Introduction

Climate change confronts us with deeply tangled temporalities. The past of industrial societies shapes present-day crises in often invisible ways, the future becomes fragmented into a range of more or less optimistic scenarios of global warming, intergenerational thinking is more important than ever—but typically in limited supply given the short-term logic of electoral cycles. The linear notions of time that underlie scenarios of economic growth and scientific progress break down. Time becomes ‘bumpy’, to use William E. Connolly’s (2017, 8–9) terminology—that is, deeply nonlinear, contested, and convoluted.

The bumpiness of climate temporalities is one of the main reasons for the intractability or ‘wickedness’ of the crisis we are facing. Wicked problems, in Horst W. T. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber’s (1973) account, display a number of features: they elude simple definitions, admit no clear-cut solutions, and they are unique in nature and scope. The planetary scale and ramifications of climate change amplify these features, to the point that climate change has been called a ‘super wicked problem’ (Levin et al. 2012). Because the temporal scale of the climate crisis is so stretched out in terms of both causes and effects, the possibility of finding a solution—whether solution means mitigation, adaptation, or a combination thereof—becomes uncertain and blurry.

Given the deep connection between narrative and time, it is hardly surprising that the narrative imagination has found many ways to address this wicked temporality, as a growing body of scholarship on ‘climate’ or ‘Anthropocene fiction’ attests (see Bolze 2026; Johns-Putra 2019; Mehnert 2016; Trexler 2015).¹ Econarratologists such as Erin James and myself have asked how narrative can represent and negotiate this type of temporal nonlinearity, and the field has produced insights into, for example, the affordances of the time loop or what James (2022) discusses as the ‘pseudo-singular’ mode of representation in environmental fiction.² In this mode, an event is presented as having occurred once but understood by readers as part of a much longer, repetitive temporal sequence.³

Experimentations with narrative form can thus enrich readers’ understanding of the temporal scale of the climate crisis. In these econarratological debates, though, the interplay between narrative strategies and more local stylistic choices has remained underexplored. This article homes in on metaphor as a site of negotiation (together with nonlinear narration) of the bumpiness of climate temporality. Work in cognitive approaches to the arts has highlighted the central role of metaphorical structures in understanding complex phenomena, including (but not limited to) temporally complex stories.⁴ A more technical term for these structures is ‘image schemas’, and they have been widely seen as helping map abstract ideas onto more basic, embodied patterns.⁵ My focus is on one schema in particular, which associates the complex temporality of climate change with spatial layers or strata. Linguistically, this schema finds expression in metaphors drawn from the domains of geology and archaeology—two fields have been at the forefront of the climate change debate, with some scientists proposing the concept of the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002) to signal humanity’s entry into the geological record. But as a set of metaphors that are highly productive in climate change discourse (including fictional discourse), layers and strata have attracted far less attention.

Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know (2025) offers a sustained illustration of how such metaphors figure temporal complexity. The temporally layered structure of McEwan’s novel captures both the conceptual difficulties of representing the climate crisis and its ethical impasses. While Rittel and Webber (1973, 160) uncouple their use of the word ‘wicked’ from any ethical implications, McEwan’s characters are wicked in an explicitly moral sense. The novel shows how imaginative engagements with climate temporalities can bring up the enormous ethical stakes of climate change as various institutions—including literature itself—find themselves implicated in the very problem they are trying to address. In What We Can Know, spatial metaphors based on the layer schema crystallize this experience on a stylistic level: they convey the impasse of being ‘implicated subjects’, in Michael Rothberg’s (2019) terminology, uncertainly caught between multiple climate temporalities. Combining postapocalyptic fiction with the campus novel, McEwan’s work draws a satirical connection between individual culpability—moral wickedness—and our collective and institutional implication in climate crisis, where the pronoun ‘our’ encompasses the inhabitants of the Global North but also (more pointedly) the literary establishment.

Schemas and Strata

Inspired by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) work, cognitive linguists have repeatedly highlighted that our conceptualization of abstract ideas tends to rely on patterns derived from embodied engagements with the world.⁶ These patterns include path, balance, or link, and they are known as ‘image schemas’ (see Hampe and Grady 2005). Image schemas build on our everyday interactions with space and material things but are routinely employed to talk about less tangible relations, such as political change (the path to freedom), the time we devote to various pursuits (work-life balance), or causal connection (the link between vaccination and illness prevention). Image schemas work metaphorically, by comparing abstract processes or ideas to embodied experiences, though they are often so conventional that they do not register as linguistic metaphors. Nevertheless, they are pervasive across a broad range of discourse modes, and they are particularly productive when it comes to conceptualizing temporal relationships (see Boroditsky 2000).

