Ian McEwan’s Haunting Vision of the Future
It’s perhaps fair to observe that Ian McEwan has entered the elegiac phase of his career. It happens to us all eventually, I suppose, whether one makes donuts or novels; eventually pondering what came before takes up most of your dwindling time. He looked back at the past in his last two novels: Machines Like Me (2019) is set in a 1980s England depicted through an alt-historical lens (the Brits lost the Falklands war to Argentina, but, in a version of the country where Alan Turing still lives, flying cars already exist), and Lessons (2022), a portrait of a feckless boomer born the same year McEwan was, 1948, spans 70 years of its protagonist’s unremarkable, faintly gilded life, one that never quite escapes the shadow of a sexual assault at the hands of his piano teacher, Ms. Cornell, when he was 14. McEwan’s fiction has always been about the need to make meaning from catastrophe, to awaken or shield the moral imagination through the intellect, and in his new book, What We Can Know, the catastrophe is the future and the elegy is for our species, as the oceans rise and prospects grow dour.The book concerns a literary scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, in a diminished England, one McEwan imagines as half-submerged and wholly disillusioned by 2119. The country’s green fields have turned into inland deltas, the southern coast has been eaten by what survivors call The Inundation—erosion of the coasts and rewriting of the world’s topography by the onrush of salt water, spurred not just by climate change but also by a catastrophic tsunami in the Atlantic caused by an errant Russian nuclear missile that landed short of America—and what remains of civilization has reorganized itself around an archipelago in which travel is hard and the only growth industries are data recovery and atmospheric management.McEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses. People move through the future quietly, their lives bracketed by scarcity and the faint hum of desalination plants. Interracial love has rendered most people honey-colored, just as the 1998 movie Bulworth predicted would become a necessity, and those with pale skin now face discrimination and othering; there was no stopping those from the global south from moving north to seek higher ground and cooler climates, especially after Pakistan and India’s nuclear exchange.In this world the humanities have become an archival curiosity and Metcalfe, a professor at the underfunded University of the South Downs, teaches to near-empty rooms. He is a relic of the humanities in a world that no longer values them, “a poor cousin to the water scientists,” as he puts it. His colleagues envy the grant money that still flows to the climatologists and biotechnologists in the new “Renaissance of Necessity.” His own work of retracing the biographies of dead poets and their spouses from an archive of the entire internet, made possible only by Nigerian ingenuity, is a ritual of mourning, an act of faith performed in the ruins of meaning. The old moral questions persist, but without the luxury of conviction. McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization have finally given out.When Metcalfe refers to the twenty-first century as the “century of hubris,” he’s not sneering, he’s nostalgic. His generation has a life expectancy of 64. Electronics are scarce, plane travel nonexistent. Those born into collapse can no longer imagine progress, only curation, it seems. Amid this landscape of loss, Metcalfe begins his excavation of Francis Blundy, a prominent early-millennial poet who once read a cycle of sonnets called “A Corona for Vivien” to a coterie of literati at a dinner in 2014. The poem is ostensibly about his life with his wife, but comes in later years to achieve widespread and enduring fame largely because of the controversy surrounding its nonexistence—no copy of it exists—and the persistent belief that it was a suppressed masterpiece containing profound truths about a changing world during the years of what twenty-second-century citizens have come to call “The Derangement.” That is the time we the reader are living through now, when the world is on a collision course with ever more calamitous climate change–powered disasters. We are promised a future that is One Battle After Another with the elements, in which no political solutions seem possible. Over time, McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization—its faith in reason, progress, democratic governance—have finally given out.The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. Gone is the mechanical precision that once made his moral contraptions click. What remains is an older writer’s acceptance of disorder, an embrace of the fog. The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. The mystery of the poem’s disappearance and the suggestion that it might have been suppressed, or bought off by oil interests, or simply burned, drives the narrative as Metcalfe digs deeper into the moral archaeology of Blundy’s life. Blundy is vain, brilliant, intermittently tender, and wholly convinced that his intellect confers moral immunity. Vivien, a scholar of the Romantic poet John Clare, has allowed her own academic career to calcify