Tag Archives: Dystopian fiction

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

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Ian McEwan, What We Can Know. Jonathan Cape hb 2025. 301 pp. Library copy

I’ve always been drawn to and (mostly) enjoyed the novels of Ian McEwan. In What We Can Know, his latest, he’s even more ambitious than usual, and there’s a strong literary element, in that a central character is a famous (fictitious) poet of the late 20C-early 21C: Francis Bundy, said to have been up there with Seamus Heaney.

The novel deals in the first half with the nature of biography, hence the title. The protagonist here is Tom Metcalfe, a literary scholar specialising in the period 1990-2030. So yes, it’s a sci-fi novel of sorts, in that it’s set in 2119, and the times we live in now have become as distant and different as the Bloomsburys are to us. He’s employed at the University of the South Downs, and he has gone to the Bodleian Library in Snowdonia. After a disastrous series of nuclear conflicts, which have exacerbated the effects of climate change, Britain (and most of Europe) has been inundated, and the habitable territory reduced to a few dozen square miles of former high ground.

I suppose dystopian novel of the future would be a better genre description than ‘sci-fi’. McEwan works in a lot of grim stuff about the lack of creature comforts and technology we take for granted today: food and other basic resources are limited in scope, transport is largely by ferry and boat, and nature has been decimated.

Tom’s on a quest to track down a long-lost poem by Blundy, a ‘Corona’, a sequence of 15 linked sonnets dedicated to his wife Vivien. He’d read this poem aloud to her and their guests at her 54th birthday party in their rural barn house. He’d handwritten it on a piece of vellum, and there were no copies. By its ‘non-existence’ it had in the century that passed ‘become a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.’

The poem, through no merit of its own but the folly of its admirers, had leapt its bounds to plunge into the mire of political economy, global history and suffering.

With its references to wild flowers, country picnics and river swims, it had taken on the kind of pastoral, idyllic reputation of the poetry of the great Romantics, and Blundy – and in particular this dinner-party ‘corona’ – was seen in the tradition of Wordsworth and Keats. Tom has spent countless hours wading through digital and other archives of largely trivial journals and records of the time, attempting, as all biographers do, to tell a story about a long-dead person’s life that combines textually attested evidence with imagination.

His quest takes him to some dangerous places, and his obsession causes him to neglect his personal relationships. He feels more affinity, in some ways, with biographer Richard Holmes in his account of reproducing RL Stevenson’s travels in the Cevennes with a donkey than he does with his wife.

We hear a great deal about the guests at that birthday dinner. As the novel progresses our perception of their relationships with each other and with the Blundys shifts dramatically, and our view of Tom’s quest and the legendary lost poem MS shifts with it. McEwan handles all this with gusto, and it’s hard not to keep turning the pages to see where he takes us with this motley cast of characters, past and present.

Then the narrative in part two is taken over by another voice, and the novel becomes something very different again. A whole new dynamic replaces what we thought we knew about that dinner party, its hosts and its guests. Plot twists and revelations resemble those found in golden age crime fiction – but all narrated with McEwan’s customary edgy originality.

This was an immersive, rewarding reading experience, yet after finishing it I felt a little like one does after eating a delicious dessert: deep pleasure followed by a realisation that it wasn’t really very nutritious. Some of the dystopian tropes, the surprises and uncovered secrets in the plot seem, in retrospect, too contrived, and the characterisation implausible. But there’s no denying McEwan’s mastery of his material, and ability to tell a cracking good story.

Most of my reading of McEwan was done pre-blog. I posted a brief note on his 2023 novel Lessons HERE.

Death is a tough habit to break: Don DeLillo, ‘Zero K’, pt 1 of an exploration of what it might all mean

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Don DeLillo, Zero K (UK edition by Picador, 2016) 

 

‘Life everlasting belongs to those of breathtaking wealth’

‘Is it outright murder? Is it a form of assisted suicide that’s horribly premature? Or is it a metaphysical crime that needs to be analyzed by philosophers?’

 This place was located at the far margins of plausibility.

This post became so unwieldy in the drafting that I’ve broken it into two instalments. This is Pt 1.

cover of my copy of Zero KThis reflects the difficulty I’ve experienced as I grappled with its meaning. The struggle was exhilarating, but I emerged not exactly unenlightened, but not entirely clear what on earth I’d just read.

Zero K seemed to me on first reading to be a sporadically interesting but largely tedious sci-fi dystopia. It’s a well-trampled field.

But there’s also a subtext critiquing a hit-list of DeLillo hates: corporate capitalism; the increasingly depersonalising, invasive and debilitating influence of technology; eco-disaster and humanity’s spoliation of the planet; wars and the terrorism that arises out of or before them; the socio-cultural and political atrophy and ennui of modern life – the list goes on.

The ‘Convergence’ is located in a ‘strafed desert’. It’s a semi-submerged complex in ‘a wasteland’ (literary allusions abound in Zero K), possibly in Uzbekistan where cryogenic suspension is the gamble of the rich; they believe they can cheat death by freezing their bodies in pods, crypts or capsules, awaiting some time in the future when they hope technology will have advanced to the point where it’s possible to use ‘nanobots’ to ‘refresh their organs, regenerate their systems’ using ‘Enzymes, proteins, nucleotides’ and they will live again in ‘the billionaire’s myth of immortality’. Their decapitated heads will be restored to their torsos, eviscerated organs restored to their proper places. They will be reborn in ‘cyberhuman form.’ Probably.

‘Die a while, then live forever.’

Weird multinational scientists, philosophers and spectral, monklike figures in scapulars waft about the facility, that resembles an Escher picture, intoning psychobabble like

‘Death is a cultural artefact, not a strict determination of what is humanly inevitable.’/’Nature wants to kill us off in order to return to its untouched and uncorrupted form.’

