Ian McEwan Casts the Climate Crisis as a Story of Adultery

"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 sing-song voices, as if addressing a pre-school class.""

"He is fixated on a dinner party that took place in October of 2014, at the country home of the poet Francis Blundy. 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 Vanity Fair." The occasion was the birthday of Blundy's wife, Vivien. That night, Blundy recited a sonnet cycle, "A Corona for Vivien," exalting their love and the natural world."

The year is 2119 and the humanities exist under crisis in a world reshaped by mid-twenty-first-century tsunamis that sank New York and Rotterdam and turned the United Kingdom into an archipelago. Young people prefer new cultural novelties while scholars struggle to justify literary study. Thomas Metcalfe teaches literature of 1990–2030 with gimmicks and is romantically involved with his colleague Rose. Metcalfe becomes obsessed with a 2014 dinner where poet Francis Blundy recited a sonnet cycle titled "A Corona for Vivien." Only one copy of the poem existed, it was entrusted to Vivien and has since been lost, and evidence from communications and memoirs hints that the poem was exceptional.

Read at The New Yorker