in service of her husband’s as a poet. McEwan renders the contours of her domestic life—the long dinners for “the Barn set,” the ironing, the peeled potatoes for the poet’s birthday—as both parody of how much information those living through The Derangement collected digitally about their lives and as a lament for where it was all headed. Hers is a mind turned servant to another’s ambition, the life of the highly educated housewife whose tragedy is self-knowledge.The revelations in her confession arrive with the deliberate rhythm of memory loosening its hold. Vivien recounts her earlier marriage to Percy Greene, a kind craftsman and luthier whose mind begins to fray with Alzheimer’s. It is while caring for Percy that she meets Francis, who charms her, seduces her, and eventually persuades her that the sick man’s death would be merciful—an event he brings about himself, with a mallet. Francis, having inherited both his widow and his violin, begins the slow work of absorbing the dead man’s life into his own art.That theft—and its moral, emotional, and artistic dimensions—forms the novel’s true moral crisis. When, years later, Francis reads “A Corona for Vivien” aloud at a dinner table thick with smoke and brandy, she recognizes its falseness immediately. The poem, a lush meditation on love, mortality, and the natural world, is the inverse of everything the man believes. “I don’t like country walks,” he once told her. “I don’t know the names of flowers and I don’t give a damn.” In that moment she understands that he has not only stolen her husband’s essence but forged a counterfeit of her own devotion. What Metcalfe finds is not the poem itself but explanation of its absence, made manifest in the form of Vivien’s confession. Her memoir, retrieved from a sealed container beside her first husband’s violin, rewrites the story entirely. It reveals a marriage rooted in exploitation, a literary myth built on cruelty. Francis, a self-anointed genius who dismissed climate change as hysteria, depended on Vivien’s labor and intellect even as he erased them. That night, after the guests have gone, Vivien rolls up the poem’s vellum scroll and feeds it into the dairy stove. The act is both vengeance and mercy: the burning of a false idol. Her decision to destroy his work, committing it to the fire on the night of its triumph, is both punishment and release, the act of a woman reclaiming the one power left to her: the right to silence him.Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not escape McEwan. The belief that language can fix what nature destroys, or at least allow us a way past it, lives in both the protagonist and the object of his obsession here. He pores over Vivien’s letters, texts, and shopping lists as if they were fossils, “tokens of vitality” in an era when vitality itself has become an endangered condition. McEwan uses that obsession to mirror our own digital archiving of catastrophe, the endless documentation that substitutes for action.Francis’s climate denial, meanwhile, is more than characterization; it is McEwan’s indictment of the twenty-first-century elite class that refuses to imagine the crisis as worth sacrificing our decadent comforts and entitlements for. The poet’s failure to perceive the natural world except as metaphor becomes, in hindsight, a metaphor for civilization’s failure to perceive its own ending. McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.Like McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, What We Can Know has a nested structure—beginning with Metcalfe’s frame, then Vivien’s confession, and the recovered fragments of Francis’s correspondence—and it recalls Atonement, too, in its fascination with the ethics of narrative control. Francis Blundy, in his climate-denying, classicist arrogance, is an emblem of the old order, one that governs our world today: male, murderous, self-mythologizing, possessed by delusions that are driving us all off a cliff. Vivien’s corrective isn’t enough to save her first husband, or the world, from Francis’s harm. There is no justice to be found. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy. But continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless. Metcalfe, trudging between the archives and his coastal home, finds an unexpected companion in his colleague Rose Church, and their late-blooming affection, growing into an on-again, off-again literature department romance—halting, courteous, tinged with exhaustion—gives the novel its fragile heartbeat. When Rose reveals her pregnancy near the end, McEwan resists sentimentality. The child’s birth is not salvation; it is continuation, “the next link in the chain of futility and care.” Still, that flicker of human persistence feels like grace.If 2011’s Solar was McEwan’s comic treatment of environmental hubris, What We Can Know is its deeper, more tragic echo. Here, climate change functions as the novel’s moral solvent, dissolving the old binaries—guilt and innocence, art and theft, preservation and erasure—until all that remains is entropy. “The imagined poem triumphs over the real,” Metcalfe concludes, “because the imagination is all we have left.” In that single sentence lies both McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.
