Ian McEwan’s Haunting Vision of the Future

Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not escape McEwan. The belief that language can fix what nature destroys, or at least allow us a way past it, lives in both the protagonist and the object of his obsession here. He pores over Vivien’s letters, texts, and shopping lists as if they were fossils, “tokens of vitality” in an era when vitality itself has become an endangered condition. McEwan uses that obsession to mirror our own digital archiving of catastrophe, the endless documentation that substitutes for action.

Francis’s climate denial, meanwhile, is more than characterization; it is McEwan’s indictment of the twenty-first-century elite class that refuses to imagine the crisis as worth sacrificing our decadent comforts and entitlements for. The poet’s failure to perceive the natural world except as metaphor becomes, in hindsight, a metaphor for civilization’s failure to perceive its own ending. McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know.

If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.

Like McEwan’s most famous novel, Atonement, What We Can Know has a nested structure—beginning with Metcalfe’s frame, then Vivien’s confession, and the recovered fragments of Francis’s correspondence—and it recalls Atonement, too, in its fascination with the ethics of narrative control. Francis Blundy, in his climate-denying, classicist arrogance, is an emblem of the old order, one that governs our world today: male, murderous, self-mythologizing, possessed by delusions that are driving us all off a cliff. Vivien’s corrective isn’t enough to save her first husband, or the world, from Francis’s harm. There is no justice to be found. If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.