What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan

University of East Anglia: housing and environmental science dept

This novel offers conversations between the present, the past and the future, about climate, art and love.  The present centers on characters who write poetry or study it and live in and around Oxford. The past makes appearances in the poets and landscapes of 19^th century England, in the gentle hills and crags of the Lake District and the nature themes that perhaps express “biophilia” better than any other poetic works, at least in the English language.  Thirty years ago, unwittingly I stepped into a scene in this novel. Following a climate change meeting at the University of Lancaster, I took the train to the town of Grasmere and then walked over hill and dale, my object being Dove cottage, the home of the poet William Wordsworth. It was my first trip to the Lake District, and I was surprised at the number of houses I saw scattered about on my six-mile trek.  But it was a sunny day, and I airbrushed the small breeze block structures away in my imagination and replaced them with the poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” which I had memorized as a child. I did indeed see daffodils fluttering and dancing in abundance.

At Wordsworth’s house I took the tour, delighting in the small room upstairs where an underground stream emerged and rushed through, contained by stone walls, offering a soft murmur and refrigeration for the glass milk bottles. At the base of the stairs I stopped to read a document in Wordsworth’s hand framed in glass on the wall. I could have missed it, but I read it, it was about the experience of that spring day and the writing of “I Wandered…” and the date was the very same day of my visit.  I had seen much the same landscape as Wordsworth, the hills and lake but also the same light, and the same meadow flowers. This coincidence only deepened my feeling of sharing the original inspiration of this poem.

Our connection to landscape, and to cultural memory of the landscape as described in poetry, the visual arts, even music, is something that is only partly preserved today in many parts of the world.  Its value is intangible and is not easily described by the scientists and social scientists who contribute to all manners of climate impact assessments and biodiversity loss compendiums.  In this novel, the traditional landscapes of England are gone, submerged after tsunamis brought on by wars and sea level rise brought on by climate change. As ever, Ian McEwan is making a case for the importance of the novel in comparison to science, helping us to not only understand a projection of loss under climate change but to make us feel that loss.   

River Rothay, Lake District

McEwan’s vehicle is a young academic, Tom Metcalfe teaching English literature in the early 22^nd century.  His passion is the literature of the past, especially 1990-2030 but also earlier eras and of course the Romantics. He looks back at our time and earlier with a great deal of curiosity and longing and through the internet he has an experience of these landscapes:

 “I was in love with simple Dove Cottage.  They became mine, those 900 square miles of mountains and lakes,…Submerged long ago, they remain a familiar terrain, boundlessly free, one that I can almost convince myself I remember.”….the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here appears whole and precious, when many of humanities problems could have been solved. When too few understood how sublime their natural and man-made worlds were.”  The novel’s narrator has a poignant view of  all the landscapes that he reviews as a scholar of literature regarding them with a feeling of loss: “…across the landscape lay a jealously preserved lattice- work of old footpaths that ran through woods, across the last remaining fields, alongside impure streams….there was a continuity which must have shaped the understanding of a poet, and which is not available to us today,” writes Metcalfe.

Tom Metcalfe has trouble seeing his own physical surroundings as beautiful, though the built environment and rewilded landscape of the early 22^nd century reflect feats of human ingenuity and cooperation after all the tragedy, the “great disruptions” that preceded it.  The details of McEwan’s imagined future world are carefully constructed and bears some resemblance to Singapore, the high GDP, low carbon footprint nation where Ian McEwan lived as a child. 

The people of early 22^nd century England in Tom Metcalfe’s world are living a life of sufficiency because the human race eventually tamed climate change and learned to use resources wisely. The head of state depicted on the English coinage is or was a Mary Tyndall, a fictional relative of the 19^th century Irish scientist John Tyndall who wrote precisely and lyrically of the greenhouse effect theory, taking the science further than his predecessors, Joseph Fourier in France and Eunice Foote in the USA.

Regardless of whether this early 22^nd century English life evolved out of necessity or enlightenment, the material culture of this society is interesting, a selection of what we often tell ourselves we should be doing or using.   England has become a country of vegans or ovo-vegetarians, multi-unit housing dwellers and bicycle riders. They are following a sensible diet, eating bread, eggs and protein cake.  As special treats, they can tuck away vegetable stew and drink chicory coffee instead of acorn coffee, and sometimes even apple brandy.  Chocolate can be had, but at more than $100 a bar. Meat doesn’t seem to be consumed, or even discussed, perhaps this is not a nightmare for those who have never tasted it or craved it.

England is a series of islands and archipelagos named for their high ground – Chilterns, Cotswolds, Downs -- that are reached using ferries and sailboats with backup motors.  The ocean is everywhere and the wrecks of 21^st century civilization, submerged automobiles are pulled up from the sea and repurposed into useful material. Fossil fuels do not seem to be part of this future world, and the protagonists of this book use wind power and hydropower for their personal mobility.   Tom Metcalfe has a transit card that unlocks bicycles from docking stations placed conveniently close to marinas and apartment buildings.  I have to ask myself whether I’ve ever been able to avail myself of such a pleasant bimodal means of getting around. Trains and bicycles, yes, even here in Chicago, ferries and walking paths in Geneva, but ferries and bike stations? I’m not sure about that!

