This unique British sensibility present in Ian McEwan’s writing may go fully noticeable to his native audience. However, it stands out clearly—and occasionally humorously—to one non-English perspective. It’s not just McEwan’s elegiac and nationalistic focus on British landscapes—the meadow blooms, hedgerows, and craggy outcrops, the “infinite pebble” of Chesil Beach, or the ancient tree mentioned in the opening passage of Enduring Love.
It also isn’t simply the ferocious middle-classness of his recent novels, where every significant character is no less than a brain surgeon or a supreme justice, each person is well-versed with Marcel Proust, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wordsworth, while individuals from working classes often emerge as troubling outsiders from a realm where nobody tinkers with the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. Rather, McEwan’s national character has most to do with his meticulously logical, yet sometimes charmingly short-sighted, progressive ethical outlook: England’s most admirable—and most frustrating—legacy to political thought and art.
A Future Scenario of Catastrophe
Such reflections were prompted by a short segment in McEwan’s latest future-set book that depicts the “Inundation” of England after a Russian warhead accidentally detonates in the central ocean, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, eradicates everything but a continental chain of high altitudes. Within these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the outcome of that other major portion of the British Isles goes without note. Presumably Ireland, with its lack of tall mountains, suffered greatly as Europe was submerged. But from McEwan’s future history, one would not know it.
This science fiction premise, the secret histories finally revealed: these are engaging, and executed with considerable flair
Isolation as a Central Theme
The novel is placed a century from now, in 2119. The first section is told by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an school largely centered on science and mathematics, located on a modest-sized island in the “sleepy ahistorical” post-monarchy archipelago that is what’s left of the UK. Globally, things are post-catastrophe. The 21st century has unfolded as many predicted it would. The US is now run by competing “military leaders”; Nigeria is the hegemonic power. But, this is all offstage elements. When the novel begins, Tom catches several ferries to the Bodleian Library, now occupying a Snowdonian peak and accessible by a “eco-mechanical funicular”.
There, he trawls the archive of Francis Blundy, a writer of our own era, and reportedly the peer of Seamus Heaney. Superficially a reserved, scholarly type—his opening text stress how “tranquil” and “uneventful” his life is—Tom, as a genuine scholar, is passionate inside. He is seeking a missing poem, the unlikely titled A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy wrote for his wife Vivien’s 50th birthday in 2014. Recited once at Vivien’s birthday dinner, the sole copy, on vellum, which scholars are aware of only from period accounts of the event, vanished into a hard-to-believe afterlife as the great lost masterpiece of the environmental emergency.
Nostalgia and Liberal Partiality
Isolated on the mental space of his fixation, Tom builds a portrait of the absent masterpiece, and parallel to it, a portrait of the early 21st century. It’s a sentimental vision, and Tom’s consuming nostalgia for our violent and chaotic time period is the canniest aspect of What We Can Know. Without doubt, the narrative—revolving as it does on the fate of Blundy’s vellum manuscript and a series of surprising revelations about multiple characters—is incredibly gripping and ultimately unconvincing in that classic McEwan way.
Beneath his opinionated frankness, we come to question that Tom is really a deeply evasive storyteller. Perhaps it is Tom, and not his author, who has the progressive intellectual’s limited perspective of understanding. Crusoed on his backward-looking scholarly island, he has little patience for the vulnerable humanity in his life. He views his colleague and sometime partner Rose, for instance, increasingly as a tool to an end. Can his longing, or indeed his progressive ideals, be trusted? Will they ever be enough, in the present or in the future?
A New Form for Catastrophe
In one section, Rose argues that, between the years 2015 to 2030, there was “a crisis of authenticity in fiction” brought about by the scale of environmental breakdown: “New forms were required to frame the material and moral consequences of a worldwide calamity.” Readers are intended, perhaps, to view Rose’s theory with some irony. But we are surely meant to see What We Can Know in Rose’s framework, as an attempt to find a fresh form in which to write about what McEwan’s characters, referencing Amitav Ghosh, call “the derangement”.
Therefore, this is a science fiction work that is also a narrative entirely about our ordinary present, with its “metaphysical gloom” about the future. The science fiction scenario, the concealed histories eventually disclosed: they remain fun, and handled with notable brio, but they’re not exactly groundbreaking. The book’s value lies in what it is willing to omit—nothing new, mind you, but a typically realist virtue. What it omits, and makes us work out for ourselves: the “moral consequences of a global disaster”. Which we can understand only, possibly, by inference or by conceiving.
Progressive thought itself, in the early 21st century, seems increasingly fragmented—confined to the high points of a former cultural landscape. One might see McEwan, the progressive critic of liberalism, as among those peaks. Après lui, le déluge?
