AFTER THE FLOOD

Ian McEwan casts the climate crisis as a story of adultery.

- BY KATY WALDMAN

At the start of “What We Can Know,” Ian McEwan’s eighteenth novel, the year is 2119 and the humanities are still in crisis. Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of the literature of 1990 to 2030, props up his lectures with jokes and colorful animations; he and his colleague Rose, who is also his lover, speak to students in “cheery singsong voices, as if addressing a preschool class.” Midway through the twenty-first century, a nuclear disaster sent tsunamis curling over the continents, sinking New York and Rotterdam and turning the United Kingdom into an archipelago. With much of the past decomposing underwater, it’s hard to blame young people for preferring “things that are new, like the latest toys and novelties of Nigerian pop culture,” Tom reflects. He imagines the inner monologues of his students, sitting listlessly through a seminar on “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation”: “The past was peopled by idiots. Big deal. The matter was dead.”

Tom, the novel's protagonist, is hopelessly nostalgic for the twenty-first century.

For Tom—a man easily carried off by obsession, emotion, or reverie—not much ever really dies. He is fixated on a dinner party that took place in October of 2014, at the country home of the poet Francis Blundy, an eminence rivalled only by Seamus Heaney. The evening, later known as the “Second Immortal Dinner,” drew a glamorous group that included Blundy’s editor, his sister, and a journalist who profiled him in “a magazine called