Image schemas also play an important role in audiences’ engagement with temporally complex, nonlinear narrative, as shown by film scholars Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss (2020).⁷ In the context of Western modernity, the path image schema is the most basic way of conceptualizing the passage of time, and therefore it is systematically involved in narrative comprehension. However, nonlinear narrative disrupts or complicates the application of this schema: instead, as Willemsen and Kiss argue, audiences resort to different modes of conceptualization, alternative schemas that help them come to grips with an otherwise puzzling narrative structure. For instance, in their analysis of Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), Willemsen and Kiss (2020, 187–88) suggest that the schemas of ‘containment’ and ‘verticality’ supplant path-like progression in the viewer’s experience.

In some instances, complex narrative verbally or visually foregrounds the schemas that are to be used for its comprehension. The protagonist of Inception, for example, remarks that ‘downwards is the only way forwards’, as Willemsen and Kiss (2020, 187) note, and that is an explicit thematization of verticality as an alternative to the linear model of narrative time. More generally, narrative can deploy verbal or visual metaphors that serve as figures of complexity, steering audiences’ conceptualization of time so as to facilitate or enrich understanding.⁸ These metaphors often tap into existing image schemas and flesh them out them by conveying specific affective meanings or cultural connotations. For instance, the image of the tangle—a frequently used metaphor for complex situations—can be invoked by narrative to facilitate comprehension of the characters’ predicament. It combines schemas of ‘collection’ and ‘linkage’, adding associations of intractability and difficulty.⁹

If image schemas are vaguely metaphorical in nature, figures of complexity are full-fledged linguistic or visual metaphors that narrative can introduce in order to guide the audience’s comprehension of a nonlinear temporal sequence and its experiential significance. They work similarly to the ‘paranarrative’, a concept introduced by Luz Aurora Pimentel (1990) and later theorized by Gunther Martens and Benjamin Biebuyck (2013).¹⁰ A paranarrative is a series of related metaphors or similes that run parallel to narrative progression, amplifying certain thematic ideas or resonances. This paranarrative can give rise to a figure of complexity, in my terminology: it can coalesce into related metaphorical expressions that steer the audience’s meaning making, particularly when it comes to making sense of nonlinear temporality.

The schema of layers or strata can serve as a figure of complexity in fiction, and it is particularly significant in relation to climate change. A common framing for today’s crisis is that of humanity inscribing itself into the geological record. That is, of course, the starting point of the influential—if controversial—concept of the Anthropocene: advanced human societies become geological agents, leaving a physical trace or mark on our planet’s composition. That picture is problematic in many ways, as articulated by environmental humanities scholars such as Eileen Crist (2013), Donna Haraway (2015), and others. But a point rarely raised in these debates on the Anthropocene is that humanity’s impact on the planet is a profoundly nonlinear affair. That partly explains why it is so difficult to agree on the exact beginning of the Anthropocene (see Smith and Zeder 2013). Was the Anthropocene inaugurated by the advent of agriculture, by the industrial revolution, or by the ability to control atomic energy? No one seems to know for sure. That points to the complexity of the ‘collision’ of histories discussed by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2014): the messy way in which climate change runs together biological, geological, and cultural processes, denying us the luxury of an orderly transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

When geological metaphors become figures of complexity in narrative, they typically capture and convey that sense of messy nonlinearity. If we consider how material strata have been conceptualized in geology and archaeology, that idea should not come as a surprise. Geological strata tend to be organized vertically, with higher strata being generally more recent than the underlying strata. But there are many exceptions to that linear arrangement, as already acknowledged by one of the fathers of modern geology, the Danish scientist Niels Steensen (also known as Nicolas Steno). In his account of the four basic principles of stratigraphy (published in Florence in 1669), Steensen suggested that ‘the earth’s state can change position in two ways’, the ‘violent thrusting up of the strata’ and the ‘spontaneous slipping or downfall of the upper strata after they have begun to form cracks’ (1916, 230–31). More recent work in geology has highlighted how strata may mix or interact due to a variety of factors, from seismic activity to disturbance caused by burrowing organisms, a phenomenon known as ‘bioturbation’ (see Boggs 2014, 14). These material processes disrupt a purely linear understanding of geological time, introducing the possibility of surprising interactions between seemingly distinct epochs.

