This book is both a love letter to and an indictment of our world today, and it’s also an insightful reflection on what we can really know about the past, even when we have vast troves of data available to us.

The first half of the book follows a scholar in the near future studying the life and work of a 20th-century poet and the people around him. In the scholar’s attempts to reconstruct our world, McEwan paints a loving and damning picture of all of us now, surrounded by natural and artificial riches and slowly but surely destroying everything with our greed and carelessness. It made me want to look around myself a bit more and really appreciate what we have - and what we have to lose. I think McEwan also accurately captures the feeling of a historian desperately trying to reach back and understand the past, and to somehow connect with people who died a century or more before you. Even I’m familiar with the feeling that you’ve actually gotten to know a historical figure by engaging intensively with their work coupled with the realization that you can never really know them.

The second half of the book hammers that realization home by actually going back into the past and revealing the true story that the future historian is trying to piece together. I’m not sure how I feel about the true story, which veers into melodrama and doesn’t sit particularly easily with the rest of the book. But the fundamental tenet holds true: the past really is a foreign country, and ultimately there are things we simply can’t ever know.

Further reading…