It’s perhaps fair to observe that Ian McEwan has entered the elegiac phase of his career. It happens to us all eventually, I suppose, whether one makes donuts or novels; eventually pondering what came before takes up most of your dwindling time. He looked back at the past in his last two novels: Machines Like Me (2019) is set in a 1980s England depicted through an alt-historical lens (the Brits lost the Falklands war to Argentina, but, in a version of the country where Alan Turing still lives, flying cars already exist), and Lessons (2022), a portrait of a feckless boomer born the same year McEwan was, 1948, spans 70 years of its protagonist’s unremarkable, faintly gilded life, one that never quite escapes the shadow of a sexual assault at the hands of his piano teacher, Ms. Cornell, when he was 14. McEwan’s fiction has always been about the need to make meaning from catastrophe, to awaken or shield the moral imagination through the intellect, and in his new book, What We Can Know, the catastrophe is the future and the elegy is for our species, as the oceans rise and prospects grow dour.The book concerns a literary scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, in a diminished England, one McEwan imagines as half-submerged and wholly disillusioned by 2119. The country’s green fields have turned into inland deltas, the southern coast has been eaten by what survivors call The Inundation—erosion of the coasts and rewriting of the world’s topography by the onrush of salt water, spurred not just by climate change but also by a catastrophic tsunami in the Atlantic caused by an errant Russian nuclear missile that landed short of America—and what remains of civilization has reorganized itself around an archipelago in which travel is hard and the only growth industries are data recovery and atmospheric management.McEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses. People move through the future quietly, their lives bracketed by scarcity and the faint hum of desalination plants. Interracial love has rendered most people honey-colored, just as the 1998 movie Bulworth predicted would become a necessity, and those with pale skin now face discrimination and othering; there was no stopping those from the global south from moving north to seek higher ground and cooler climates, especially after Pakistan and India’s nuclear exchange.In this world the humanities have become an archival curiosity and Metcalfe, a professor at the underfunded University of the South Downs, teaches to near-empty rooms. He is a relic of the humanities in a world that no longer values them, “a poor cousin to the water scientists,” as he puts it. His colleagues envy the grant money that still flows to the climatologists and biotechnologists in the new “Renaissance of Necessity.” His own work of retracing the biographies of dead poets and their spouses from an archive of the entire internet, made possible only by Nigerian ingenuity, is a ritual of mourning, an act of faith performed in the ruins of meaning. The old moral questions persist, but without the luxury of conviction. McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization have finally given out.When Metcalfe refers to the twenty-first century as the “century of hubris,” he’s not sneering, he’s nostalgic. His generation has a life expectancy of 64. Electronics are scarce, plane travel nonexistent. Those born into collapse can no longer imagine progress, only curation, it seems. Amid this landscape of loss, Metcalfe begins his excavation of Francis Blundy, a prominent early-millennial poet who once read a cycle of sonnets called “A Corona for Vivien” to a coterie of literati at a dinner in 2014. The poem is ostensibly about his life with his wife, but comes in later years to achieve widespread and enduring fame largely because of the controversy surrounding its nonexistence—no copy of it exists—and the persistent belief that it was a suppressed masterpiece containing profound truths about a changing world during the years of what twenty-second-century citizens have come to call “The Derangement.” That is the time we the reader are living through now, when the world is on a collision course with ever more calamitous climate change–powered disasters. We are promised a future that is One Battle After Another with the elements, in which no political solutions seem possible. Over time, McEwan’s novels have grown more austere, more haunted by the sense that the moral and narrative architectures that once defined Western civilization—its faith in reason, progress, democratic governance—have finally given out.The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. Gone is the mechanical precision that once made his moral contraptions click. What remains is an older writer’s acceptance of disorder, an embrace of the fog. The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. The mystery of the poem’s disappearance and the suggestion that it might have been suppressed, or bought off by oil interests, or simply burned, drives the narrative as Metcalfe digs deeper into the moral archaeology of Blundy’s life. Blundy is vain, brilliant, intermittently tender, and wholly convinced that his intellect confers moral immunity. Vivien, a scholar of the Romantic poet John Clare, has allowed her own