Ian McEwan takes on climate disaster in "What We Can Know"
The prizewinning novelist on his latest book and how a dystopian novel can be an antidote to metaphysical gloom
In Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know, everything we fear today will go wrong already has.
A perfect storm of populist leaders, climate change, greed, and technology unleashed — the “Inundation” —has forever changed the world. The U.S. is mostly submerged and governed by rival warlords. Some survivors look back at the pre-apocalypse 21st century with yearning for all we had that they likely never will: lush gardens and tall trees, good food, wildlife, fresh air, international travel, and relative peace. Others remember us with contempt. How could we have seen the signals and done nothing about them? In England, where the story unfolds, a literary scholar named Tom Metcalfe navigates his diminished present without complaint, choosing to immerse himself in researching a dinner party that took place in 2014, and a poem that was read aloud there, and then lost to history.
Is What We Can Know about living with a kind of cognitive dissonance that allows contentment within strife? Is it a plea for us to wake up before it’s too late? It’s both of these and more, most notably, how we will be judged by future generations, and the contradictions that lie within us all.
McEwan is the author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award; his novel Amsterdam won the Booker Prize; and novels, among them Atonement and The Children Act, have been made into movies. We caught up with him via Zoom from Cleveland, a stop on his book publicity tour, to talk about the new novel—and about avoiding “metaphysical gloom.”
What We Can Know is set in the next century, after decades of war and ecological disasters. Your main character spends most of his time looking back at our present via digital archives with a combination of envy and nostalgia. What led you to frame the novel in that way?
I was looking for a way of talking about our present and how future generations will view us—looking back not only on disastrous decisions around, say, climate change, nuclear weapons, and so on—but also all what we still have, that we treasure.
You’re reminding us to savor the present but also to heed the warning signs and take action.
I wanted to go down two roads at once—to speculate how the future might look back at us with longing. Yes, there’s a vast extinction of species going on, rising temperatures, rising seas, and so on. But on the other hand, if you stop doing bad things to the Earth, it pushes back with amazing speed. We have possible catastrophes looming, and we also still have the power to avoid them.
As much of a threat as climate change poses, the novel posits that equally dangerous is a resulting “metaphysical gloom.”
By that I mean that there’s a certain attitude that comes with speculating about the future and climate change, which in the novel I term “metaphysical gloom.” You hear ordinary people saying, “I don’t think my grandchildren are going to have as good a life as I did.”
I think once you adopt that position, you enter a lack of all notion of progress. You see potential disaster coming towards you, but you’re like rabbits in headlights. There’s a torpor, an inertia. We mustn’t give up on the idea of progress, and that within our own societies—wealthy societies—we have many who aren’t sharing in our wealth.
This is not a “cli-fi” novel per se, right?
I don’t really think this is a “climate change novel.” Climate change, though, does pose a real problem to the novel form. The realist novel—the tradition in which I work—is very good at examining personal relationships, the beginning of love, the end of love, individual consciousness, tracking thoughts and feelings. Also, the relationship of the individual to his or her family, or society. And there’s this argument I’ve been following: that the realist novel isn’t up to taking on a problem as vast and scientifically complex as climate change. It’s just too big, the argument goes. That’s not my view. I think the realist novel is well-placed to do that. One can only really write fiction about climate change by not writing about it—it’s in the background. If you really want to talk about climate change, you should probably be writing non-fiction.
Your scholar/protagonist from the future is enamored of our present day and looks back with longing, even envy. His students, on the other hand, view our era as “the Derangement”; we’re idiots who knew disaster loomed but didn’t bother to take action. They aren’t nostalgic for the past; they’re focused on their present. What were you getting at in probing that tension?
The students’ point-of-view stemmed from reflecting on my own past. I was a child in the 1950s, then coming of age in the 60s. Behind us, we had 90 million deaths in the Second World War, but we weren’t thinking about it every day. The peace came, and we were concerned with ordinariness. ‘To hell with that! We’ve got the present to live and enjoy.’ I suppose I felt a little guilt there about that, and gave the kids in the novel that same attitude. I thought: here’s an act of atonement.”
In the novel, America doesn’t fare well. It’s been among the hardest hit environmentally of all the countries in the world—it’s a swampy wasteland ruled by rival warlords. How intentional was that?
