Realism Scrapes Through

Harry Stecopoulos explores Ian McEwan’s new novel “What We Can Know.”

By Harry StecopoulosSeptember 23, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

• Environment

AT ONE POINT in Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know, Thomas Metcalfe, a 22nd-century literature professor, shares a description of his partner Rose’s new monograph on “a crisis in realism in fiction between 2015 and 2030.” During “the Derangement” or climate emergency of the early second millennium, Rose argues that “the conventions of fictional realism […] were inadequate. New forms were needed to frame the physical and moral consequences of a global catastrophe and certain writers were struggling to find them.”

Many readers will recognize in Rose’s comment a reference to Amitav Ghosh’s influential The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), a powerful account of how we have collectively failed to recognize and address anthropogenic environmental damage. Much of Ghosh’s argument focuses on how humans seem incapable of ending their reliance on fossil fuels regardless of the ongoing climate disaster all around them. And writers, according to Ghosh, have failed to create the stories needed to help the public work through this derangement. Literary fiction is particularly at fault. Like Rose, Ghosh believes that conventional realism isn’t up to the task of engaging with the “flash floods, hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents […] and, yes, freakish tornadoes” that characterize the ongoing crisis. In his view, normative realism’s valuation of probability and predictability makes the representation of climate catastrophe difficult, if not impossible.

More overtly speculative genres pose a different sort of problem. To depict the floods, droughts, and tornadoes in “magical or surreal [terms] would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.” Ghosh asserts that the environmental cataclysm facing us demands a new realism, a realism capable of engaging frankly and bravely with the improbable but undeniable disasters that threaten our planet.

For some time, McEwan has sought to fulfill the need for a new form of narrative that acknowledges the anthropogenic climate catastrophe. His 1987 novel The Child in Time touched on this issue, but his 2010 novel Solar commented more directly on the crisis through its account of Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who invents an affordable and renewable mode of energy production—“artificial photosynthesis.” In 2017, Ghosh cited Solar as one of the few recent novels that take up his challenge to create new narratives, and in certain ways, What We Can Know is a more direct response to the call for the new stories needed to address the devastating impact of the Anthropocene.

To be sure, the novel will not satisfy readers hoping for the McEwan version of cli-fi or his riff on “the new weird.” The fantastic barely makes an appearance in What We Can Know. Rather than go this route, McEwan adopts a less flamboyant but arguably stranger strategy by juxtaposing two existing forms: science fiction lite (or, as McEwan puts it, “science fiction without the science”) and conventional literary realism. This odd pairing of genres doesn’t lead to “genre-bending,” as Knopf’s publicists claim, but the coupling of futurist SF and contemporary realism does unsettle the novel’s representation of history, whether personal or communal, and the result is a distinct and disjunctive take on the climate change narrative.

Focused on English professor Thomas Metcalfe’s search for “A Corona for Vivien” by the eminent 21st-century poet Francis Blundy—heir to T. S. Eliot and competitor with Seamus Heaney—the first part of What We Can Know takes place in the Britain of 2119. By the 22nd century, Thomas informs the reader, the sceptered isle has devolved into a technologically limited, underpopulated archipelago that somehow has survived the wars and flooding (or Inundation) that followed the Derangement. Academic life persists under these straightened circumstances—Thomas works assiduously to reconstruct the context that led to Francis’s creation of the corona—but the humanities must subsist on “the crumbs” left behind by science and technology. Thomas and Rose, a fellow literature professor, struggle to attract students and research funding at their institution, the University of the South Downs. As Thomas puts it, commenting on the literature faculty’s lack of status: “We are the poor cousins and we don’t get the smartest bunch.” No comforting fantasies here: McEwan insists on the home truth that, in this future as in our present day, “the humanities are always in crisis.”

The second part of the novel moves backward in time to the Britain of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In this section, McEwan chronicles the literary and romantic life of Vivien Blundy, Francis’s wife and the honored subject of the poem that so fascinates Thomas roughly 100 years later. Vivien, an English literature professor like Thomas and Rose, publishes a book on the romantic poet John Clare, but she soon tires of academia. Her relationship with Percy, a violin maker, however idyllic early on, doesn’t provide sufficient intellectual stimulation, so she embarks on a long-standing affair with Harry Kitchener, a married poetry editor, before the failure of this romance precipitates her affair with Francis. Vivien’s affective and sometimes violent 21st-century life, one marked by the realization that “men were shits,” stands in marked counterpoint to Thomas’s more staid 22nd-century existence in a reduced future Britain.

Linked by character, plot, and poetry, these two portions of the novel—both narrated in the first person—jostle gently but productively, with Vivien recounting events already chronicled by Thomas as he recreates the context of the corona. The latter’s obsession with 21st-century poetry clashes with the former’s emphasis on her 21st-century life. Vivien’s memoirish account of literature and romance pushes against Thomas’s obsession with long-dead poets and the broader historical circumstances that have led to the dystopic diminution of the United Kingdom and the world. He cannot see beyond a historical period he has never known. Vivien, conversely, finds it hard to imagine a world unstructured by her present-day experience. If the SF of part one finds its shape in a scholarly quest for the past, the realism of part two finds its form in a confessional relation to the present.

What catalyzes the dynamic between these two parts of the novel are Thomas’s and Vivien’s respective attitudes toward Francis’s celebrated poem. The corona, a 15-sonnet sequence in which the final sonnet repeats the first lines of the preceding 14, is the poet’s crowning achievement and only exists in one copy, given to his wife Vivien as a present at her birthday dinner in 2014. McEwan never provides us with the text of the poem, but Thomas and Vivien separately indicate that Francis’s corona, ostensibly focused on Vivien, takes rural nature as its main subject. The hunt for the long-lost poem haunts Thomas’s portion of the novel. In his view, the poem, once revered by activists as a powerful riposte to fossil-fuel modernity, promises a new way of understanding history. McEwan shares with us the troubles and travails of the researcher as he scours email messages, journals, and manuscripts, desperate to find what he understands to be the key to the past.

