Lessons

by Ian McEwan

One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out. The book he required had a hundred chapters, one for each year—a history of the twenty-first century. As things stood he might not get a quarter of the way through. A glimpse of the contents page would be enough. Would a catastrophic global overheating be headed off? Was a Sino-American war woven into the pattern of history? Would the global rash of racist nationalism yield to something more generous, more constructive? Might we reverse the current great extinction of species? Could the open society find new and fairer ways to flourish? Would artificial intelligence make us wise or mad or irrelevant? Could we manage the century without an exchange of nuclear missiles? As he saw it, simply getting through intact to the last day of the twenty-first century, to the end of the book, would be a triumph.