REVIEW: “What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan

I’ve been thoroughly absorbed by Ian McEwan’s “What We Can Know,” a novel set in a future England radically transformed by climate change. Its vision is eerily plausible – Oxford lies beneath the water; the Bodleian Library has found refuge in Snowdonia; places like Marlborough and parts of London are now harbours or have vanished altogether. McEwan’s protagonist, Tom Metcalfe, an academic and historian, travels across this haunting landscape, searching for lost meaning and piecing together the puzzle of a vanished world through a mysterious poem and the fractured remnants of society.

What drew me in is not just the dystopian setting, but McEwan’s sensitive probing into how people adapt – emotionally and intellectually – when so much is lost. The novel explores the uncertainties of knowledge, the fragility of memory, and the imperative to remain compassionate even as the world reels from upheaval. There’s a bittersweet undercurrent of nostalgia, but also a gentle call for humility and empathy amid crisis.

For anyone thinking about the reckoning we face in the Anthropocene, “What We Can Know” feels both urgent and oddly comforting.