Ian McEwan Casts the Climate Crisis as a Story of Adultery

The new book suggests that human beings have always been declinist, underselling the riches of the present and romanticizing what earlier generations merely made do with. The “Second Immortal Dinner,” Tom explains, pales beside the first, which took place in 1817, at the home of the painter Ben Haydon, and featured Wordsworth, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. “There was no one at the Blundys’ that evening who could have matched Leigh Hunt or Keats” or “competed with Wordsworth for learning, memorised verse or force of personality,” Tom concedes. Yet the Romantics themselves were prone to feeling that they’d missed out on something. In Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” addressed to Lamb, an injury keeps the poet from joining his friends at a waterfall. He resigns himself to the humbler attractions of his garden. (“Yet still the solitary humble-bee / Sings in the bean-flower!”) Today his evocations of “transparent foliage” and “a deep radiance” laid “full on the ancient ivy” are admired as glimpses of nature at its height.

But, if yearning for lost splendor blinds people to what they have (TLC might have told Coleridge not to go chasing waterfalls), the opposite risk is letting forgetfulness stunt the imagination. “As natural beauty declines over the years, so too, unnoticed, do standards of beauty,” Tom observes. It is no small loss that the Blundys could step into a garden alive with “fifty-seven resident species” of butterfly, while the archipelago dwellers of 2119 count only eight. The oceans of Tom’s day—“vast beds of undulating sea grasses”—are nothing like Vivien’s “seas whose cold depths contained cod, mackerel, hake, shad and sprat, pollock and three-bearded rockling.” So who is right, the students, who plant themselves in the now, or the forlorn historian? Are the tides that have overrun McEwan’s novel—the “hostile sea” obscuring the face of the earth—oblivion or memory?

It’s never wise to underestimate the minor characters at a dinner party. One of the Blundys’ guests, Mary Sheldrake, is a successful novelist—“almost a national treasure,” McEwan wickedly notes—celebrated for her minimal, affectless style and abstract themes. On the publicity circuit, she stirs controversy by denouncing the traditional novel as a “paradigm of higher gossip.” Until modernism, she insists, fiction was merely “love, marriage, adultery, contested wills—the stuff of neighbourly fascination.”

In the second half of “What We Can Know,” the speculative scaffolding falls away and the perspective shifts to Vivien’s. Here, McEwan leans into dishy melodrama, embracing what Mary would call “the amoral, easy-living ways of conventional fictional realism.” After giving so much space to Tom’s idealizations of the past, McEwan seems intent on some puncturing. Francis proves ripe for deflation: as the novel unfolds, he emerges not only as monstrously narcissistic but also as something of a fraud. The “Corona” is “fakery,” one guest realizes; Francis, who indulges in a climate-change-denying rant shortly before his recitation, “had no love for the things his poem seemed to love.” Vivien is startled that he “would want to imagine a life, evoked in such detail, in which they freely roamed, adoring nature’s plenitude. . . . It was as if he was beguiling her with all that was missing from their marriage.”

Unhappy unions loom large in the novel, which teems with adultery. When we first meet Mary, she has just discovered that her husband, Graham, has been cheating. Though his infidelity enrages her, it eases her own guilty conscience: she’s cheating, too. The decline of Vivien’s first husband, who suffered from dementia, prompts a series of affairs—of convenience, passion, and revenge. Few characters prove immune. Even Rose steps out, sleeping with a graduate student, partly because Tom won’t stop pining for Vivien, his inaccessible ghost.

These ruptures serve the novel’s larger project of demystification. Books about global warming often seem wary of beauty, evoking it only as fleeting and inconstant. Good things—whether the first blush of love or Bengal tigers—are always making false promises to endure. McEwan suggests that high-flown poetry may not be the best vehicle for understanding ourselves or the planet; something grubbier, more sordid, is required. History is one alternative, but how should it be practiced? Tom and Rose diverge. Rose, writing a monograph on the failure of realism to capture the climate crisis between 2015 and 2030, proposes that historians should cleave to facts. Tom, by contrast, argues for a more imaginative reconstruction of what has been lost, the kind of history that fills in silences. “Unprofessional to make things up,” he thinks, “arid not to.” They agree, at least, on the power of experiential detail. “The everyday life of, say, a mid-twenty-first-century junior doctor as told by her digital traffic, recording her week,” Tom says, “can arouse even the dullest of our students into an acceptance of shared humanity across an immensity of time.”