Environmental Collapse (Derangement) in What We Can Know

The Thematic Claim of Derangement

In Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, the Derangement is not merely a weather event or a list of disasters—it is a wholesale cognitive and societal failure to act on overwhelming evidence. The term, capitalised and used from the mid-2030s onwards, suggests a madness that afflicts humanity collectively: a preference for short-term comfort over long-term survival, a refusal to believe what scientists keep proving. The novel’s 2119 narrator, Professor Tom Metcalfe, defines it as a concept that includes not only the “vengeful fury of weather systems” but also humanity’s “innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits.” The Derangement therefore names the psychological root of the environmental collapse that overwhelms the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.

But the novel does more than diagnose. It shows how the Derangement operates at every level—from a poet’s dinner-party arguments to the launch of nuclear weapons across half the globe. It also shows how, even after catastrophe, human beings adapt, forget, and begin again, leaving the question open: will we ever learn to care about what we cannot see?

Tracing Derangement across the Plot

1. The Barn Dinner Party (2014): Denial in Action

The earliest chronological scene of the Derangement occurs in Francis Blundy’s sitting room. A leak from the UN’s climate panel has alarmed scientists, and Francis launches into a familiar rant: “the ocean was not rising to envelop Tuvalu… Tuvalu was sinking!” He dismisses the entire scientific consensus as a “gravy train” for left-leaning bureaucrats. His friends, who disagree, “tended to let him run on until the subject could be changed,” believing that “the views of a poet made no difference to the earth’s fate.” This passage crystallises the Derangement as a socially contagious denial: it is reinforced by personal influence, intellectual vanity, and a collective willingness to avoid confrontation. Francis’s position is not simply ignorance; it is an active, sophisticated refusal that serves his ego and his comfort.

2. The Historical Interlude (Chapter 15): The Derangement Unfolds

The novel’s most direct account of the collapse comes in a long historical digression narrated by Tom. He describes the “first climate war in 2036, one in a sequence, between two nuclear states, India and Pakistan.” Water scarcity from Himalayan glacier melt pushes the conflict to the nuclear brink. “Merciful Allah on one side, diverse gods, some with elephant trunks, on the other, inflamed and blessed their separate constituencies.” The war ends with “limited” nuclear exchanges that kill over a million instantly. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Israel invade Iran; six more battlefield nukes explode. In the Taiwan Straits, China and the US exchange fire. The world economy breaks apart, and “ideas of progress or even change slowly vanished.”

The Derangement here becomes a feedback loop of denial and catastrophe: each new disaster makes collective action harder, while nationalism, religion, and AI-driven warfare accelerate the destruction. Tom remarks that “people clung to notions of survival, of making bunkers, of fleeing cities and of writing peace plans”—but not to decarbonisation. The tragedy is that even as the temperature rises, humanity chooses short-term solidarity in fear rather than long-term solidarity in change.

3. The Inundation and Its Aftermath (2042 and beyond)

The pivotal event is the Inundation of 2042: a faulty Russian missile drops off-target, causing seventy-metre waves that swallow Atlantic-facing coasts. Lagos, London, Rotterdam, Hamburg, most of Paris are “swamped.” Over 200 million die. Britain becomes an archipelago. Yet the novel does not end in despair. Within twenty years, the post-nuclear cooling provides a “climate opportunity” as global temperatures drop almost two degrees. The trauma fades, and nature begins to push back: “Sail through the clear waters of the Cotswold Islands and be delighted by what’s starting to come back.”

But the Derangement is not cured. The Third Sino-American War erupts later; “famous cities were turned to ashes.” Humanity’s numbers fall from nine to four billion. Tom describes a “moribund” twenty-second century in which “nothing much being different across the generations” and “our relative isolation has enforced a form of peace, which some like me take to be stagnation.” The Derangement has become a permanent condition of diminished expectation, a low-energy survival rather than a vibrant future.

Character and Symbol Connections

Francis Blundy: The Denier who Becomes a Prophet

Francis is the most direct embodiment of the Derangement in the 2014 timeline. His denial is not merely passive; he dominates social occasions with his contrarian views, and his friends accommodate him to keep the peace. The irony deepens when, after the Inundation, his lost poem “A Corona for Vivien” is reinterpreted as a hymn to nature and a manifesto for ecological longing. Francis, who dismissed climate science, becomes the “prophet of the biosphere” by virtue of his art. The novel suggests that a poet’s words can outlive their author’s beliefs, but also that the Derangement’s taint—the refusal to see what is coming—is itself immortalised in the gap between the man and the myth.

Vivien Blundy: The Silenced Witness

Vivien Blundy’s journals record her dissatisfaction with her role as Francis’s enabler. She abandons her own career to serve his genius, and her observations on climate change are glimpsed but never fully aired. She is the witness who cannot speak directly within the historical record; her story is mediated by Tom and the archive. Vivien represents the many voices that are drowned out by the Derangement—the scientists, the activists, the women who sacrifice their own work—whose knowledge circulates only in fragments. Her lost poem, or rather her husband’s poem for her, obscures her own possible contribution.

