Ian McEwan belongs on the list of authors whose novels work well as an antidote to doomscrolling. Spend an hour with one of his books and you start to feel the world settling back into place as he quietly reaches for the right word, again and again. In a world of all-caps tweets, it does the mind good to experience language deployed with such care, and so invitingly.
Such is the power of language used well that it’s a pleasure to read McEwan’s books even when they take tragic misfortune as their subject, as they often do. McEwan’s newest novel, “What We Can Know,” is a story about climate disaster. Cleverly, though, when we begin, the disaster has already passed. Taking the year 2119 as its starting point, the novel casts a rueful eye back at the cataclysmic course of the 21st century, and at us in our oblivious present, “crouched beneath extinction’s alp,” as the protagonist puts it, paraphrasing Philip Larkin.
From the perspective of McEwan’s imagined future, our epoch looks pretty bad. Put briefly, as the oceans rose, we squabbled. Rather than pulling back from the brink, we stopped only when war and climate change had so hobbled our technological capacities that further self-destruction became more or less impossible.
What’s left after the flood is an impoverished world, but a tranquil one. England has become a neglected archipelago. Some of its northern waters swarm with pirates in electric canoes. Many of its native animal species have been depleted; no more hedgehogs, many fewer birds and butterflies. But this is not the ashen hellscape of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” It’s a subdued world — worse for wear — in which the nightmare has passed. Some readers may find themselves hoping we might be so lucky.
“What We Can Know” follows the quiet life of a professor of literature, Tom Metcalfe, whose area of expertise is the period 1990 to 2030. In the year 2014, we learn, a famous poet named Francis Blundy wrote a sonnet sequence for his wife. Read once on the occasion of her birthday dinner and then lost from the records, the “Corona for Vivien” became an object of popular and scholarly lore. Like every student of the period, Tom longs to find the lost poem.
In fact, Tom longs to escape from his own “timorous” present and return to the chaotic bravado of our own age. “They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike,” Tom says of us. “They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain.” As he’s shown across several recent novels, McEwan has a gift for seeing the vices of the present with one eye and its virtues with the other.
One of the major concerns of the novel is, well, what we can know. Tom has access to a sea of information about the period he studies, including every text and email ever sent by Francis and Vivien Blundy, and he fancies that this is as good as being a fly on the wall of their lives. “I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend,” muses Tom. If you commit them to your keyboard, “we’ll know everything.”
It soon becomes clear, however, that Tom doesn’t know everything. The written record of our lives is incomplete. What we can know turns out to be less than we think we know. The way McEwan draws out the distance between Tom’s scholarly reconstruction of events and the events themselves is clever and satisfying. And while McEwan would surely be the first to acknowledge that he cannot know what the next century will look like, his predictions are dark enough to rouse us but hopeful enough to ward off despair.
McEwan is now 77, and “What We Can Know” is his 17th novel. Remarkably, his first collection of short stories was published 50 years ago, in 1975. Six of his novels have been longlisted or shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1998 for “Amsterdam.” Four of his novels have been made into films. McEwan is that rare writer whose books are enjoyed by critics and lay readers alike. This reviewer is one of his many admirers.
And yet it is hard not to quibble with the publisher’s bold description of “What We Can Know” as a “masterpiece.” The novel is epic in scope, straddling a century without losing McEwan’s trademark attention to the fine grain of our emotional lives. The narrative is compelling and often moving.
But McEwan makes a slightly goofy prophet. It can be difficult to take him seriously as his characters make love beside sea turtles in the newly tropical waters of the Republic of England’s archipelago or ride its water-powered funiculars. McEwan is at his strongest when he confronts the horrors of the past century, as he does in “Black Dogs” and “Atonement,” rather than the speculative tragedies of the century to come.
Two of McEwan’s very few characteristic foibles are also on display here. The first is the political sensibility of the New Atheist set: well-informed but intransigent, and patronizing on the topic of religion. “How we would have loved it to be true,” thinks one of the characters as she listens to the “improbable words” of a friend’s funeral service.
The second is McEwan’s habit of introducing emotionally poignant surprises at improbable times. A pregnancy comes to light just as all hope seems lost. A marriage is destroyed out of the blue on the very morning the couple has at last decided to have a child. Such coincidences can happen, of course, but they happen a bit too often to McEwan’s characters.
Even so, he wields these moments to greater effect than most authors do. They are surely a part of his wide appeal, and his wide appeal is cause for hope. “What We Can Know” is a timely and typically thoughtful addition to McEwan’s impressive corpus. If it finds enough readers, perhaps we can avoid the future it depicts.
