What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

River Rothay near Dove Cottage, Lake District (photo credit: Martyn B.)

The emotion of climate change can be many things, anger, guilt, a sense of foreboding, a mystery, how bad will it be?  A climate fiction novelist might seek to build up a story around impending disaster, but McEwan dispenses with these in the beginning pages of his new book released in September 2025. We learn what happened between now and 2124 in a fictional world, that endured a sequence of catastrophes and then a mild outcome in which southern England -- where the present and past stories are situated – is quite livable.  In this future, people live peacefully and with enough to eat, and the English climate is safely similar to that of today.  Global warming, which the fictional narrator, Tom Metcalfe, describes more aptly as global heating, is dealt with in short order so that McEwan can get to the business of writing a novel that is filled with suspense, mystery and romance, and indirectly, climate change on every fascinating page.

Tom’s material life is not bad at all but his circumstances in the early 22^nd century and that of his contemporaries was made possible through a series of horrific events in the 21^st century.  Struggle for resources in a heating climate fueled regional conflict and warfare: “Nationalist 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 infinitely 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. 

This future does not, in my opinion, resemble what the New York Times puts as “standard dystopian nightmare fuel”.  The people of early 22^nd century England in Tom Metcalfe’s world are living a life of sufficiency, with immense access to information because the internet had been preserved. 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 windpower 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 apartments in tall apartment blocks in a set-up that does not seem very appealing, but the inhabitants take it in stride even when they are re-assigned to a smaller unit. 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, fall in love on a sandbar.

 But Tom does not try to concern us much with his own personal ups and downs, a woman of our time – Vivien Blundy who he has gotten to know through paper and digitized archives is an important part of his emotional life perhaps more so than Rose who he sees and touches in the flesh.  Despite the rather okay circumstances of his life, Tom Metcalfe is so aware of loss that he cannot fully live in his own present.  He is an academic specializing in the literature of our era, which apparently 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.”  This abundance is in contrast to Metcalfe’s early 22^nd century world which is diminished in cultural diversity. As a literature scholar he feels this loss acutely and he is most interested in one of the most famous poets 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.

The fictional Blundy is, actually, a fake in his sentiments.  While he could write in the style of England’s great nature poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and John Clare, he himself did not like the outdoors and had 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.  His story is a new manifestation of the old romantic rivalry that ended gruesomely in The Innocent, comically tragic in Solar, and tragically Shakespearean in Nutshell.  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.

Blundy’s badness and Vivien’s reflections drive the story forward in the second half of the book, but in the meantime, Metcalfe is oblivious to the poet’s ill-deeds but immersed in Blundy’s time, its landscapes, and its proximity to the landscapes that preceded Blundy’s time: “…across the landscape lay a jealously preserved lattice- work of old footpaths that ran through woods, across the last remaining meadows, 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.

Through his love of Romantic poetry Tom Metcalfe has a special connection with the Lake District, explaining the landscape that William Wordsworth knew: “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 exclusion that McEwan articulates is one that is not identified by science, or the social study of human needs, but a loss that can only be conveyed by the humanities.  National climate assessments, such as published in the USA every few years since 2000 and now, indefinitely canceled, may describe habitat loss, but McEwan is describing the poetic rendering of nature and the loss of the tangible landscape that the poet could see, but that the inhabitants of the future world may never see or really know.  It is hard to imagine that the scientists of the future can fully describe this loss without the voice of the poet.  And today it is hard to dismiss the potential of the novel to mirror our current times and help us to understand what we are losing and what future humankind cannot fully know.  This is the first novel to have achieved this.