I Know Very Well ‘What We Can Know’, But Even Still…

CW: Spoilers, big ones.

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
– Bertolt Brecht, motto to Svendborg Poems, 1939

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know (2026), gestures towards many questions about its post-climate world, but answers very few of them. Undoubtedly, this is because of its narrators. The novel, divided into two sections, is told by and for the overeducated academic elite in the form of its two narrators. Whatever passing reference they make to philosophy or literature, and the thornier questions they raise, McEwan can chalk up to their idiom.

The first half is narrated by Tom Metcalfe in the year 2119, as he studies the long shadow of the early 21^st century poet Francis Blundy and his now infamous lost poem, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Tom writes to us from a world after climate change, where resource wars went nuclear and Britain is now a flooded series of archipelagos. Tom specialises in the literature of the 1990s to 2030s, and is excited by the turbulence, wastefulness, and decadence of our time. His nostalgia manifests as an infatuation for Vivien, Francis’ wife. 100 years separates this Tom from his Viv, and from the now mythical lost Corona. 

The second half takes the form of a found document, after Tom unearths the buried story of Vivien Blundy. Vivien’s version of events shakes the foundations of Tom’s archival research that Part One constructs. She tells all about her life, her relationship to her poet husband, and what happened to the Corona.

Whatever criticisms can be made of the novel, it isn’t boring. It has a plot that races from page to page, the world-building is convincing enough––though Tom sometimes acts more like a tour guide of the future than someone actually living in it, halting to explain inconsequential details––and there are twists galore. The characters are repulsive and relatable by turns, their immorality is an entertaining spectacle like that of Valmont and Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons (1782).

Much like Dangerous Liaisons, much of what we are explicitly told by the narrators is implicitly disavowed by the author. When Choderlos de Laclos first published Les Liaisons Dangereuses, it was in pre-revolutionary France and censorship was still tight. He invented a fictitious editor’s note and preface condemning the contents of his novel, in order to get the censors to leave it alone. To borrow Slavoj Žižek’s preferred form of disavowal, Laclos’ prefaces declared ‘Je sais bien… (I know very well that my novel is immoral), mais quand même (but even still, here it is)’ [modified from Against Progress (2025), 104].

In What We Can Know, McEwan disavows the climate novel, and its pretensions towards ‘solving’ the issue, precisely so that he can write one. Just as the novel is split between future and present narrators, so too is it split by an ironic distance between a misanthropic realism and an unlikely optimism. Knowingly, it appears to elude classification. 

McEwan has said that he wanted ‘to let the climate change matter simply be there as a given’, rather than lecture the reader with one-dimensional analogues for social, political and philosophical issues. George Saunders may be accused of this (although his reductions are at least formally interesting) in Vigil (2026), another recent Cli-Fi release, as the central protagonists ‘represent’ the opposed views of fatalism and libertarianism. 

Instead, Tom and Vivien are unreliable and complicated narrators, and they profess as much. Being an academic, Tom devotes some pages to justify his choice to fictionalise aspects of the past that he studies. He believes that it is possible to exceed the documentary evidence ‘within the bounds of the highly probable’, as long as he first makes clear that he is doing so. ‘He knows very well, but even still.’ The discovery of Vivien’s document does much to confirm and contradict Tom’s view of the past. Easy to imagine why the book is so called, since McEwan aims to show us…what we can know. 

Do as I say, not as I do

The contrasting first-person narratives would rub harshly against Vivien, who rails against postmodernism in academia, and says at one point ‘To hell with relativism!’ I imagine the author winking at us through a narrative that is so open to interpretation, and so openly interpreted by Tom himself.

Vivien says she believes that her sex life has been determined by her detached, uncaring father, as she searches for a similarly uncaring, unmoving figure in her mature years. Perhaps this is the same as her longing for a God-Daddy figure to prevent the shifting sands of meaning across time (what Derrida would call différance, his term for the fact that meaning can never be closed down but shifts with time and readers).

Relativism doesn’t make us feel cuddly and warm inside, the way that our God-Daddy might as he holds us tight and keeps the messy world at bay. That Vivien even wrote and buried her story for posterity in the first place may be seen as an attempt to be her own God-Daddy-Author, and prevent the rabble from fiddling with her story.

The satire that McEwan presents us with, then, seems to be making fun of liberal elites who claim to know better. Tom, Vivien and Francis Blundy all hold disparaging views of those beyond their cultural island. In a scene ripped from Good Will Hunting (1997), the snooty Francis disparages the blue collar Chris Gage’s speech, who retorts with textbook citations correcting Francis’ own grammar. Elsewhere, Tom describes himself as a defender of culture, graciously bestowing humanity’s heritage on his dim-witted students. Rather than belonging to the people, culture must be defended from them. 

