On climate ‘change’ Ian McEwan has form. In Solar (2010) he played on themes of retreating Arctic ice and power from the sun. He gives ecofiction another outing in his most recent novel, What we can know (2025), the main section of which begins in the year 2119, long after Earth has been transformed by climate catastrophe and nuclear war into an unrecognisable world of flood and disorder. ‘Science fiction’, as McEwan describes the novel, ‘without the science.’
The narrator, Tom Metcalfe, teaches literary history to bored and reluctant students in the University of the South Downs (older, lower-level universities are now underwater). His real interest is research. He’s also an obsessive, intent on tracking down a missing poem, ‘Corona for Vivien’, the supposed crowning achievement of the outstanding poet of the early twenty-first century, Francis Blundy. ‘Supposed’, because after its original reading in a select gathering at Blundy’s Cotswold home, an expensively converted barn, in 2014, the poem’s solitary copy disappeared. Despite this, the gathering later became famous as the ‘Second Immortal Dinner’ – the first, in 1817, was attended by Wordsworth, Keats and Charles Lamb – and the invisible poem gained a mythologised status.
Making use of all the archives he can find, Tom tries to unearth the poem, and to reconstruct, at a century’s distance, both the events of the dinner and the lives lived by Blundy, his wife Vivien and their relatives and friends. He’s beginning to doubt the value of his hunt when a chance decoding leads him and his colleague and partner Rose to hire a boat and sail to a small island – Britain is now just a collection of isolated islands – where Blundy’s home once stood. Here they dig up a literal ‘buried treasure’, a sealed box containing what Tom assumes will the lost poem. (Treasure Island gets a mention, and the end of Tom’s narrative has a playful, ‘boy’s own’ feel to it.)
The second part of the novel consists of very different narrative, dated 2020 (it would be unfair to reveal the name of its narrator or the nature of the confessions it contains). This story – assuming you can believe it, of course – contradicts and subverts the story Tom has carefully built up of the Blundy circle and their relationships. The multiple discrepancies between the two narratives – one of the delights of the novel to the reader – point to McEwan’s main theme, the unreliability, or rather the impossibility, of writing history as opposed to fiction. His title, What we can know, may be dull, but it gets to the heart of the matter: what can we hope to know of the past?
Tom’s insistence that he has the right, in constructing his story, to move beyond historical facts to invent what ‘probably’ happened, is challenged by Rose:
She is impatient of what I regard as an essential freedom to speculate, infer, make educated guesses and animate circumstance and states of mind with the reasonable projection of a common humanity unchanged across the intervening century. The alternative, I tell me, would be a numbing series of agnostic shrugs. The dead hand of academic neutrality would cause these characters to wither. I tell her that my duty is to vitality, to convey the experience of lived and felt life, to what is was like to live in a certain time, however remote. Misquoting – not St Augustine as I thought, but the great twentieth century philosopher, Wittgenstein – she says, whereof you do not know, thereof you must be silent.
But, as the 2020 narrative makes clear, it’s not just a question of embroidered misinterpretation. Tom’s version is radically wrong simply because he lacks, at least until the very end of the book, the brutal facts of what the narrator lays bare there – facts that completely overturn his assumptions and prove his assessments of the Blundy characters as seriously overgenerous.
To follow the human story of the Blundy crowd is to admire McEwen’s brilliance as an anatomist of the failings of human beings – admittedly, within the usual narrow social confines of his fiction. A few members of the upper middle classes, academic and literary, drift continually in a triangle bounded by north London, Oxford and the Cotswolds – in Tom’s words, ‘the Barn set – straight, white, an influential and comfortable literary elite drawn from the London-Oxford axis.’ Real people come and go, including, I’m surprised to see, my old colleague and Bodley’s Librarian, ‘the distinguished and genial Richard Ovenden’.
Some of the most enjoyable parts of the novel – enjoyable to the author, I suspect, as well as to the reader – are where Tom describes the new and unfamiliar world of 2119. ‘The Derangement’ follows a series of nuclear wars, some engineered by AI. In 2042 a Russian nuclear weapon explodes in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, and the ensuing tsunami combines with existing higher sea levels to inundate all lower-lying parts of the globe. Patterns of trade, politics, travel and technological progress are disrupted; populations shrink. The collapse of the American empire has left a remote continent of warlords, difficult and dangerous to visit. A new empire based in Nigeria now dominates. The naira is the new dollar, and Nigerian controls the internet and the pop charts. Britain, as usual, is a backwater, at peace but split between countless islands. A small power elite has established itself on the Pennines, within a gated retreat; it rules the rest of the country through pliant Citizen Committees. Cars have disappeared, replaced by electric bikes and boats.
Academia is reduced to a few high-contour locations. In a neo-colonial move, the Bodleian Library has relocated to Eryri (McEwan calls it Snowdonia), reachable by boats mooring at the quay at ‘Maentwrog-under-Sea’ and a water-driven funicular railway. Strangely (but necessarily, for the sake of the story) archives, both analogue and digital, have survived (librarians and archivists are treated kindly here). So too, even more oddly given recent trends, the humanities are still taught in the remaining universities, though students are loth to study the people of the past, whom they dismiss for their indifferent and careless attitudes to warnings of climate disaster.
McEwen’s vision isn’t by any means wholly dystopian. After all the destruction, humans have survived. Lessons have been learnt, and there is rebuilding, and new hope. Nature is reviving. Tom expresses a nostalgia for the energy, inventiveness and vigour of the early twenty-first century (‘the risks they took with AI, the sense of humour, the safe airplanes, the passion for pointless sports’), but where did that lead except to disaster? It may be that McEwen’s faith in humanity at a micro level is also not yet extinguished. Tom and Rose, though they’ve had their ups and downs, are an improvement on the bad behaviour – snobbery, selfishness, treachery and worse – of the appalling Blundy set. And they too have a future.
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