What will people make of our lives and times 100 years from now? The question is at the core of Ian McEwan’s new novel, What We Can Know, which takes its title from the historian Richard Holmes’s Dr Johnson & Mr Savage. Holmes argued that Samuel Johnson’s biography of the poet Richard Savage launched an era in which biography rivals the novel, asking “what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love”.
What We Can Know – “science fiction without the science” – opens in 2119, in a UK that’s become an archipelago after “the Inundation”. In 2042 the “long-predicted” war between Russia and the West began with a Russian hydrogen bomb aimed at the US. Falling short of its target, it exploded in the Atlantic. Along with the resulting floods, nuclear wars and “the Derangement” – “shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences” – have halved the Earth’s population. With warlords controlling what’s left of North America, Nigeria is the world’s leading superpower.
Tom Metcalfe is a humanities professor at the University of the South Downs, where he teaches a course called The Politics and Literature of the Inundation. A specialist in early 21st-century literature, he becomes fixated on a love poem, A Corona for Vivien, written by the poet Francis Blundy as a gift to his wife, Vivien, in 2014. Read aloud once at her birthday dinner, the sole copy, a vellum scroll presented to Vivien, has disappeared.
Tom trawls the archives for clues about the poem’s contents and whereabouts. Unlike past historians, his problem is not too few sources but too many: text messages, camera reels, email drafts and browser histories – stored on “what the Blundy era airily called ‘the cloud’” – are all available to him. “Messages sent by end-to-end encryption have been laid bare,” he shares, “ ... we have robbed the past of its privacy.” And yet, despite all the data, the truth remains elusive.
As he becomes increasingly obsessed with Vivien, Tom’s marriage to Rose, a colleague, begins to wobble. The couple disagree professionally, too. Tom is more comfortable with filling in the blanks of a story: “my duty is to vitality, to convey the experience of lived and felt life, to what it was to live in a certain time,” he tells Rose. She, meanwhile, errs towards the “arid”, arguing that their “only duty is to the truth”.
McEwan has written cli-fi before, in the satirical 2010 novel Solar. Since moving away from the historical fiction that made his name, his novels have increasingly taken on topical subjects, such as euthanasia (Amsterdam), the Iraq War (Saturday), AI (Machines Like Me) and Brexit (The Cockroach) – leading the critic Ryan Ruby to accuse his novels of veering into “narrativised punditry”. In What We Can Know, he matter-of-factly lists the consequences of climate change in his fictional world, but the characters don’t quite engage in that world: aside from consuming “cheap, edible protein” and acorn coffee, and travelling to libraries preserved at elevation, the life of a humanities professor looks very much like today.
The novel is at its strongest when McEwan returns to his forte of realism, with a macabre twist harking back to his earliest work. The scene of Vivien’s birthday dinner, in which the attendees are caught up in their own internal dramas and, as such, not listening to the corona, is well-rendered, as are his portrayals of relationship dynamics. He has fun with a side dig at a minimalist author, “winner of all the usual prizes, almost a national treasure”, whose writing has “all descriptive colour stripped out, too cautious for any fictional tricks, false histories or false trails”.
The pace (and fictional tricks) pick up in part two, with Vivien’s first-person account, written in 2020. The decline of her first husband, Percy, a talented violin maker who had early-onset Alzheimer’s, is delicately and poignantly rendered. Vivien’s story elucidates her relationship with Blundy – less rosy than the mythology suggests, which has cast her as his happy helpmeet. The gripping – if somewhat melodramatic – story reveals complicated romantic entanglements and skeletons in the closet.
Deliberately set before the Trump era and the war in Ukraine, 2014 is painted as a halcyon era, evoking nostalgia and frustration with our blithe dismissal of impending ecological doom. Tom marvels at “people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday” and “razing ancient forests to make paper to wipe their backsides”. Among the optimistic elements of What We Can Know is that, however defunded, a literature department still exists in 2119, and that a poem is so important. In his acknowledgments, McEwan credits John Fuller’s Marston Meadows: A corona for Prue – “a celebration of long love and nature, and a meditation on mortality” – as the inspiration for the novel. The corona form requires the repetition of its first line as the last. “Come then. We’ll walk,” Fuller suggests. “What else is there to do?”
