In a year that has already delivered some fascinating climate fiction, one of England’s best, Ian McEwan, enters the fray. What We Can Know is a book about a climate-affected future but it is as much about academia, historians and the power of great art. As with many of his books (Atonement included), What We Can Know is a book that looks at a series of events from one perspective and then shifts that perspective to give a completely different view of the characters and their actions. Through it all readers are left to wonder where the truth lies, given each narrator’s vested interest in their own version of the truth.
The first half on What We Can Know is set in 2119, a time in which Britain is a series of archipelagos following climate disaster and war (following an era that people call ‘the Derangement’).
… in the mid-2030s, ‘the Derangement’, respectfully capitalised, came into general usage as shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences – a litany that wearied activists and sceptics alike. The term suggested not only madness but the vengeful fury of weather systems. There was also a hint of collective responsibility for our innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Humanity itself was deranged.
In line with some other recent climate fiction, McEwan’s imagined future is not all doom and gloom. The world has changed significantly but if has not become the kind of lawless wasteland that many imagine. In McEwan’s future humanity has come through the Derangement and adapted to the point where there is still space for academic pursuits.
Tom Metcalf, an academic, is travelling by boat to the new Bodleian library on the top of Mount Snowdon to continue his research into the early twenty-first century poet Francis Blundy. Blundy hosted a famous dinner party in 2014 at which he recited a poem for his wife Vivien. That poem, ‘A Corona for Vivien’, has never been found, but somehow, in its absence, was adopted as emblematic by the environment movement (ironically, since Blundy did not believe in climate change). Metcalf becomes what he describes as ‘the biographer of the reputation of an unread poem’. He is obsessed with the Blundys, particularly Vivien, and how he thinks that famous dinner party happened, who was there and what they thought. This is part of his more general obsession with the era 1990 to 2030, the world as it was just before the Derangement:
The Blundys and their guests lived in what we would regard as a paradise. There were more flowers, trees, insects, birds and mammals in the wild, though all were beginning to vanish. The wines the Blundys’ visitors drank were superior to ours, their food was certainly more delicious and various and came from all over the world. The air they breathed was purer and less radioactive.
Metcalf thinks he understands the world of the Blundys due to his access to a trove of physical and digital information. But the second half of the book, which tells the story from Vivien’s perspective as a kind of confession, shows how flawed these understandings can be. This idea of trying to understand and reconstitute the past through documents is a running theme of the novel. Metcalf believes he has it easier because no one studying earlier periods of history had access to such a wealth of information. McEwan disabuses readers of that idea.
As in many McEwan novels, very few of the characters come out of the story well. Metcalf has a fraught relationship with his wife and academic partner Rose, complicated by his obsession with Vivien (at one point after they are married he says that he might even be in love with Vivien, an observation he immediately regrets). As the second half of the book shows, he lives in a world that he has constructed from the detritus of the past, which may not represent the world as it actual was.
Vivien herself is also far from beyond reproach. Her story opens with what might be called a classic McEwan situation in which she rescues an abandoned child. The tale then goes through her first marriage, which ends tragically after her husband develops Alzheimer’s, during which time she starts an affair with Blundy. But this is her narrative, so readers need to remember that even when she seems to be brutally honest about her own failings, Vivien cannot necessarily be trusted either.
McEwan is also taking shots at academia and the humanities in particular and their ability to unearth truths. At one point Metcalf observes:
Most of our history and literature students care nothing for the past and are indifferent to the accretions of poetry and fiction that are our beautiful inheritance. They sign up to the humanities because they lack mathematical or technical talent. We are the poor cousins and don’t even get the smartest bunch.
At another point:
The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter – it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis.
What We Can Know is another amazing novel from McEwan – layered, effortlessly erudite and deeply complex. McEwan considers how our world might look from the future, but in doing so, reveals how he sees it now. He reflects on how history is constructed and imagined and how much of that process is driven by the mind of the person doing the constructing and imagining. And he anchors this all in the fascinating stories of two very imperfect characters, living in two very different times.
This review first appeared in Newtown Review of Books.
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
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