Hope--and a Good Story--on the Other Side of the Great Derangement

 

  

The pre-historic village of  Bouldnor Cliff off the Isle of Wight is now completely submerged

Ian McEwan's What Can We Know was published just as I was putting the finishing touches on my Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years. I borrowed McEwan's book from the library without really know what it was about: his novels are always good reads, and that was just what I needed at a time when I was struggling to get my own story told

 

It was a delight to jump into McEwan's story which rolled along briskly.  A young scholar 100 years from now is trying to resurrect a poem written in honour of a poet's wife in 2014. Doing so requires a fair amount of legwork on his part as well as ferry rides around the British Isles which now are even more  of an archipelago, due to rising sea levels.  The picture he paints of what is in effect our current reality is somewhat off, as are his imaginings of both the poem and the people in the poet's literary circle.  We learn the truth of the latter in the second part of the book (spoiler alert.) but it's a mystery solved satisfactorily.  We are similarly assured that the scholar and his equally-scholarly girl friend are likely to live sort-of happily ever after.

 

But the thing I liked most about the book is its underlying premise: life will go on even after "the great derangement" brought on by climate change and international conflict.  Obviously, surviving all this has not been easy and life is far from as pleasant as it is now for a lot of us.  But we--a general, all-encompassing we--will survive. Furthermore people will want to remember what happened in the past and  will have the tools to investigate it. McEwan postulates a Nigeria that has become the global power house and which has been able to salvage all our electronic records: a conceit that seems a little far-fetched now, but who knows?

 

What I do know is that my message in Before We Forget is exactly that: memory, collective and individual is what we will need to continue as civilizations.  Hopeful thoughts as the seas rise faster than ever, and stupid, destructive war rages on and on.