Ian McEwan’s new novel, What We Can Know, his 18th in a long career of writing books that play with startling premises, bold ideas and big dilemmas, begins as a work of futurist fiction set in 2119. It’s a time when the climate catastrophe has delivered devastating floods to the world and nuclear conflicts have upended world powers.

The United States is a country of heavily armed warlords. Britain is a series of islands with severely limited populations and the centre of world power has shifted to Africa. AI has not, after all, transformed the way the world works because it more or less came to a halt before it got going, thanks to the collapse of populations, the flooding and the wars.

The steady and dour Tom Metcalfe narrates the first half-and-a-bit of the novel. He is an English literature academic (the humanities are still in crisis) and the period he has spent his life researching and teaching is 1990 to 2030. This is possibly one of the dullest literary periods a scholar could choose to devote his life to and one his students increasingly refuse to spend their time on.

Metcalfe is in pursuit of a poem that has disappeared. The poet who wrote it was...

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