Shifting the focus to archaeological layers yields an equally nonlinear picture. Archaeologists Bjørnar Olsen and colleagues use the term ‘percolation’ (in itself a metaphor) to describe how, in their words, ‘the past is amassed, aggregated, enrolled, mixed up, recirculated, unforgotten, or torn out’ (2012, 145). They add: ‘It is the exchange with things that gather the “pasts” that is of importance and not an orientation with respect to a measured and passing temporality’ (2012, 145). This ‘gathering’ of the pasts (in the plural) is an indication of their complex and nonlinear relationship. In short, whether conceptualized through the lens of geology or archaeology, layers and strata are not always neatly or linearly organized. That messiness is frequently reflected in metaphorical figures drawing inspiration from these disciplines. The messiness also tends to resonate in ethical terms, as I argue in the next section.

Implication and Moral Responsibility

I have already mentioned Rothberg’s discussion of the ‘implicated subject’, a figure that destabilizes the distinction between victim and perpetrator that is central to the study of trauma and collective memory. While Rothberg’s discussion is geared towards the ravages of twentieth-century history, he acknowledges that the concept of implication equally applies to collective responsibility for ecological processes: ‘We citizens of the Global North are not precisely perpetrators of climate change, yet we certainly contribute disproportionately to current and future climate-based catastrophes and benefit in the here and now from the geographically and temporally uneven distribution of their catastrophic effects’ (2019, 12). This idea introduces a key ethical theme in debates on climate change: namely, how the climate crisis is profoundly unequal in both its historical causes and its effects. Advanced industrial societies are responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that are shaping today’s climate. Yet the wealth generated by these societies over time shelters them from the disastrous consequences of those emissions. Conversely, developing nations are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters despite their negligible contribution to the crisis. This contradiction is part of the reason why the concept of Anthropocene has proven so contentious: its elevation of the human to the role of a geological agent collapses fundamental differences on the level of collective and historical responsibility. Hence the many counterproposals, from Capitalocene to Plantationocene (Haraway 2015; Moore 2017), which link climate crisis not to an undifferentiated notion of humankind but to Western modernity’s capitalist and colonial practices.¹¹

Acknowledging the deep roots of crisis places individuals in the developed world in an ethical quandary. Historically, their wealth is the result of processes such as industrialization, colonial exploitation, and fossil fueled-growth—processes that have contributed to the destruction of the natural world and, more or less indirectly, to climate change. Materially and institutionally, those living in the Global North are part of a capitalist system that is fundamentally extractive and exploitative in nature: no attempt at minimizing one’s carbon footprint can completely erase that participation in ecological harm. That is the experience of implication that Rothberg describes, and it calls for a profound rethinking of everyday notions of ethical responsibility. Philosopher Dale Jamieson discusses that point in detail: there are, he argues, ‘serious difficulties in bringing actions that may contribute to climate change under our commonsense notions of individual moral responsibility’ (2014, 160). Someone’s choice to drive to work every day can be determined by many factors, but a deliberate intention to cause ecological harm is usually not among them. Even if the driver is aware of the potentially destructive effects of their choice, it is hard to conclude that they are in any meaningful sense at fault for the climate crisis. However, they are still implicated in it, and so (but arguably to a much larger degree) are the institutions and infrastructures that shape their choice to drive.

The intergenerational dimension of climate change further complicates the ethical calculus. As Jamieson highlights (2014, 164–65), our actions have ramifications not only for other human beings living today (including younger individuals) but also for future cohorts of unborn individuals.¹² Yet the uncertainty surrounding the impact of climate change often weakens the moral claim exerted by future generations. Jamieson links this problem to the temporal nonlinearity of the climate crisis: ‘damages [on future people] can display many different temporal patterns. For example, they can crescendo much like a musical piece or they can erupt suddenly far in the future. Damages can be exported to the further future, largely bypassing the two or three generations that present people care most about’ (2014, 165). The inadequacies of commonsense ethics vis-à-vis the climate crisis thus depend on the temporally distributed nature of both its causes and its effects. Nonlinearity is closely bound up with temporal scale: a temporally extended process is more likely to give rise to nonlinear (unpredictable and surprising) outcomes.

As I argued above, metaphorical language in narrative can break with the path image schema to figure nonlinear temporality and thus help audiences imagine the interconnected, ‘bumpy’ quality of the climate crisis. McEwan’s novel serves as an example of how nonlinear narrative and metaphorical scenarios can jointly stage the temporal complexity of climate change. By activating the layer schema, this metaphorical paranarrative also evokes the forms of ethical responsibility identified by Rothberg and Jamieson. We will see that McEwan’s novel sets up an explicit contrast between commonsense moral culpability and implication in climate crisis, with specific focus on the institutions of literary writing.

‘Celebrating Nature’s Glories’?

