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This unique British sensibility present in Ian McEwan’s fiction might not be entirely apparent to his local readers. However, it stands out vividly—and occasionally amusingly—to this non-English perspective. It’s not only McEwan’s elegiac and nationalistic focus on English scenery—the wildflowers, hedgerows, and rocky outcrops, the endless pebble” of Chesil Beach, or the ancient tree described in the first passage of Enduring Love.

Nor is it merely the ferocious bourgeois sensibility of his recent novels, where every major character is no less than a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, each person is deeply familiar with Proust, Bach, and Wordsworth, while individuals from working social strata often emerge as troubling interlopers from a world where no one tinkers with the Goldberg Variations on the household baby grand. Rather, McEwan’s national character has most to do with his scrupulously logical, yet sometimes endearingly myopic, liberal morality: Britain’s most praiseworthy—and most frustrating—contribution to political thought and art.

A Future Scenario of Catastrophe

These reflections were prompted by a brief section in McEwan’s latest dystopian book that depicts the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead inadvertently explodes in the central ocean, causing a tidal wave that, combined with increasing sea levels, eradicates everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. Within these amusingly apocalyptic passages, the fate of that other significant portion of the British Isles goes without note. It is assumed Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. Yet from McEwan’s future history, one would not know it.

The SF scenario, the secret pasts finally disclosed: they are fun, and handled with great brio

Isolation as a Key Theme

The book is set a century from now, in 2119. Part one is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an school mostly centered on STEM and mathematics, situated on a 38-mile-wide landmass in the “calm ahistorical” post-monarchy archipelago that is what’s left of the UK. Globally, things are after the collapse. The 21st century has progressed as many predicted it would. The US is now run by competing “warlords”; an African nation is the dominant force. However, these are all background elements. When the story opens, Tom rides several boats to the Bodleian Library, now occupying a Snowdonian peak and reachable by a “water-and-gravity-powered cable railway”.

Here, he trawls the records of Francis Blundy, a poet of our own time, and allegedly the peer of Seamus Heaney. Superficially a quiet, academic sort—his opening pages emphasize how “tranquil” and “uneventful” his life is—Tom, as a genuine scholar, is passionate inside. He is seeking a missing work, the improbably titled A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy composed for his wife Vivien’s 50th birthday in 2014. Recited once at Vivien’s birthday dinner, the sole copy, on vellum, that scholars are aware of only from contemporary descriptions of the evening, vanished into a hard-to-believe legend as the renowned unfound poem of the environmental emergency.

Nostalgia and Progressive Partiality

Isolated on the mental space of his obsession, Tom constructs a portrait of the absent masterpiece, and alongside it, a portrait of the early 21st century. It’s a sentimental vision, and Tom’s obsessive yearning for our turbulent and chaotic time period is the sharpest aspect of What We Can Know. Without doubt, the narrative—turning as it does on the fate of Blundy’s vellum manuscript and a sequence of surprising disclosures about multiple individuals—is incredibly compelling and ultimately unconvincing in that classic McEwan manner.

Under his assertive candor, we begin to suspect that Tom is really a deeply evasive narrator. It is Tom, and rather than his author, who has the progressive intellectual’s partiality of vision. Crusoed on his regressive scholarly island, he has minimal time for the vulnerable humanity around him. He views his associate and sometime partner Rose, for instance, increasingly as a means to an end. Should his longing, or indeed his liberalism, be trusted? Can they truly be enough, now or in the future?

A New Form for Catastrophe

At one point, Rose argues that, during the years 2015 to 2030, there was “a crisis of authenticity in fiction” brought about by the magnitude of environmental breakdown: “Novel forms were required to frame the physical and moral consequences of a global calamity.” Readers are intended, perhaps, to regard Rose’s theory with some skepticism. But we are surely meant to see What We Can Know in Rose’s framework, as an attempt to find a new approach in which to speak about what McEwan’s figures, echoing Amitav Ghosh, call “the derangement”.

Thus, this is a science fiction work that is also a narrative entirely about our mundane present, with its “philosophical pessimism” about the days ahead. The science fiction scenario, the concealed narratives eventually unveiled: they remain entertaining, and handled with great energy, but they’re hardly original. Its value stems from what it is willing to omit—not a new tactic, mind you, but a classically realist virtue. What it omits, and forces us deduce for ourselves: the “ethical consequences of a global disaster”. That we can know only, perhaps, by interpretation or by imagining.

Progressive thought itself, in the modern era, seems increasingly fragmented—confined to the high points of a previous upland. We may see McEwan, the progressive commentator of liberalism, as among those peaks. Après lui, le déluge?