`Author:` Ian McEwan `Availability:` ## Summary _What We Can Know_ is a futurist novel set in 2119, in a Britain reduced to a scattered archipelago after an apocalyptic “Inundation.” Ian McEwan uses this speculative setting to explore the longstanding insularity of English liberal culture—its virtues, its blind spots, and its limits. The narrative is divided into two separate but subtly linked “islands” of prose, mirroring the novel’s preoccupation with isolation in both geography and thought. The first part is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, a literature scholar living on a 38-mile-wide island that is all that survives of southern England. Much of Europe has been erased by rising seas, while geopolitical power has shifted elsewhere; yet these wider devastations appear mostly in the margins. Tom travels to the relocated Bodleian Library—now perched on a Snowdonian peak—to investigate the archive of Francis Blundy, an early-21st-century poet. His particular obsession is a lost poem, _A Corona for Vivien_, read aloud once and then vanished, which later acquired mythic status as a masterpiece of the climate crisis. Tom’s scholarly quest becomes a study of nostalgic longing. He yearns for the “resourceful raucous times” of the early 2000s, even as his students dismiss that era as one of “ignorant, squalid and destructive louts.” The novel quietly suggests that Tom’s viewpoint may be as partial, blinkered, and naïvely liberal as the culture he embodies. His emotional detachment from those around him—especially his colleague and intermittent lover, Rose—reveals a familiar English rationality that is admirable yet myopic. McEwan uses the speculative elements—warlord-run America, Nigerian ascendancy, drowned nations—as framing devices rather than narrative engines. They provide a backdrop against which he examines a subtler crisis: the shrinking imaginative horizon of [[Liberalism]] itself. The novel gestures toward what Rose calls “a crisis of realism in fiction,” brought on by climate catastrophe, and implicitly positions itself as an attempt at a new narrative form capable of addressing what [[Amitav Ghosh]] terms “the derangement.” Ultimately, the book becomes an anatomy of liberal partiality. In its gaps, omissions, and silences, it asks whether liberal values—rationality, nostalgia, humanistic faith—are adequate to the moral [[Scale]] of [[Ecology|environmental]] collapse. The England McEwan portrays is an archipelago both literal and ideological, its liberalism stranded on the “island peaks” of a vanished world. The novel ends by prompting the question of whether such liberalism can survive the deluge that follows it, or whether it is itself a relic of a lost moral landscape. --- ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes > [!info] > ![[What-We-Can-Know-by-Ian-McEwan-020725-tout-ffd356f2b5f348c283f8530225900886.jpg]] `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` ## Highlights