Ian McEwan Casts the Climate Crisis as a Story of Adultery

At the start of “What We Can Know,” Ian McEwan’s eighteenth novel, the year is 2119 and the humanities are still in crisis. Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of the literature of 1990 to 2030, props up his lectures with jokes and colorful animations; he and his colleague Rose, who is also his lover, speak to students in “cheery sing-song voices, as if addressing a pre-school class.” Midway through the twenty-first century, a nuclear disaster sent tsunamis curling over the continents, sinking New York and Rotterdam and turning the United Kingdom into an archipelago. With much of the past decomposing underwater, it’s hard to blame young people for preferring “things that are new, like the latest toys and novelties of Nigerian pop culture,” Tom reflects. He imagines the inner monologues of his students, sitting listlessly through a seminar on “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation”: “The past was peopled by idiots. Big deal. The matter was dead.”

For Tom—a man easily carried off by obsession, emotion, or reverie—not much ever really dies. He is fixated on a dinner party that took place in October of 2014, at the country home of the poet Francis Blundy, an eminence rivalled only by Seamus Heaney. The evening, later known as the “Second Immortal Dinner,” drew a glamorous group that included Blundy’s editor, his sister, and a journalist who profiled him in “a magazine called Vanity Fair.” The occasion was the birthday of Blundy’s wife, Vivien. That night, Blundy recited a sonnet cycle, “A Corona for Vivien,” exalting their love and the natural world. Only one copy of the poem existed. Entrusted to Vivien, it has since been lost. The mystery gnaws at Tom: Was the work suppressed? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, and memoirs from the party suggest that “A Corona for Vivien” was a masterpiece—“the words, the images, the unearthly music of their ruthless truth, bore the listeners away, as if in a dream.” The poem comes to symbolize the unattainability of a bygone world, “more beautiful,” in Tom’s view, “for not being known.”

This elusiveness is all the more alluring given that twenty-second-century researchers have access to a mountain of detail—the ephemera of our digital lives, preserved in Nigerian data centers. “We have robbed the past of its privacy,” Tom recalls his dean saying. Tom knows Francis’s favorite snack (an apple), has scanned Vivien’s browsing history, and can watch “the daily news that troubled her contemporaries, the diverting scandals, the ancient sporting triumphs.” Much of the novel’s charm lies in its re-creation of our era as seen from the future. (A luthier’s fortunes improve after he meets “a member of the famous group Radiohead.”) A hopeless nostalgist, Tom rhapsodizes about the glories of 2010, the effect at once amusing and chastening. “To have been alive then in those resourceful raucous times, when the sea stood off at a respectful distance, when you could walk in any direction as far as you liked and keep your feet dry,” he laments. The air was “purer and less radioactive” then; the average life span had not yet dropped to sixty-two. For McEwan, whose tone often tends toward the elegiac, Tom is a useful self-deprecation, and a didactic mouthpiece: Readers, he seems to say, appreciate what you have.

At seventy-seven, McEwan, who has been adorned with his native Britain’s rarest honors, enjoys something like Stuart Sapphire status. His later fiction has tilted topical—“Saturday” on 9/11, “Solar” on the climate crisis, “Machines Like Me” on A.I.—and embraced high-concept conceits, most conspicuously in “Nutshell,” narrated by a fetus modelled on Hamlet. Yet he has always filtered his philosophical preoccupations through the prism of domestic drama. “What We Can Know” feels like a direct descendant of “Atonement,” McEwan’s most beloved work, where an illicit relationship generates unexpected tremors, and fantasy and memory rush into the gaps between facts.

The new book suggests that human beings have always been declinist, underselling the riches of the present and romanticizing what earlier generations merely made do with. The “Second Immortal Dinner,” Tom explains, pales beside the first, which took place in 1817, at the home of the painter Ben Haydon, and featured Wordsworth, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. “There was no one at the Blundys’ that evening who could have matched Leigh Hunt or Keats” or “competed with Wordsworth for learning, memorised verse or force of personality,” Tom concedes. Yet the Romantics themselves were prone to feeling that they’d missed out on something. In Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” addressed to Lamb, an injury keeps the poet from joining his friends at a waterfall. He resigns himself to the humbler attractions of his garden. (“Yet still the solitary humble-bee / Sings in the bean-flower!”) Today his evocations of “transparent foliage” and “a deep radiance” laid “full on the ancient ivy” are admired as glimpses of nature at its height.

But, if yearning for lost splendor blinds people to what they have (TLC might have told Coleridge not to go chasing waterfalls), the opposite risk is letting forgetfulness stunt the imagination. “As natural beauty declines over the years, so too, unnoticed, do standards of beauty,” Tom observes. It is no small loss that the Blundys could step into a garden alive with “fifty-seven resident species” of butterfly, while the archipelago dwellers of 2119 count only eight. The oceans of Tom’s day—“vast beds of undulating sea grasses”—are nothing like Vivien’s “seas whose cold depths contained cod, mackerel, hake, shad and sprat, pollock and three-bearded rockling.” So who is right, the students, who plant themselves in the now, or the forlorn historian? Are the tides that have overrun McEwan’s novel—the “hostile sea” obscuring the face of the earth—oblivion or memory?

It’s never wise to underestimate the minor characters at a dinner party. One of the Blundys’ guests, Mary Sheldrake, is a successful novelist—“almost a national treasure,” McEwan wickedly notes—celebrated for her minimal, affectless style and abstract themes. On the publicity circuit, she stirs controversy by denouncing the traditional novel as a “paradigm of higher gossip.” Until modernism, she insists, fiction was merely “love, marriage, adultery, contested wills—the stuff of neighbourly fascination.”

In the second half of “What We Can Know,” the speculative scaffolding falls away and the perspective shifts to Vivien’s. Here, McEwan leans into dishy melodrama, embracing what Mary would call “the amoral, easy-living ways of conventional fictional realism.” After giving so much space to Tom’s idealizations of the past, McEwan seems intent on some puncturing. Francis proves ripe for deflation: as the novel unfolds, he emerges not only as monstrously narcissistic but also as something of a fraud. The “Corona” is “fakery,” one guest realizes; Francis, who indulges in a climate-change-denying rant shortly before his recitation, “had no love for the things his poem seemed to love.” Vivien is startled that he “would want to imagine a life, evoked in such detail, in which they freely roamed, adoring nature’s plenitude. . . . It was as if he was beguiling her with all that was missing from their marriage.”