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The unique British sensibility present in Ian McEwan’s writing may go fully apparent to his local audience. However, it shines through clearly—and at times amusingly—to one non-English viewpoint. It’s not just McEwan’s elegiac and nationalistic focus on British scenery—the meadow blooms, hedgerows, and rocky formations, the endless shingle” of Chesil Beach, or the turkey oak described in the opening passage of Enduring Love.

Nor is it simply the ferocious bourgeois sensibility of his later works, where each major character is no less than a brain surgeon or a supreme justice, each person is deeply familiar with Proust, Bach, and William Wordsworth, while people from lower classes often emerge as troubling outsiders from a realm where nobody casually plays the Goldberg Variations on the household piano. Instead, McEwan’s national character has most to do with his scrupulously logical, yet at times endearingly short-sighted, liberal ethical outlook: England’s most admirable—and most irritating—legacy to political thought and art.

An Imaginative Scenario of Disaster

Such thoughts were prompted by a brief segment in McEwan’s latest dystopian book that depicts the “Inundation” of England after a Russian warhead inadvertently detonates in the mid-Atlantic, causing a tidal wave that, combined with rising sea levels, eradicates everything but a continental chain of mountain peaks. In these amusingly nihilistic pages, the outcome of that other major portion of the islands goes without note. Presumably the neighboring island, with its dearth of high peaks, suffered greatly as Europe was submerged. But from McEwan’s future history, you’d never realize it.

This science fiction scenario, the secret histories eventually revealed: they are engaging, and executed with great flair

Insularity as a Central Idea

The novel is set a hundred years from now, in 2119. The first section is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an school mostly centered on science and mathematics, situated on a modest-sized landmass in the “calm timeless” post-monarchy island group that is what’s left of the UK. Globally, things are post-catastrophe. The 21st century has unfolded as many predicted it would. America is now run by competing “warlords”; an African nation is the dominant force. However, these are all background details. When the story begins, Tom rides various ferries to the Bodleian Library, now housed on a Welsh peak and accessible by a “eco-mechanical cable railway”.

Here, he trawls the archive of Francis Blundy, a writer of our own era, and reportedly the equal of Seamus Heaney. Superficially a quiet, scholarly sort—his opening pages stress how “tranquil” and “uneventful” his life is—Tom, as a genuine scholar, burns within. He is seeking a missing poem, the improbably titled A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy composed for his wife Vivien’s fiftieth birthday in 2014. Recited on one occasion at Vivien’s birthday dinner, the only copy, on parchment, that scholars are aware of only from period accounts of the event, disappeared into a hard-to-believe afterlife as the renowned unfound masterpiece of the environmental emergency.

Nostalgia and Liberal Bias

Isolated on the mental space of his fixation, Tom builds a portrait of the missing work of art, and alongside it, a portrait of the early 21st century. It is a nostalgic vision, and Tom’s obsessive nostalgia for our turbulent and chaotic time period is the canniest aspect of What We Can Know. Certainly, the plot—revolving as it does on the fate of Blundy’s parchment document and a sequence of shock disclosures about various individuals—is absurdly gripping and ultimately unpersuasive in that classic McEwan manner.

Under his opinionated candor, we begin to question that Tom is actually a profoundly elusive storyteller. It is Tom, and rather than his author, who possesses the English liberal’s partiality of vision. Crusoed on his backward-looking academic refuge, he has minimal time for the vulnerable people around him. He views his colleague and occasional partner Rose, for example, increasingly as a tool to an end. Can his nostalgia, or for that matter his liberalism, be trusted? Can they truly be sufficient, in the present or in the future?

A New Structure for Catastrophe

In one section, Rose contends that, between the years 2015 to 2030, there was “a failure of realism in fiction” caused by the magnitude of environmental breakdown: “Novel forms were needed to address the physical and ethical repercussions of a worldwide catastrophe.” Readers are meant, perhaps, to view Rose’s idea with some skepticism. But we are surely meant to see What We Can Know in Rose’s terms, as an effort to find a new form in which to write about what McEwan’s figures, referencing Amitav Ghosh, call “the madness”.

Therefore, this is a science fiction work that is also a narrative entirely about our mundane current reality, with its “metaphysical gloom” about the future. The science fiction setting, the secret histories in time disclosed: they remain entertaining, and handled with great brio, but they’re hardly groundbreaking. Its value stems from what it is willing to leave out—nothing new, this, but a typically realistic virtue. What it omits, and makes us work out for ourselves: the “ethical implications of a global disaster”. That we can understand only, perhaps, by inference or by conceiving.

Progressive thought itself, in the early 21st century, seems more and more archipelagic—confined to the island peaks of a former upland. We may see McEwan, the liberal critic of his own ideology, as among those peaks. Après lui, le déluge?