The facility is portrayed as a cross between a starship and a nuclear bunker. Many of the tropes familiar from a thousand sci-fi stories appear: the canteen auto-dispenses clinical ‘food-units’ of unidentifiable mush. Access to different ‘levels’ is gained by an electronic wristband that resembles the tag used to track bailed prisoners. Elevators don’t necessarily travel in a vertical trajectory. Creepy guides or ‘escorts’ conduct the visitor like a psychopomp. Anonymous, disengaged and wordless sex is offered. The place is apocalyptic.

There’s clearly something deeply sinister about this setup: it’s more like a death-cult than serious experiment – or is it a refuge from a mad world, where meditation and contemplation have replaced acquisitiveness and aggression? The monk sits on his bench and considers himself reincarnated and sitting on that same bench. An empty room has murals depicting that same empty room. These are mises en abyme that typify this novel’s enigmas that take it beyond the realm of regular sci-fi.

The twin Scandinavians who seem to be the masterminds of the Convergence breezily claim that these frozen ‘units’ – the obscenely rich candidates for cryogenic suspension – will become ‘citizens of the universe’. ‘We want to stretch the boundaries of what it means to be human – stretch and then surpass…to alter human thought and bend the energies of civilization.’

Jeff Lockhart, 34-year-old first-person narrator and son of billionaire entrepreneur Ross, who is the prime source of funds for this project, has arrived at this ‘faith-based technology’ unit, summoned by his father. Ross deprecates Jeff’s aimlessness: ‘I hadn’t done anything yet. Hadn’t lived at all yet. All you do is pass the time, he said’. Jeff is, says Ross, justifiably, in a ‘determined drift, week to week, year to year.’ (Time and the means of measuring it are a recurring preoccupation for Jeff and this narrative.) His is a ‘noncareer’ – the opposite of his father’s.

And Jeff is sceptical; he’s like the Savage in Huxley’s Brave New World, the outsider-visitor who enables us to perceive what those within the system he visits are inured to, or in league with: the horror. The heart of darkness.

Here’s his reaction to the twins’ opening spiel:

They weren’t scientists or social theorists. What were they? They were adventurers of a kind that I could not quite identify.

But when Jeff asks if the subjects when reassembled in the future will be who they were before they entered the chamber to be frozen, the chilling response is:

‘They will be subjects for us to study, toys for us to play with.’

Jeff is both intrigued and appalled by these twin ‘demonologists in spirit’, with their predictions that ‘In time a religion of death will emerge in response to our prolonged lives.’ ‘Bring back death.’ There will be ‘voracious bloodbaths’ as ‘bands of death rebels’ will randomly kill these regenerated forms, mutilate and eat them, smear the ashes from their immolated corpses on their own bodies. It’s a vision out of Bosch or the Holocaust, not a Walt Disney fantasy. Yet the twins blandly answer the question: What will we find at the final reckoning? with:

‘A promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world’s organized religions.’

Jeff is dubious:

This was their aesthetic of seclusion and concealment, all the elements that I found so eerie and disembodying. The empty halls, the color patterns, the office doors that did or did not open into an office. The mazelike moments, time suspended, content blunted, the lack of explanation.

These thoughts of Jeff’s are surely those of any sensible sceptic confronting this nightmare, this mad vision, with its SS skull prominently displayed – or revered. But there’s an allure to it, as his thoughts go on to show:

This was art in itself, nowhere else but here.

So far, so tedious. There’s a lot of pretentious guff about the nature of art, religion, identity, fate, technology. ‘Many other questions’, ethical and philosophical, arise, and the twins, Jeff or narrator chillingly recite them. What is art? Or Death of course. And ‘What does it mean to die?’, ‘What good are we if we live for ever?’ What about life, immortality and mortality: what do these terms mean? What do words signify? ‘Define X’ is one of Jeff’s default inner questions. Rhetorical ones.

Jeff learns that he’s been summoned to the Convergence by Lockhart for an unsettling reason; he tells his son he has chosen to join prematurely his dying wife Artis (see what he’s doing with characters’ names?!) by euthanizing himself and facilitating the process of ‘cryostorage’ that gives the novel its title – and going with her into a pod of his own. Even worse follows: ‘Come with us,’ Artis urges Jeff.

I nearly gave up on Zero K around p.90. I had no other books with me – I was on a trip – so had no option but continue. I’m glad I did.

Because the novel turned, at p.163, into a different one. Jeff leaves the Convergence (what a silly pseudo-religious, cult-like name), returns to the city, two years pass, and the story picks up his relationship with a woman who has an adopted son, rescued from war-torn Ukraine and now a troubled, obsessive teenager called Stak.

I hope I haven’t put you off with this not entirely positive start; do stay with me. In the final part of this exploration of Zero K I hope to look more deeply into its textures and puzzles, as I try to fathom what DeLillo may possibly have been up to in this, his seventeenth novel, as he nears 80. Is it a falling-off in his notorious ‘late period’, or a return to the form of a writer often hailed as ‘America’s greatest living writer’, as the blurb on the dustjacket calls him?

Is DeLillo toying with the reader, playfully duping us into thinking this is his grimly faux sci-fi take on Margaret Atwood-esque oracular visions, after watching ‘Solaris’, ‘2001’ and other dystopian tech-horror films like Alex Garland’s 2015 ‘Ex-Machina’ (all those disturbing ‘mannequins’ lurking in the Convergence hallways)? Or is it an eschatological, metalinguistic riddle? The crushing mindlessness of corporate jargon is constantly lampooned. Gnomic aphorisms abound.

I’ll continue with such questions next time and may even attempt some answers.