pleasure.
C (2:08)
Tell us about this world a century from now where the diet seems to be acorn coffee and protein cakes. What's happened?
D (2:17)
What's happened is that 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. An 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 live and milieu of this poet and the search quest for this missing poem.