Yet these aren’t so much rational critiques of academia or the cultured elite as they are psycho-sexual fears and fantasies. Vivien isn’t the only character whose sex stands in for broader issues – Tom is cuckolded at one point by a younger, more forward-thinking graduate student. McEwan fears that the fires of liberalism and academia have gone out.

McEwan establishes a kind of noble savage dynamic. Tom feels impotent when dealing with people beyond his university, emasculated by their simpler, worldlier virtues. In fact, even outside of the humanities department Tom feels ill at ease, as when he takes a trip over to the much better funded STEM building. Vivien and Francis, also tortured academics, experience the inverse of this. Unable to be satisfied by her first husband, the blue-collar Percy who is painted as a caricature of goodness, Vivien has an extended affair with the literary editor and poet Harry Kitchener. In the first instance, the noble workers of the world frighten the emasculated academic. In the second, their simplicity and manipulability turns her off. In each case, those who lack the cultural capital and education of our narrators are almost seen as a different species.

This critique of academia, and the humanities in particular, works on a simple premise. The humanities are locked in an ivory tower, incomprehensible to others, and therefore failing to sympathise with those others. Tom must respond in Freudian manner, by becoming ‘a real man’ (like Percy or Chris Gage) who ‘actually does something’ – not the spoiled effeminate child of decadent times (note that this gendered language is very deliberate). This means winning his wife back after his cuckolding, setting out on a manly odyssey to discover the lost Corona, and having a baby.

If anything, the dismissal of academia and high culture, and Tom’s implicit turn away from it, reads as a disavowal that permits McEwan to rest on his postmodern laurels. It is the literary counterpart to capitalist realism which cannot envisage alternatives and so directs its negative energies towards itself. After all, What We Can Know certainly doesn’t take the stance of littérature engagée, which would presume to explain how we should think and act. Instead, it decadently leaves us to our own conclusions. Not seeing a way around itself, the novel presents us with its own psychosexual anxieties, without attempting to resolve them.

Up the book without a paddle

We are left with a novel that is seemingly ambivalent about culture, and its own status as a work of climate fiction. Indeed, whether the novel could help solve our existential issues, and therefore rightfully inherit the title of ‘climate fiction’, is of central concern. Tom would undoubtedly say yes. He is very modernist in viewing art as a higher ideal than life. It’s a bit like the sentimental line from the Dead Poets Society (1989); ‘medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.’ 

Where Tom falls for this ideology of culture, Vivien breaks his illusions with an uncut cynicism. While her narrative and world is steeped in literature and its institutions (she lives around Oxford, works at the university, and spends time with various literary figures), Vivien couldn’t care less for them. They are background noise to her personal dramas, pretty settings and turns of phrase to embellish her story, nothing more. 

Her narrative is irredeemably self-involved, almost exaggeratedly beating Tom over the head with his rose-tinted glasses. What ‘poetry, beauty, romance, love’ Tom had imagined in her life, she shows little care for. There is a drastic switch in tone from Part One to Part Two, and I had my mouth open in shock for practically her entire section. By the close of the novel, we have at least lost our illusions.

Choderlos de Laclos knew that it is the special power of the novel to be able to suspend our moral judgements, although one can almost see the French censors step back into frame when Valmont and Merteuil meet hyperbolically sticky ends. McEwan, unlike the censors, would say that these just deserts exist, and can be useful, only in fantasy. Art doesn’t teach us to be better people, nor are we redeemed by engaging with it.

This stance may seem misanthropic; people are short-sighted and complicated, unable and unwilling to be kind to each other. The young students of 2119 are inclined to view the people of our period in this way, and blame the collapse of the world on our selfishness. Vivien is the cartoonish confirmation of this belief.

Nevertheless it is the disavowal of the power of art, our knowledge that it does nothing, that might provide the impetus to act. As Žižek says, ‘We know (or feel with the force of seeming knowledge) that we cannot avert environmental collapse, but we should still take the actions that would give us the best chance of doing so.’ (Žižek, Against Progress, 105) This disavowal sits in the periphery of the vision of What We Can Know, and gives the novel its force. It is, undoubtedly, a depressingly fine line to walk.

In What We Can Know, Tom and Vivien, both liberals who hide behind culture to excuse their passivity, make us feel with the force of seeming knowledge that nothing can be done. Yet their presence also shows that things may be different. This difference is rarely glimpsed in the novel, and McEwan’s cynicism feels authentic. He leaves us to prove him wrong.