Name: Late Show Book Club with “What We Can Know” Author Ian McEwan
Uploaded: 2025-11-27T16:57:31.000Z
Duration: 12 min 33 s
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I'm ian mckeon, I come from london and I'm a british novelist.

Gerund

The superlative

You are one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed writers of our time.

You are the author of 19 novels and two short story collections.

And today you are here to talk about your latest novel, what We Can Know.

As the book goes on, you start thinking, can we really know anything?

What we can know about the past, what we can know about the future, and

what we can know about each other and how difficult it is sometimes to break through, even to the person closest to you.

So it's a dialogue with history, with futurology, the future of love, the future of history.

In some senses, it's, I guess, a science fiction novel without the science.

I'm interested in all those things that science fiction don't look into, like what's the future of universities, humanities, intellectual life, artistic life, but

also love, betrayal, changing circumstances through time, and

getting the present and past and future all into some kind of dialogue with each other.

How did you choose 21, 1990, four years from now, as the amount of time in the future you wanted to set this story?

then a very good friend of mine, who's one of my first readers, on his first reading of an early draft, said, I think 400 years is too long.

You're writing in the same language, although you've got all kinds of explanations of why language hasn't changed much.

It would be so much more alive if it was a future that we could almost reach out and touch.

And I used to, as a young writer, not take notes very easily from other readers early on.

And I've come round to the view that you know a good note the moment you hear it.

What was it like to imagine the future that you describe in this book?

And what sort of research did you do to imagine this fate?

Well, I'll answer the second question first.

I used to do a lot of research for my novels, and

I feel that my head is so stuffed with stuff that I try to treat it like a garden.

And I prefer to go down there, those garden paths into my own mind and my own memories.

As researcher, I didn't research a thing for this.

Your Character Tom and his pursuit of this lost poem makes me think, what is the importance of art when the world is burning?

Well, I've passed the point of thinking that climate change fiction can warn people because it's, it's already happening, we're in it, we don't need to be warned.

So the function of art, one element of that is to render pleasure to us, aesthetic pleasure, and

I'm talking particularly of literature here, of trying to understand where we are, what we are, who we are, what it's like to be a man or woman in a city in all the conditions of modern life, to reflect back on us, what we are.

And that's really why I thought that having someone writing about us from the future who half envies us, half despises us for all our mistakes would be another way of carrying on that discussion that I think literature is, is always having with itself and with its readers.

Or are we about to interfere with human nature by bioforming?

But pleasure has to be a strong element in this.

The concept of a lost poem that has achieved this myth like quality, so much so that a scholar wants to track it down 100 years later, is for any lover of the written word, so romantic.

Was there a real poem that inspired this?

It was written, it was published about four years ago.

It's by John Fuller, an English poet now in his 80s.

And I should just explain that this is called a corona.

It's got nothing to do with the pandemic.

It is basically Renaissance or Rococo form.

The last line of each sonnet has to be the first line of the next.

The 15th sonnet is the corona, the crown.

It consists of the first line of all the preceding 14 sonnets.

And a corona, traditionally is spoken or addresses one particular person, a loved one, perhaps.

And Fuller's poem was published and I read it and I was astonished by its beauty, how relaxed it was with all these rules.

I didn't guess for a minute when I read this poem that I was going to write a novel about this poem, but

it, it bit hard into my thoughts and feelings.

And two years later I was fully engaged with just such a poem that gets lost.

Maybe I think a lost poem, like a poem as good as this, that got lost would be a terrible tragedy, as it were, and

Along the way, I wrote just the odd few lines of this imaginary poem, and

And when I gave it to one of my close readers, early readers, he loved the novel, he said, but

So I thought, well, that's such a good note.

And it would put the reader in the same position as all of us, including myself.

If you knew you were going to be teleported to a dystopian future where access to books is limited, but

you know you can bring one book with you, right?

And I'm not allowed a 40 set encyclopedia, I guess I probably would take James Joyce's Ulysses because I'm always dipping into it with such pleasure.

The beautiful rhythm of the prose, the strange division of its sections, the wonderful soliloquy of Molly Bloom at the end of it, and

I know quite a few fellow writers who treat it almost as a Bible.

I see that quite a few people I know just keep it on their desk.

So I think that would be a colossal comfort to me to have that.

He changed our minds about what the novel could do.

He brought us into some understanding of how we might represent the flow of consciousness.

And also he was revolutionary too, because he, he could write about children so well, as well as Dickens, as well as Jane Austen, if not better.

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Late Show Book Club with “What We Can Know” Author Ian McEwan

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