The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Ian McEwan earns The Visionary through fiction that operates as structured thought experiment about civilisational futures. His novel imagines a tsunamied, archipelago Britain a century hence, deployed not as dystopia but as a lens on what is irreducibly human: consciousness, embodied experience, even the marital tiff in Homer.
“Got a bit shirty about getting school places or too many people in the doctor's waiting room. People down south say xenophobes and they didn't listen. But that was the British state that had done that. It was not the EU that said a million poles please proceed to Wolverhampton.”
“Yeah, so I've got this on mental list like there's an old inurium, the blockheads, reasons to be cheerful. So I hear that especially the olders, people my age, 65, age was a very good predictor of how you voted and the old really led us down selfishly, the future which they will mostly not inhabit.”
“Well, it's true I do think they're wrong. I don't think they're stupid, but I think they're wrong. And I think this is self-harming. But to answer that question, there are a couple of very cherished friends who are highly articulate levers.”
“Sometimes the Daily Mail just on the website just to get a taste of it. But certain things are not going to change. So that's very important. And perhaps two, to come back to something you said which I thought had a kind of shred of hopefulness about it, that it has held up a mirror to ourselves.”
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “Ian McEwan: what gives renowned author hope in an age of crisis?”
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