A sliver of optimism

The trouble with interviewing Ian McEwan about his latest novel, What We Can Know, Peter Florence told an audience packed into St Martin-in-the-Fields on a dreich evening last Tuesday, is that it touches on “so many, many” things. It’s a crime novel, and a “time of change” novel – set in 2119, in a post-catastrophic world in which a Russian warhead has helped cause a tsunami that has wiped out everything except a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. It’s big on infidelity and betrayal, and it explores dementia. McEwan’s mother and brother-in-law had dementia, he told us, in this first of a new series of “The Conversation” talks, and, as a patron of Dignity in Dying, he’s impatient not just for end-of-life legislation to be passed, but for it to be extended to reach dementia sufferers.

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