What We Can Know (5*)

Leave it to Ian McEwan to coin the era that follows climate change which Tom Metcalfe, an academic who narrates the first part of What We Can Know, refers to as the "Degradation." Though rising seas and nuclear war have mostly reduced merry olde England to an archipelago replete with marauding tribes, very little about fundamental human nature has changed other than the finger-pointing anger that characterizes a future generation who can't forgive the perpetrators of contemporary environmental inertia: us. 

Imagining the future a century hence enables McEwan to flash his sardonic wit--Nigeria, for example, controls the internet--while at the same time nailing mankind's current headlong rush to paradise lost through Tom's historical consciousness.  

I prefer teaching the post-2015 period, when social media were beginning to be drawn into the currency of private lives, when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. Fascinating! It was as if credulous medieval masses had burst through into modernity, rushing into the wrong theatre and onto the wrong stage set. In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated.

Rose, Tom's "just the facts, please" colleague in the barely afloat humanities department of a much diminished university, accuses him of romanticizing the past and falling in love with Vivien, the wife of a poet, Francis Blundy, whose supposed masterwork, dedicated to her as a 54th birthday present, has been lost to time after an initial, private reading.  Tom has immersed himself in the lives of the couple using a feast of electronic bread crumbs, including e-mail, text messages, photos and journals left behind by Vivien who earlier lost her soulmate, a luthier, to Alzheimer's and the same entitled arrogance that ignores global warming.

My journals are on a shelf above a writing desk in our cottage sitting room, but I’m happier to be free of them and exercising my memory. Working hard at it, as in a mental gym, making the effort and prising open a scene, opens others along the way. It gets easier the more I try. In addition, guilt and remorse are useful aids to memory. I use the journals mostly to remind myself of the sequence of events, on which memory is notoriously weak. The past, jumbled in the mind, survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present. A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.

(Does it ever, as I can affirm after having kept one since the early 80s!)

McEwan links Tom's fascination with the night Francis reads his "Corona to Vivien" to another event a hundred years earlier, the "immortal dinner of 1817" attended by William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and John Keats; thus, the 2014 dinner Tom imagines is at the mid-point between a still pastoral England and the ravaged present.  Fortunately, what initially seems like a sci-fi inflected exercise in literary erudition soon evolves into an absorbing, almost Hitchcockian mystery powered by buried treasure, the elusiveness of truth--particularly in an emotional context--and the essential selfishness of human existence.  To say much more would give way to spoilers.  But as Vivien, very much an underestimated woman of our time and known only by her married name, notes:

I delighted in the afternoon sun on my bare arms and felt capable, given life’s brevity, of ruthless insistence on my small share of the world’s pleasures.

Nutshell (3*)

Not the author's best, that's for sure.  The musings of an in utero oenophile with a taste for Sancerre who nervously narrates the murder of one parent by another and contemplates its impact.  His perspective elicits a few puerile chuckles.

Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose.

The man who obliterates my mother between the sheets obeys like a dog.  Sex, I begin to understand, is its own mountain kingdom, secret and intact.  In the valley below we know only rumors.

This slight novel may appeal more to readers with a fondness for the crime genre, although McEwan has more on his mind than that.  I particularly enjoyed his mordant take on world outside of the amniotic sac:

The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant.  Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them.  They help to tip local struggles into bigger conflicts.  Europe, according to her, in existential crisis, fractious and weak as varieties of self-loving nationalism sip that same tasty brew.  Confusion about values, the bacillus of anti-Semitism incubating, immigrant populations languishing, angry and bored.  Elsewhere, everywhere, novel inequalities of wealth, the super rich a race apart.  Ingenuity deployed by states for new forms of brilliant weaponry, by global corporations to dodge taxes, by righteous banks to stuff themselves with Christmas millions.  China, too big to need friends or counsel, cynically probing its neighbours' shores, building islands of tropical sand, planning for the war it knows must come.  Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention.  The Middle East, fast-breeder for a possible world war.  And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran.  Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun.  Africa yet to learn democracy's party trick--the peaceful transfer of power.  Its children dying, thousands by the week, for want of easy things--clean water, mosquito nets, cheap nets, cheap drugs.  Uniting and leveling all humanity, the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures and polar ice.  Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty.  Oceans turning to weak acid.  Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the ruinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care.  And soon with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline.  Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, capitalism corrupt, destructive and in disgrace, no alternatives in sight.

And still the fetus demands to be born!  

Machines Like Me (4*)

 

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Ian McEwan's take on artificial intelligence in an alternative historical context, although he sets up his fractured premise well.

"The present is the frailest of improbable constructs.  It could have been different.  Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.  True of the smallest and largest concerns."

In this novel's present, further computing discoveries by Alan Turing, who evades his mysterious death by cyanide poisoning, lead to the development of extraordinarily lifelike robots branded Adam and Eve and this telescoping assessment of man's diminishing place in the world:

"Once we sat enthroned at the center of the universe, with sun and planets, the entire observable world, turning around us in an ageless dance of worship.  Then, in defiance of the priests, heartless astronomy reduced us to an orbiting planet around the sun, just one among other rocks.  But still we stood apart, brilliantly unique, appointed by the creator to be lords of everything that lived.  Then biology confirmed that we were at one with the rest, sharing common ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout and sheep.  In the early twentieth century came deeper exile into darkness when the immensity of the universe was revealed and even the sun became one among billions in our galaxy, among billions of galaxies.  Finally, in consciousness, our last redoubt, we were probably correct to believe that we had more of it than any creature on earth.  But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach.  In the compressed version, we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension.  What need then of us?"

Typical of McEwan's twisted wit, his protagonist wishes he had gotten hold of an Eve but uses his Adam to ensnare his love interest in a relationship that's the least of his complications.  The Brits also have suffered a humiliating defeat in the Falklands War with casualties and a national response with strong parallels to America's 9/11.  In other words, the world is topsy turvy but recognizable; only human foibles have remained constant.

"Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighborhood to fix a sash window although a few had tried."

As much as I enjoy reading McEwan and his resurrection of a gay man who never has quite gotten his due, Machines Like Me suffers from a surfeit of thematic complexity.  Ray Bradbury's short stories stimulate thought-provoking goosebumps more succinctly although perhaps not quite so tragically.