I’ve been reading Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know (2025). It’s the first work of fiction that’s held my attention in several years. The real world has been so strange that fiction has felt trite. In spite of being populated by pompous poets and unhappy academics, this book pulled me in. There’s a good measure of dysfunction and dystopia, but McEwan’s well-crafted prose makes it a joy to read.
The Inundation
The majority of the book is set in the UK in the year 2119. A lecturer in English literature and history who specializes in the period 1990-2030 is on a quest to discover a poem written in 2014. The existence of the poem is documented, but it was never published.
A lot happened between 2014 and 2119. Competition for resources on an overheating planet led to a series of limited nuclear wars. During one of these, a Russian nuclear weapon exploded in the mid-Atlantic by accident (or maybe not). The resulting tsunami, combined with already high sea levels, led to catastrophic flooding that permanently changed the geography of the UK, among other countries. Hundreds of millions died. Industrial supply chains collapsed, science ground to a halt, and formerly powerful economies became pitiful barter societies.
The UK mainland was transformed into archipelago of former mountaintops. Oxford and London are submerged. The United States is a lawless territory ruled by warlords who must be paid protection money as soon as you land there.
Ancestors
The humans who survived “The Inundation” regard their predecessors from the early 21st century with a mix of envy and contempt. They envy their easy enjoyment of global travel (“people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday”) and access to a mind-boggling array of things and experiences to buy. They resent their stupidity and short-sightedness. How could the same people who were smart enough to invent the internet and “make a start on AI” be so short-sighted that they knowingly, even gleefully, trashed ecosystems and risked the hard-won well-being of billions of people?
Tom, the hapless but determined academic looking for the lost poem, tends toward nostalgia:
[The] vitality and beauty … the crazy music … serious science … the suspension bridges … a thousand forms of music festivals … an astronaut playing golf on the moon … the cheese-rolling competitions …
His wife and research partner Rose, who also studies the period 1990-2030, is more scornful. She says that if Tom were transported back there, he would loathe it.
The stupidity and waste would suffocate me or make me insane. So would the nastiness of social media, then run for profit rather than as a public service … the short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders … the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations [and their] careless love of autocrats …
Tom and Rose’s lives are much poorer than those of the people they study. Life in the archipelago is hard, but there is also a hint of serenity. The world is quieter and nature is returning, if only because civilization has collapsed.
The Derangement
Somewhere amid this inventive plot, McEwan drops a term that will stay with me because it perfectly and compactly captures the moment we’re entering.
… in the mid-2030s, ‘the Derangement’, respectfully capitalised, came into general usage as shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences – a litany that wearied activists and sceptics alike. The term suggested not only madness but the vengeful fury of weather systems. There is also a hint at collective responsibility for our innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Humanity itself was deranged …
The onslaught of storms, floods, heatwaves, and fires is exhausting. Nazi shipwrecks emerging from dry European rivers seem like a macabre portent of worse summers to come. Governments are too busy managing crises to take any positive action on climate. Some are finding the bandwidth to make it worse. I wish it were fiction.
Leave a Reply