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16 Sep 2025

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The unique Englishness found within Ian McEwan’s writing might not be fully apparent to his local audience. However, it shines through vividly—and at times humorously—to this non-English viewpoint. It’s not just McEwan’s nostalgic and nationalistic attention on British scenery—the meadow blooms, hedgerows, and craggy outcrops, the endless pebble” of Chesil Beach, or the turkey oak mentioned in the opening passage of Enduring Love.

Nor is it simply the ferocious middle-classness of his later novels, where every significant figure is no less than a brain surgeon or a high court judge, everyone is well-versed with Proust, Bach, and Wordsworth, while people from lower social strata often appear as disruptive interlopers from a realm where nobody tinkers with the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. Instead, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his meticulously rational, yet sometimes endearingly short-sighted, liberal ethical outlook: England’s most praiseworthy—and most irritating—legacy to political thought and literature.

An Imaginative Vision of Catastrophe

Such thoughts were prompted by a brief segment in McEwan’s latest future-set novel that depicts the “Inundation” of England after a foreign missile accidentally explodes in the mid-Atlantic, triggering a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, eradicates all but a Europe-wide chain of high altitudes. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the islands goes without note. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, suffered greatly as Europe was submerged. But from McEwan’s visionary narrative, one would never realize it.

This science fiction premise, the hidden histories finally disclosed: they are engaging, and handled with great brio

Isolation as a Key Idea

The novel is set a century hence, in 2119. Part one is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an institution mostly focused on STEM and mathematics, situated on a 38-mile-wide island in the “sleepy ahistorical” republican archipelago that is what’s left of the UK. Globally, things are post-catastrophe. The 21st century has unfolded as many feared it would. The US is now governed by competing “military leaders”; an African nation is the hegemonic power. However, these are all background elements. When the novel opens, Tom rides various ferries to the Bodleian Library, now housed on a Snowdonian summit and reachable by a “water-and-gravity-powered cable railway”.

Here, he searches the archive of Francis Blundy, a poet of our own time, and reportedly the equal of Seamus Heaney. Outwardly a reserved, academic type—his initial pages emphasize how “peaceful” and “smooth” his existence is—Tom, like a true scholar, burns within. He is seeking a missing poem, the improbably named A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy wrote for his wife Vivien’s 50th birthday in 2014. Recited once at Vivien’s birthday dinner, the sole copy, on vellum, that scholars know of only from period accounts of the event, disappeared into a credulity-stretching legend as the renowned unfound poem of the environmental emergency.

Longing and Progressive Bias

Alone on the mental space of his obsession, Tom constructs a image of the missing masterpiece, and alongside it, a portrait of the early 21st century. It is a nostalgic portrait, and Tom’s obsessive yearning for our turbulent and disordered historical moment is the canniest element of What We Can Know. Without doubt, the narrative—revolving as it does on the whereabouts of Blundy’s vellum manuscript and a sequence of surprising revelations about various characters—is incredibly gripping and finally unconvincing in that familiar McEwan manner.

Under his assertive candor, we come to question that Tom is actually a profoundly evasive narrator. It is Tom, and rather than his author, who possesses the English liberal’s limited perspective of vision. Stranded on his regressive academic refuge, he has minimal time for the vulnerable humanity in his life. He sees his associate and occasional partner Rose, for example, increasingly as a means to an end. Can his nostalgia, or indeed his liberalism, be relied upon? Will they ever be enough, now or in the years to come?

A New Form for Catastrophe

At one point, Rose contends that, between the years 2015 to 2030, there was “a crisis of realism in fiction” brought about by the magnitude of environmental breakdown: “Novel styles were needed to frame the material and ethical consequences of a worldwide calamity.” Readers are meant, I think, to view Rose’s theory with some skepticism. Yet we are surely meant to see What We Can Know in Rose’s terms, as an effort to discover a new approach in which to write about what McEwan’s characters, echoing Amitav Ghosh, call “the derangement”.

Therefore, this is a science fiction work that is also a narrative entirely about our mundane present, with its “philosophical pessimism” about the future. The science fiction setting, the concealed narratives eventually disclosed: these are fun, and handled with great energy, but they’re not exactly groundbreaking. The book’s value lies in what it is willing to leave out—nothing new, this, but a classically realist virtue. What’s excluded, and forces us work out for ourselves: the “ethical implications of a planetary catastrophe”. That we can understand only, possibly, by interpretation or by conceiving.

Liberalism itself, in the early 21st century, seems increasingly archipelagic—limited to the island peaks of a former cultural landscape. We may see McEwan, the liberal critic of liberalism, as one of those peaks. Après lui, le déluge?