In part two, Vivien also offers a different perspective on the corona, finding in the poem a way of understanding her own experiences over the course of two marriages and multiple affairs. In an inversion of Thomas’s structure, she offers the reader a narrative that leads to the production of the poem in 2014. Vivien’s parental and marital responsibilities vie for our attention with the text’s drive to the fateful evening in which Francis gifts her the corona. For a novel self-consciously commenting on the need to invent a prose form appropriate to the climate crisis, What We Can Know spends a great deal of time focused on an obscure sonnet sequence.

McEwan doesn’t highlight poetry—and a demanding type of poetry at that—because he thinks this literary mode offers a better means of moving beyond the derangement that limits our capacity to respond imaginatively to climate change and eminent doom. For all the many references to Clare, Eliot, Heaney, Tennyson, and other poets, this novel does not argue that the lyric imagination provides better ways of knowing than prose or any other mode. What McEwan does suggest is that our best chance of confronting the reality of the climate crisis and other challenges of our era—AI, nationalism, arms proliferation—depends on a willingness to resist totalizing visions, whether of science, history, or indeed literature.

Francis’s obsession with the stringent demands of the corona form constitutes the perfect example of what a writer should not do when confronted by the Derangement: identify in one genre or narrative or theme a complete answer to an impossible historical situation. The novel’s uneven collage of SF and realism, prose and poetry, is McEwan’s riposte to this overweening investment in form. But so is McEwan’s suggestion that totalizing visions of racial identity in the future will prove equally irrelevant. When Thomas, Rose, and a sea captain named Jo discuss their respective genealogies, it emerges that most people in 22nd-century Britain are, like them, mixed-race, a “golden” mixture of Black, Asian, and white European who find “completely white people” a strange and alienating minority. Insistence on racial purity, like an emphasis on narrative or formal consistency, needs to be abandoned if we are to push through the crisis and survive.

A refusal of totalizing apocalyptic narrative is linked to McEwan’s refusal to see the current climate disaster as leading ineluctably to the complete destruction of the species and the planet. In a recent comment on What We Can Know, McEwan opined, “through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving somehow.” The novel elaborates on this idea from the perspective of the 22nd century. Thomas thus points out that, for all our propensity for death and destruction, humans have not yet destroyed the planet: “We wrecked much of it, but not everything.” Like McEwan, Thomas is sanguine about the infinite human capacity for renewal:

Round we go. Each time we fail, or calamities overwhelm us, we will come back from a slightly higher place. Rising and falling, we would continue to scrape through. […] With civilisation barely 10,000 years old, an eyeblink of time, we hardly know our cycles yet. My optimism says that with each one, we will adapt and improve.

Some readers might decry this passage and others like it as inadvertently lending support to climate change deniers. On occasion, McEwan has seemed overly enamored of a belief that technology will save the species, and he does allow Francis, the naysayer, to reject the reality of climate change, only to then have this view soundly denounced by other characters. For McEwan, believing in the future validity of the “three-word history […] we scraped through” is not only a matter of optimism; it’s also an issue of art and narrative. He refuses to accept that the only relevant and responsible climate narratives are those that adhere to a thoroughly dystopic trajectory.

McEwan, always the consummate literary craftsman, provides the reader with richly drawn characters and a compelling plot. Indeed, Thomas and Vivien’s capacity to persevere, even when confronted by crises large and small, offers a smaller-scale example of what the novel claims humans can and will do, no matter the ongoing calamity. McEwan demonstrates his characters’ talent for renewal and reinvention by including narrative twists and turns—a treasure hunt, adultery, betrayal, child endangerment, and, most important, murder—that put Thomas and especially Vivien through their paces. This plot snakes wildly through the two sections, buffeted by the genre-switching and the constant turns to poetry, but still moving to a stimulating conclusion.

The quest for—and generation of—Francis’s corona drives a good deal of What We Can Know, but not completely. There are deeply moving and often lyrical portions of Vivien’s narrative that precede her relationship with Francis, and these pages are set apart from Thomas’s (and the novel’s) obsession with a lost poem. Indeed, McEwan deliberately leaves the reader at sea during the beginning of the second portion of the novel, refusing to name his narrator or provide contextual clues. Instead, he invites us to shift our expectations and revel in a woman’s detailed account of her often bitter experiences with men. From a neglectful father to a mentally ill husband and a manipulative lover, Vivien has led a full if somewhat terrifying life. Her confessions are, McEwan implies, no less relevant than Thomas’s SF chronicle of flooding and war to how we should understand environmental crisis and its consequences for humanity and the planet. The quotidian is, for him, directly connected to climate change narrative because it is in the everyday that we can best see how humans scrape through.

McEwan’s turn to Vivien and her life in the second portion of the novel will come as no surprise. While the Booker Prize–winning author has written proper science fiction—for example, Machines Like Me (2019)—he is, for many readers, an extraordinary practitioner of literary realism. Works like Atonement (2001) and On Chesil Beach (2007) attest to the author’s prowess in that mode. And this is perhaps why What We Can Know offers only a partial answer to Ghosh’s challenge to develop a new literary form—or, indeed, a partial rejection of Ghosh’s critique of “serious fiction.” Even as he borrows from more speculative genres, McEwan refuses to give up on realism. His understanding of how literature can engage the world hinges crucially upon realism’s rich verisimilitude and wild capaciousness. For all the failures of fiction in “the time of the Great Derangement,” McEwan still believes that the conventional novel has the capacity to depict the improbable and the diminished, the irrational and the catastrophic, whether in this century or the next.