Substack diary no.143: Monday, 4th. May 2026

My thoughts this morning are swirling around a book laid open and page-down on the settee and thoughts that have only just this minute occurred to me about a book I read some years ago. The novels are strikingly similar and at the same time strikingly different.

I am just over two-thirds of the way through the most recent Ian McEwan novel What We Can Know. I rarely buy books these days and if I do it is because I have read or listened to a book review that draws me into the story – and I find myself needing to know more. However, in this case my purchase was guided by the liner notes alone, and aided by a Christmas book token that for once I remembered to take with me into town.

The book that sprang to mind this morning is one I purchased many years ago and which, sadly, I no longer possess. I lent it to someone and forgotten who, and I do not expect to see it again. It is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Both books are set in the near-future following a man-made apocalypse. They are essentially post-climate change novels although, as those of us who study anthropogenic climate change know, it is not the climate breakdown that kills most of humanity, but humanity itself. The difference between the two novels is the outcome: what is it like on the other side of the breakdown?

The Road is relentlessly bleak and very sad, and essentially it is difficult to see that there is any outcome at all for humanity, and the characters – a father and his son – are living through the horror. In contrast, the characters in What We Can Know do not live through the horror but have come out on the other side, where a much-reduced humanity is eking out a living with some difficulty and acceptance and, especially amongst the younger generation, a desire to make the best of what they have. The primary thrust of the story revolves around the search by a university lecturer for a poem that is said to be one of the greatest ever written but which was never published in the ‘before times’. Does it even exist? The search is hampered by the fact that much of England is under water, and the machines, technology and variety of food we take for granted exist only in a very limited fashion. I must get on and finish the book, but I like the way the angst of climate change is deep in the background and hardly ever comes up at all. That is all in the past and those that remain are getting on with a life that is different to the one we enjoy. They have adapted. And that, it seems to me, is the best we can expect for humanity in the second half of the 22nd. century.