I watch with dismay—as does half of America—at the partisan divide. I sense a strong yearning on the right of this divide for some kind of non-existent past and imperial glory. What I posit here—and it’s not prophecy, just speculation—is that the two opposing views of the world could dissolve into a civil war with different factions laying claim to past grandeur. I’m not the only one to posit the idea of an internal war in the U.S. It’s armed to the teeth—that’s what’s so frightening about it. So, yes, in the novel I paint a dark future for America, but one that’s avoidable. It’s also partly a way of suggesting that empires rise and fall.
It’s Nigeria that reigns supreme in What We Can Know…
Nigeria will be the third most populous country in the world by mid-century, which is not very far away. It’s already showing an extraordinary level of cultural energy. It’s not too hard to imagine it as hegemonic, once you step out of your Eurocentric or America-centric sense of things.
Another fascinating aspect of the novel is how just about everything since the invention of the internet has been digitized—journal entries, text, receipts, emails—and all that information is centrally archived in data centers in Nigeria. Still, the past remains an enigma to those studying it in the future. What’s behind that dissonance?
If you were researching an 18th-century, or 19th-century, or early 20th-century writer, you’d be dependent on letters to try and get into the minds of your subjects. You’d have less daily information, but you’d probably get a much more considered and subjective sense of them—a deeper reflection. It’s been a long time since I wrote a thoughtful email to someone of, say, two to three thousand words. So if you were researching Napoleon, who wrote roughly 3,000 words a day during his adult life, or Darwin, or Dickens, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, you’d have a lot of true insight into their thoughts and feelings. I posit that a future historian would have an avalanche of material, but a lot of it would be trivial.
By the way, you mentioned you are reading a novel by a Nigerian writer and really enjoying it. What’s the book?
It’s called The Comfort of Distant Stars, by I.O. Echeruo. It’s pretty amazing.
Thanks for the recommendation! You’re in this country now, touring for your book. Are you seeing anything to contradict the novel’s dark outlook on the U.S.?
When you are observing another country from a long distance—just reading about it in newspapers, etc.—it shrinks down to its bad news. So it’s useful to be here seeing it firsthand. I arrived in New York and suddenly it was all very familiar—extremely pleasant. I do love being here. And it’s a useful reminder that, to quote Adam Smith, who I cite a couple of times in the novel, “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.” In other words, it takes a long time to undo it. And one more thing: we mustn’t be completely wiped out by the immediate political presence of whoever’s in the White House. It’s all still rescuable. On the other hand, if you go down one path, it can be difficult to reverse course. Across the world, we’re all at a pivotal moment—it’s not just the U.S.
To switch topics for a moment, I’ve read that writing now—at age 77—comes easily to you, and that there are days when you spend as many as twelve hours writing. Can you share a little about your process?
I keep a large green notebook for each novel and write notes in it by longhand. In this case, I’d read a love poem titled “Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue” by the English poet John Fuller. I was dazzled by it, read it again and again, and shared it with friends. Then I forgot about it. Then another element made its way into the notebook. I’m a friend of Stewart Brand, who published The Whole Earth Catalog and founded the Long Now Foundation, which looks ahead to the future. It suggests that there might be a breakdown of civilization, and that we have a moral responsibility to future generations to send instructions on some basics that might get lost—for example, something as simple as how to make soap, or how to execute a three-crop rotation.
That got me thinking about what it would be to write a fiction in which I could somehow get the past, present, and future talking to each other, breaking the barriers between them so that you could be in the mind of someone in the future trying to look into our minds. I could only approach all this through the personal, which brings me to the third element that crept into the notebook: the First Immortal Dinner in 1817. Wordsworth and Keats were there, as was the essayist Charles Lamb. Thinking of that reminded me of the John Fuller poem. All three elements began to come together.
What do you hope readers will take away from What We Can Know?
It’s about a melding of future and past and present. We think we stand on some kind of summit of history looking back. But we are born in the middle of things. We die in the middle of things. We’re living squashed between the dead, whom we are trying to understand, and the as-yet-unborn. Soon, we will join those ghosts of the past, and others will try to understand us. We have a duty to the past to understand it, which is the reason I have a character in the novel—Percy—suffering from Alzheimer’s. Once you start losing your memory, what’s seeping away is your identity. I think the same is true of societies. I think the core curricular matter should be for all of us in a society not to lose our history—to have a good sense of it. Otherwise, we lose our way.
I hope readers sense they’ve read a very personal story, but with civilizational resonances.
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is What We Can Know.
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