In this future world, airplanes and airports do not seem to be in existence. The USA, for instance, can be visited only using a boat, but few make the voyage because America is a violent place of constant warfare.  The continent has become isolated because the dominant power – Nigeria – has cut the communication cables.  Unlike southern England, the USA has never recovered from the disruptions and struggles of the 21^st century.  And to recall that most of this book was written before November 2024!

The academics in this novel, including those with inherited wealth, live in small and medium sized apartments, in apartment blocks that may be the only form of housing.  Windows are small because glass is expensive, and bathrooms are often shared.  The dense housing and sprawl-free settlements, however, has freed up land and allowed efforts to rewild the countryside to bear fruit.  Tom Metcalfe is sometimes forced to admit that the seashore near where he lives is not only nice, it is beautiful.  And one evening he and his colleague Rose finally fall in love on a sandbar despite still being in love with the early 21^st century.

It took me much less time to fall for this novel which begins with a summary of the past horrors of the mid-21^st century.  Struggle for resources in a heating climate fueled regional conflict and warfare: “  and religious furor merged in both states [Pakistan and India]. Merciful Allah on one side, diverse gods, some with elephant trunks on the other, inflamed and blessed their separate constituencies.”  The USA, western Europe and Russia are also embroiled in war but the world is saved thanks to the happy coincidence that a limited nuclear exchange released aerosols, “war dust,” that radiated much of the atmospheric heat back out to space.  McEwan chose this fortuitous coincidence, not because he thinks that it is likely to happen, in fact, he likely knows that the alternative outcome – unabated climate change and destructive wars, not necessarily nuclear, are more probable. Instead, he reminds us of the two great crises that humanity can engineer, and then almost neutralizes them so that the future he depicts is not so dire as to overwhelm the narrative. 

Tom and Rose’s ancestors survived these events, and the young academics chose our era as their specialty although it is not a particularly popular period of study compared with the mid-21^st century, which had the best writers, more well-regarded than William Shakespeare or Ian McEwan. Metcalfe contributes to “the Literature and History Joint Programme:1990-2030,” a period defined probably more by climate history than by literature; the beginning of public awareness of climate change in 1990, until 2030, a year not specifically described, but the start of a new era of literature, as well as natural disasters. Even compared to what followed, the period 1990-2030 stands out in its careless decadence.

Writes Metcalfe of our era,“….what brilliant invention and bone-headed greed….people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday, buildings that touched the cloud base; razing ancient forests to make paper to wipe their back-sides.”  Metcalfe and his colleague and eventually wife, Rose, struggle to interest their students in this era.  Like students everywhere they are mostly pre-occupied with their own present and fashions, which in 2119 happens to include leprechaun-ish, oversized buckles on their belts.  But unlike the imagined grandchildren of the future, they do not forgive the inhabitants of this era and would rather know nothing about us.  Metcalfe paraphrases their views: “Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts. Surely they could have done something other than grow their economies and wage wars.”  In his conversations with Rose, the critique is even more scathing: “It was all scorched earth, all blithe contempt for the generations to follow.”

The mirror on our failings to slow climate change is merged with our unprecedented cultural offerings and Metcalfe is fascinated by both.  He retrieves a video of Blackwell’s bookstore in 2018, “Oh to have wandered the aisles thrilled to be riding the crest of newness, interest and abundance.”  I can readily share this sentiment and even imagine a certain black, white and green paperback joining the feast at this venerable place.  But  the novel’s narrator is not interested in lightly read works of nonfiction, he is a specialist in the most famous poet of our era, the fictional Francis Blundy, who was believed to have written the greatest poem of our time, a biophilic poem of complex form, a corona, and a work that climate activists believed might have slowed climate change were it not that the poem had been lost and never found. While enjoying the quest for the lost corona, readers might read “Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue,” John Fuller’s poem that inspired this book,

The fictional Blundy is a fake in his sentiments.  While he can write in the style of England’s great nature poets, he himself does not like the outdoors and has not even bothered to learn how to swim. In fact, Blundy is an old-school bad guy, a snobbish villain as we gradually discern, as well as an ordinary hypocrite.  It also doesn’t hurt to say that he is a climate denier and doesn’t lift a finger around the house.  All the mundane details of his existence are handled by his wife Vivien, a former academic and teaching fellow at Oxford University who has diverted her talents and time to maintaining Blundy.  

At some point in this novel, the voice of Vivian Blundy takes charge of the narrative and does justice to the task of conveying impending horror.  As she goes about her tidying up she comes across some spiders, and readers of Nutshell are rewarded with a flicker of apprehension recalling a previous McEwan work in which spiders in a glove crush the murderer’s alibi. Or maybe it won’t be so bad, Vivien has thwarted an attempted child abduction at a railway station recalling the driving tragedy of A Child in Time. In any case, Blundy’s badness and Vivien’s complicity drive the story forward in the remainder of the book, a rollicking tale in which McEwan proves once again that a climate change novel can be a wonderful read.