{"id":24843,"date":"2025-09-16T11:56:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T11:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/24843\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T11:56:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T11:56:10","slug":"what-we-can-know-by-ian-mcewan-review-the-limits-of-liberalism-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/24843\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Can Know by Ian McEwan review \u2013 the limits of liberalism | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan\u2019s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn\u2019t just McEwan\u2019s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes \u2013 to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the \u201cinfinite shingle\u201d of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love<\/a>. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan\u2019s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England\u2019s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.<\/p>\n

These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan\u2019s future-set new novel that describes the \u201cInundation\u201d of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan\u2019s future history, you\u2019d never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan\u2019s deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision. Has Brexit, endlessly backstopped by those pesky six counties, taught English liberals nothing?<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t mean to make fun. Insularity, in both senses of the word, is one of McEwan\u2019s themes in What We Can Know. The book is composed of two islands of prose, linked only by the tenuous bridge of a brief note at the end. And it is about being islanded, in time, in space, in life.<\/p>\n

The novel is set a century hence, in 2119. Part one is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an institution largely focused on science and maths, located on a 38-mile-wide island in the \u201csleepy ahistorical\u201d republican archipelago that is all that remains of the UK. (To say who narrates part two would constitute a spoiler.) The world is post-catastrophe. The 21st century has unfolded as we all fear it will. The US is now run by rival \u201cwarlords\u201d; Nigeria is the hegemonic power. But this is all offstage stuff. As the novel begins, Tom catches various boats to the Bodleian Library, now occupying a Snowdonian peak and accessible by \u201cwater-and-gravity-powered funicular\u201d. Here, he trawls the archive of Francis Blundy, a poet of our own time, and allegedly\u00a0the equal of Seamus Heaney (whose papers at the National Library of Ireland must now be soggy beyond use).<\/p>\n

Superficially a quiet, scholarly sort \u2013 his opening pages stress how \u201ctranquil\u201d and \u201csmooth\u201d his life is \u2013 Tom, like a true scholar, burns within. He is in search of a lost poem, the improbably named A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy wrote for his wife Vivien\u2019s 50th birthday in 2014. Read aloud once at Vivien\u2019s birthday dinner, the sole copy, on vellum, which scholars know of only from contemporary accounts of the dinner, vanished into a credulity-stretching afterlife as the great lost poem of the climate crisis. Alone on the island of his obsession, Tom builds a portrait of the missing masterpiece, and alongside it, a portrait of the early 21st century.<\/p>\n

The SF scenario, the secret histories eventually disclosed: these are fun, and handled with great brio<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a nostalgic portrait, and Tom\u2019s obsessive nostalgia for our violent and chaotic historical moment is the canniest thing about What We Can Know. Certainly, the plot \u2013 turning as it does on the fate of Blundy\u2019s vellum manuscript and a series of shock disclosures about various characters \u2013 is absurdly gripping and finally unpersuasive in that familiar McEwan way (you turn the pages hungrily, and then at the end you think: Hang on). \u201cTo have been alive then,\u201d Tom writes unironically, \u201cin those resourceful raucous times.\u201d Tom\u2019s nostalgia is not shared by his present-minded students, who see us as having been \u201cignorant, squalid and destructive louts\u201d.<\/p>\n

Beneath his opinionated frankness, we come to suspect, Tom is really a deeply elusive narrator. It is Tom, perhaps, and not his creator, who has the English liberal\u2019s partiality of vision. Crusoed on his regressive scholarly island, he has little time for the needy humanity of the people around him. He views his colleague and sometime lover Rose, for instance, increasingly as a means to an end. Can his nostalgia, or indeed his liberalism, be trusted? Will they ever be enough, now or in the future? What We Can Know gradually reveals itself as an anatomy of, precisely, liberal partiality \u2013 of the insularity of a liberalism busily nostalgic for all the wrong things.<\/p>\n

At one point, Rose argues that, during the years 2015\u00a0to 2030, there was \u201ca crisis of realism in fiction\u201d brought about by the scale of climate disaster: \u201cNew forms were needed to frame the physical and moral consequences of a global catastrophe.\u201d We are meant, I think, to view Rose\u2019s theory with some irony. But we are surely also meant to see What We Can Know in Rose\u2019s terms, as an attempt to find a new form in which to speak about what McEwan\u2019s characters, echoing Amitav Ghosh, call \u201cthe derangement\u201d. Thus, this is a science fiction novel (McEwan\u2019s second proper one, after Machines Like Me<\/a>) that is also a novel entirely about our mundane present, with its \u201cmetaphysical gloom\u201d about the future. The science fiction scenario, the secret histories eventually disclosed: these are fun, and handled with great brio, but they\u2019re not exactly original. The book\u2019s value lies in what it is prepared to omit \u2013 nothing new, this, but a classically realist virtue. What it omits, and makes us work out for ourselves: the \u201cmoral consequences of a global catastrophe\u201d. Which we can know only, perhaps, by inference or by\u00a0imagining.<\/p>\n

Liberalism itself, in the early 21st century, feels increasingly archipelagic \u2013 confined to the island peaks of a former upland. We may see McEwan, the liberal critic of liberalism, as one of those peaks. Apr\u00e8s lui, le d\u00e9luge?<\/p>\n

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan is published by Jonathan Cape (\u00a322). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan\u2019s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-24843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}