Ian McEwan's latest novel WHAT WE CAN KNOW isn't out until Thursday 18 September, but this was a chance to buy a (signed, if you wanted it) copy early, and spend an hour in one of Oxfords' most beautiful and prestigious venues listening to Bodley's Librarian Richard Ovenden ask the author difficult questions about the complicated nature of what may well be a new genre in fiction.
Only in Oxford, I guess. And as Ian McEwan had spent 18 years of his life in Oxford, it did feel like he had come home for this special chit chat pre-book launch. And quite a revealing one too.
Though Richard Ovenden was keen to talk about the theme of climate change in the book as much as possible, his questions were largely batted away by Ian McEwan with his observation that if you wanted to make a book about something, the best thing you can do is to have it ticking away in the background, unaddressed and not focussed on. This is perhaps why the new genre (which I hadn't heard of before), 'Cli-Fi', still doesn't completely cover the theme of the book. Coined largely in the US, Cli-Fi is usually dystopian and post-apocalyptic. This book features the effects and affects of and on life due to obvious climate change occurrences, but the world is still just getting on with it. The blurb says that it's more of a literary thriller and a love story, and though there might be a looming catastrophe in the future, all is not quite lost. One of the reviews says that it's "dark academia mixed with big ideas".
Whilst he didn't reveal too much about the plot of the book during the talk, Richard Ovenden did manage to get a few brilliant lines from Ian McEwan. My favourite was, "we are all primates in a world of our own fundamental invention". Namely, though we have invented so many things over the course of the hundreds of years that we have inhabited his planet, that accumulated knowledge isn't widely shared. Very few people know how to make glass, or about the specifics of crop rotation. How do you save crucial information if the digital world went down? Cyber attacks could cripple society as we know it.
That said, his advice for people wanting to write, as well as for people wanting to read without interruption and truly immerse themselves in their own thoughts, was "spend 2 hours without the internet and enjoy this thing called solitude". That might sound quite post-apocalyptic to a fair few people, but it does ring true. As does his mention of Kingsley Amis, who once said that "no one can write 1000 words of fiction without giving away a part of themselves". The writer writes himself into the book regardless of whether that was their intention. That is quite a lure in itself, for the reader.
So back to the book in this conversation between a prominent and very decorated librarian and a similarly decorated and critically acclaimed novelist: another lure is in the description saying that it "spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going". I guess The Sheldonian Theatre is a good a place as any to talk about a novel that asks these past, present and future questions about humanity - and I can't wait to read a piece of work that has given so much thought to what might be, or at least, what we can know.