What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (audiobook)

genre: speculative fiction

A hundred years from now, Ton Metcalf is a scholar living in a Britain that has been submerged beyond recognition.  Instead of an island, it is now an archipelago and in order to continue his research on a famous historical poet, he must travel by boat to reach far flung repositories of documents. Tom's world is the result of catastrophic climate change and while professors are still trying to teach the literature and poetry of our time, there is little interest when our kind of technological golden age has ended, apparently forever.  But Tom is obsessed with an epic poem that was written during the 2010s and that, while all the literature points to its existence, has been lost.  He is willing to do whatever it takes to find it.

Okay, the narrative format of this book eventually worked for me.  I don't want to spoil anything, but Tom's personal narrative wasn't as compelling to me as other parts, but by the end it all wound itself together really well.  I didn't really like any of the actual characters, so that damped things a bit, not a one of them felt sympathetic to me even while I was interested in what was happening.  I just really was intrigued by the future that Tom lives in as well as how he looked back at OUR time, at MY lifetime, from the eye of a future historian.  It made me look at fresh eyes with the marvel of the world I live in and with a preemptive grief for what stands to be lost if we don't collectively find a way to somehow do something about climate change.  I did not see the mystery unfolding until it was happening and so overall, 3.5 stars.