This distinct British sensibility present in Ian McEwan’s fiction may go entirely apparent to his local audience. However, it stands out clearly—and at times humorously—to one non-English viewpoint. It’s not just McEwan’s nostalgic and patriotic attention on English landscapes—the wildflowers, hedgerows, and craggy outcrops, the “infinite pebble” of Chesil Beach, or the ancient tree described in the opening paragraph of Enduring Love.
Nor is it merely the intense bourgeois sensibility of his later works, where every major character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a supreme justice, everyone is well-versed with Proust, Bach, and Wordsworth, while people from working classes often emerge as troubling interlopers from a realm where no one tinkers with the Goldberg Variations on the household baby grand. Rather, McEwan’s national character stems largely from his scrupulously logical, yet sometimes endearingly myopic, progressive morality: England’s most praiseworthy—and most frustrating—legacy to political thought and art.
An Imaginative Vision of Disaster
These reflections were inspired by a short segment in McEwan’s latest dystopian book that describes the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead accidentally explodes in the central ocean, triggering a tidal wave that, coupled with rising sea levels, wipes out all but a Europe-wide chain of high altitudes. Within these amusingly apocalyptic passages, the outcome of that other significant chunk of the British Isles goes without note. It is assumed the neighboring island, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan’s future history, one would not know it.
The science fiction premise, the hidden histories finally revealed: they are fun, and handled with considerable flair
Insularity as a Key Theme
This book is placed a hundred years from now, in 2119. Part one is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an school mostly focused on STEM and mathematics, situated on a 38-mile-wide island in the “calm ahistorical” post-monarchy island group that is all that remains of the UK. Globally, things are after the collapse. The 21st century has unfolded as many feared it would. The US is now run by rival “military leaders”; Nigeria is the dominant force. However, these are all offstage details. As the story begins, Tom rides various boats to the Bodleian Library, now occupying a Welsh peak and reachable by a “eco-mechanical cable railway”.
Here, he searches the archive of Francis Blundy, a writer of the current era, and reportedly the equal of Seamus Heaney. Outwardly a reserved, academic sort—his initial pages stress how “tranquil” and “uneventful” his life is—Tom, as a genuine scholar, is passionate inside. He is seeking a lost poem, the improbably titled A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy composed for his wife Vivien’s 50th birthday in 2014. Read aloud on one occasion at Vivien’s birthday dinner, the sole version, on parchment, that experts are aware of only from period descriptions of the evening, disappeared into a hard-to-believe afterlife as the renowned lost masterpiece of the climate crisis.
Nostalgia and Liberal Bias
Alone on the island of his fixation, Tom constructs a image of the absent masterpiece, and alongside it, a portrait of the recent past. It’s a nostalgic portrait, and Tom’s obsessive nostalgia for our violent and disordered historical moment is the canniest aspect of What We Can Know. Certainly, the narrative—revolving as it does on the fate of Blundy’s parchment manuscript and a sequence of shock disclosures about multiple characters—is absurdly gripping and ultimately unpersuasive in that familiar McEwan manner.
Beneath his opinionated frankness, we begin to suspect that Tom is actually a profoundly evasive narrator. It is Tom, and not his creator, who possesses the English liberal’s limited perspective of vision. Stranded on his backward-looking academic island, he has minimal time for the vulnerable people in his life. He views his associate and occasional partner Rose, for instance, more and more as a means to an goal. Should his longing, or indeed his liberalism, be relied upon? Can they truly be sufficient, now or in the years to come?
A New Structure for Catastrophe
In one section, Rose argues that, during the years 2015 to 2030, there was “a failure of authenticity in fiction” brought about by the scale of environmental breakdown: “New styles were needed to frame the material and moral repercussions of a global catastrophe.” We are meant, perhaps, to regard Rose’s theory with a degree of skepticism. But we are also meant to see What We Can Know in Rose’s framework, as an effort to find a new form in which to write about what McEwan’s characters, echoing Amitav Ghosh, call “the madness”.
Therefore, this is a science fiction novel that is also a narrative entirely about our ordinary present, with its “metaphysical pessimism” about the days ahead. Its science fiction setting, the secret narratives eventually disclosed: they remain entertaining, and presented with great brio, but they’re not exactly original. The book’s significance lies in what it is prepared to omit—not a new tactic, this, but a typically realistic virtue. What’s excluded, and forces us work out for ourselves: the “moral implications of a global catastrophe”. That we can understand only, possibly, by interpretation or by imagining.
Liberalism as a philosophy, in the early 21st century, feels increasingly archipelagic—confined to the high points of a previous upland. One might see McEwan, the liberal commentator of liberalism, as one of those peaks. Après lui, le déluge?
