'You can't write a novel about big generalisations'

Ian McEwan speaks with Claire Allfree about his new book, the 'alarming rate' at which the world is rearming - and why, despite his pessimistic writing, he's hopeful about the future

- Claire Allfree

It feels fitting that my interview with Ian McEwan is delayed because of an electricity outage in the north of Scotland, where he’s on holiday. When the author does get Zoom up and running, the connection is a little unstable; he cuts a rather dim, indistinct figure, at times not entirely audible.

Set in the year 2119, McEwan's new novel What We Can Know takes place in a waterlogged Britain, transformed into an archipelago partly by climate change. It's easy to imagine its beleaguered inhabitants struggle with unreliable energy sources much more than we do. Yet despite its vision of a radically altered future, McEwan insists his novel isn't a sci-fi one.

"I have great respect for the sci-fi novel as a genre, but I'm not really interested in intergalactic warfare," he says wryly. "Assuming we don't have an all-out nuclear exchange and we just rub along from crisis to crisis, I was interested in what might survive in a rather degraded future."

At the age of 77, McEwan has established a statesmanlike position in British fiction, mapping out our national fears and anxieties across a 50-year career through novels such as 2019's Machines Like Me, set in a world where artificial intelligence has already taken hold, and 2005's Saturday, a response to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He is keen, though, that his latest book, in which the rising waters are also the result of a Russian nuclear attack several decades previously, is not considered a lecture on climate change. "You can't write a novel about big generalisations," he says. All the same,