academic career to calcify in service of her husband’s as a poet. McEwan renders the contours of her domestic life—the long dinners for “the Barn set,” the ironing, the peeled potatoes for the poet’s birthday—as both parody of how much information those living through The Derangement collected digitally about their lives and as a lament for where it was all headed. Hers is a mind turned servant to another’s ambition, the life of the highly educated housewife whose tragedy is self-knowledge.The revelations in her confession arrive with the deliberate rhythm of memory loosening its hold. Vivien recounts her earlier marriage to Percy Greene, a kind craftsman and luthier whose mind begins to fray with Alzheimer’s. It is while caring for Percy that she meets Francis, who charms her, seduces her, and eventually persuades her that the sick man’s death would be merciful—an event he brings about himself, with a mallet. Francis, having inherited both his widow and his violin, begins the slow work of absorbing the dead man’s life into his own art.That theft—and its moral, emotional, and artistic dimensions—forms the novel’s true moral crisis. When, years later, Francis reads “A Corona for Vivien” aloud at a dinner table thick with smoke and brandy, she recognizes its falseness immediately. The poem, a lush meditation on love, mortality, and the natural world, is the inverse of everything the man believes. “I don’t like country walks,” he once told her. “I don’t know the names of flowers and I don’t give a damn.” In that moment she understands that he has not only stolen her husband’s essence but forged a counterfeit of her own devotion. What Metcalfe finds is not the poem itself but explanation of its absence, made manifest in the form of Vivien’s confession. Her memoir, retrieved from a sealed container beside her first husband’s violin, rewrites the story entirely. It reveals a marriage rooted in exploitation, a literary myth built on cruelty. Francis, a self-anointed genius who dismissed climate change as hysteria, depended on Vivien’s labor and intellect even as he erased them. That night, after the guests have gone, Vivien rolls up the poem’s vellum scroll and feeds it into the dairy stove. The act is both vengeance and mercy: the burning of a false idol. Her decision to destroy his work, committing it to the fire on the night of its triumph, is both punishment and release, the act of a woman reclaiming the one power left to her: the right to silence him.Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not escape McEwan. The belief that language can fix what nature destroys, or at least allow us a way past it, lives in both the protagonist and the object of his obsession here. He pores over Vivien’s letters, texts, and shopping lists as if they were fossils, “tokens of vitality” in an era when vitality itself has become an endangered condition. McEwan uses that obsession to mirror our own digital archiving of catastrophe, the endless documentation that substitutes for action.Francis’s climate denial, meanwhile, is more than characterization; it is McEwan’s indictment of the twenty-first-century elite class that refuses to imagine the crisis as worth sacrificing our decadent comforts and entitlements for. The poet’s failure to perceive the natural world except as metaphor becomes, in hindsight, a metaphor for civilization’s failure to perceive its own ending. McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.Like McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, What We Can Know has a nested structure—beginning with Metcalfe’s frame, then Vivien’s confession, and the recovered fragments of Francis’s correspondence—and it recalls Atonement, too, in its fascination with the ethics of narrative control. Francis Blundy, in his climate-denying, classicist arrogance, is an emblem of the old order, one that governs our world today: male, murderous, self-mythologizing, possessed by delusions that are driving us all off a cliff. Vivien’s corrective isn’t enough to save her first husband, or the world, from Francis’s harm. There is no justice to be found. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy. But continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless. Metcalfe, trudging between the archives and his coastal home, finds an unexpected companion in his colleague Rose Church, and their late-blooming affection, growing into an on-again, off-again literature department romance—halting, courteous, tinged with exhaustion—gives the novel its fragile heartbeat. When Rose reveals her pregnancy near the end, McEwan resists sentimentality. The child’s birth is not salvation; it is continuation, “the next link in the chain of futility and care.” Still, that flicker of human persistence feels like grace.If 2011’s Solar was McEwan’s comic treatment of environmental hubris, What We Can Know is its deeper, more tragic echo. Here, climate change functions as the novel’s moral solvent, dissolving the old binaries—guilt and innocence, art and theft, preservation and erasure—until all that remains is entropy. “The imagined poem triumphs over the real,” Metcalfe concludes, “because the imagination is all we have left.” In that single sentence lies both McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.