Tom Metcalfe and Rose Church: Survivors in the Archive

Tom and Rose Church are academics living in the aftermath. They teach a course on “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation” and face students who are “bored” by the Derangement: “The kids I taught thought no more of those victims than Vivien’s students troubled themselves too much with the dead of medieval famines.” Tom himself admits that “we are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less.” Their relationship—strained, then reconciled through the discovery of Percy’s violin and Rose’s pregnancy—mirrors the larger arc of the Derangement: a retreat into personal survival and love, even as the larger world fractures.

Symbols: The Lost Poem and the Violin

The lost poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” becomes a blank screen for projection. It is “more beautiful for not being known”; it functions like Plato’s cave ideal, or a religious icon that must remain invisible. The novel argues that “the imagined lords it over the actual”—a profound comment on how the Derangement operates: we prefer comforting fantasies over difficult realities. The poem’s absence allows people to imagine a lost ecological paradise, just as the Derangement allowed them to ignore the real one.

In contrast, Percy’s violin is found, real, and mute. It does not speak; it is an object of craft and memory, not of ideological projection. Tom and Rose dig it up from the ruins of the dairy, and its discovery reconfigures Tom’s understanding of the past. The violin may represent the tangible residue of human effort that survives the Derangement—a different kind of hope, one based on artefact and touch rather than idealisation.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel refuses a simple moral about climate change. First, the Derangement is not just a failure of the powerful; it is a shared cognitive flaw. Even the narrator Tom, who studies the past, admits his own loyalties lie “with the loud and ruthless present.” The Derangement is not something that happens to us; it is something we are.

Second, the collapse does not end everything. The world “scrapes through.” The post-nuclear cooling and the Inundation create a strange reprieve: “Constant destruction, constant reinvention.” Tom’s optimism—that humanity will keep rising from a slightly higher place—is both hopeful and grimly cyclical. He imagines a future of “cutting down the trees again, digging for iron ore and eating the mammals and fish that flourished in our absence. Round we go.” The Derangement may be inescapable because it is hardwired into how we live.

Third, the novel’s form—a scholarly edition of a lost confession, framed by a final Author’s Note that denies hidden meanings—enacts the Derangement’s epistemological crisis. We cannot know the full truth about the past, just as the twenty-first century could not know the future. The Derangement is also a failure of knowledge itself.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Francis Blundy’s climate denial illustrate the concept of the Derangement? Francis uses rhetorical skill and social dominance to reject scientific consensus for personal comfort. His friends enable him by avoiding conflict, showing that the Derangement is not just individual stubbornness but a collective failure to confront uncomfortable truths. His later posthumous reputation as a “prophet of the biosphere” highlights the ironic gap between his beliefs and the meaning later generations assign to his work.

2. What role does the Inundation of 2042 play in the development of the Derangement theme? The Inundation is the catastrophic consequence of the Derangement: a multi-causal disaster (faulty weapon, diplomatic failure, climate pressure) that kills hundreds of millions. Yet it also resets conditions, briefly cooling the planet and allowing nature to recover. The Derangement persists because humanity learns only to survive, not to prevent. The Inundation shows both the price of denial and the ambiguous “climate opportunity” that follows ruin.

3. How are the characters of Tom Metcalfe and Rose Church affected by living in a post-Derangement world? They are professionally and personally shaped by the aftermath. Their course on the Inundation is compulsory for bored students who have moved on from the past. Their own relationship—strained, then repaired through the discovery of Percy’s violin and Rose’s pregnancy—reflects the larger pattern of retreat into private life. Tom admits that “the loud and ruthless present” commands his ultimate loyalty, a microcosm of the Derangement’s cognitive bias: even scholars find it hard to care about distant suffering.

4. How does the lost poem “A Corona for Vivien” function as a symbol of the Derangement? The poem becomes an imaginary ideal precisely because it is never read. People project their desires for a lost natural world onto it, just as the Derangement allowed people to project fantasies of stability onto a crumbling reality. The novel explicitly compares this to religious icons or Plato’s cave: “The imagined lords it over the actual.” The poem’s absence enables a kind of comforting nostalgia that prevents clear-eyed action, mirroring the psychological mechanism of the Derangement.

5. What is the significance of the Author’s Note (“nothing related to the novel is buried anywhere”) in relation to the Derangement theme? The note asserts that all necessary information is plainly presented, rejecting hidden puzzles or conspiracies. This contrasts with the Derangement’s culture of denial, evasion, and secret knowledge. It invites readers to interpret based on explicit content rather than speculation, suggesting that the real challenge is not uncovering secrets but facing what is already known—much like climate science itself. The note is a final, authorial moment of clarity in a novel that otherwise questions what can be known.