Ian McEwan’s new novel, What We Can Know , his 18th in a long career of writing books that play with startling premises, bold ideas and big dilemmas, begins as a work of futurist fiction set in 2119. It’s a time when the climate catastrophe has delivered devastating floods to the world and nuclear conflicts have upended world powers.

The United States is a country of heavily armed warlords. Britain is a series of islands with severely limited populations and the centre of world power has shifted to Africa. AI has not, after all, transformed the way the world works because it more or less came to a halt before it got going, thanks to the collapse of populations, the flooding and the wars.

The steady and dour Tom Metcalfe narrates the first half-and-a-bit of the novel. He is an Engli

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