What We Can Know by Ian McEwan review the limits of liberalism

"It isn't just McEwan's elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the infinite shingle of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth,"

"No, McEwan's Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England's most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art. These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan's future-set new novel that describes the Inundation of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks."

"In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan's future history, you'd never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan's deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision."

The fiction exhibits an unmistakable Englishness, visible in elegiac attentiveness to landscapes: wildflowers, hedgerows, crags, the infinite shingle of Chesil Beach, and the Chilterns turkey oak. The later novels display ferocious home-counties middle-classness, where significant characters are frequently neurosurgeons or high court judges, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders appear as worrying upstarts. The Englishness centers on a scrupulously rational, sometimes endearingly purblind liberal morality. A future-set novel imagines an Inundation of Britain after an accidental Russian warhead triggers a tsunami, leaving only a Europe-wide archipelago of peaks. Insularity, literal and figurative, emerges as a recurring theme.

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