McEwan’s What We Can Know can be described as a crossover of two genres: postapocalyptic fiction and the campus novel. Like many postapocalyptic fictions, the plot juggles two storylines: the first is set in the twenty-first century, just before a series of planetary catastrophes, the second takes place roughly one hundred years later.¹³ With a nod to Amitav Ghosh (2016), the effects of climate change are known in the book as ‘the Derangement’, but the list of catastrophes encompasses various wars (including a limited nuclear exchange) in addition to climate collapse. The narrator of the novel’s first part—Thomas Metcalfe, though he mostly goes by Tom—is a literary scholar located in postapocalyptic Britain. He is a professor of English at the University of the South Downs, and the novelty of the fictional university’s name (and of most other place names in the novel) signals that the topography of Great Britain has been dramatically altered by rising sea levels: the island is now an archipelago that poses significant navigational challenges, forcing the characters to lead isolated lives. It is through Tom’s reflections that readers come to know what separates his world from the preapocalyptic society of the twenty-first century, a society that closely resembles the audience’s. The triangulation of the novel’s two temporal settings and the audience’s reality is thus a first source of temporal complexity in What We Can Know.

This set-up is hardly new: the narrator is a variation on the ‘future reader’, which Pieter Vermeulen (2017) identifies as one of the main tropes of climate fiction. Usually a historian or an archaeologist, the future reader is someone located in a postapocalyptic world who looks back on present-day society, either ‘competently interpreting humanity’s current failures’ or ‘dispassionately reading the record of its passing’ (2017, 874). ‘Reading’, in Vermeulen’s discussion, may involve engaging with written language (for instance, documents that survived the catastrophic event), but it serves more broadly as a metaphor for recovering the past through its physical traces or ruins. In What We Can Know, by contrast, the future reader is an actual reader, and a professional one at that. As a specialist in literature from 1990 to 2030, Tom is working on the life and oeuvre of that period’s most famous British poet, Francis Blundy. He has access to a vast digital archive containing Blundy’s correspondence until the moment of his death, and he can read the messages exchanged by Blundy’s wife, Vivien, and friends with the same ease. The narrator frames the availability of their past lives as a form of quasi-narratorial omniscience: ‘I could have been there. I am there. I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful’ (McEwan 2025, 38). This accumulation of data is presented repeatedly as a natural force shaping the geological landscape of the present: the ‘mighty past’, explains the narrator, ‘wears hard against the present, like oceans, wind and rain on limestone cliffs’ (2025, 38).

Despite the overwhelming abundance of information, one important data point is missing: Blundy is said to have composed a long poem, a corona, to celebrate his wife’s birthday. This poem was presented to Vivien at a gathering that went down in literary history, half-humorously, as the ‘Second Immortal Dinner’, a name modeled on a famous dinner attended by William Wordsworth and John Keats in 1817. After that event, the poem was never published, and the parchment on which it was penned by Blundy went missing in mysterious circumstances.

Tom knows from Blundy’s archive that the natural world took center stage in the corona. The poet’s brother-in-law and editor, Harry Kitchener, who was present at the dinner, offers two contrasting interpretations: the poem represents ‘a celebration of nature’s glories, not only a lament for what we have mindlessly killed, but a passionate reminder of what is still there and must be loved’; alternatively, it can be read as ‘a prolonged, sad bugle call to bring us back to ourselves and our approaching end, which we should face calmly and with gratitude for our luck in having existed at all’ (2025, 97). It is impossible to adjudicate these interpretations without access to the corona, but the poem remains stubbornly out of reach—an ‘egregious gap’, in Porter Abbott’s (2013, 112) phrase, that drives the curiosity of the fictional reader-narrator, Tom, as well as the novel’s plot.¹⁴ As Tom suggests, by virtue of its ‘non-existence’ the corona had become ‘a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence’ (2025, 19).

One thing is clear, though: the corona’s apparent preoccupation with the nonhuman world is surprising given what we (including the narrator, Tom) know about Blundy’s biography. Tom describes Blundy as ‘a nuanced [climate] denier, but if opposed, a denier to his core’ (2025, 41). A few pages later we get to see Blundy in action, raging against the ‘climate high priests’ and what he describes as their ‘fashionable nonsense’: ‘Life on earth, which included clever humans, was highly adaptable’, Blundy blurts out (2025, 43). If the corona was ‘a celebration of nature’s glories’, as Kitchener suggests (2025, 97), then it appears indebted to romantic fantasies of communion with nature rather than a more modern sense of human-nonhuman interdependence.¹⁵ From the narrator’s postapocalyptic vantage point, these fantasies are completely out of touch with the harsh reality of rampant climate change—though Tom’s reverence for Blundy prevents him from seeing that tension. Even more jarring is the contrast between Blundy’s mild climate denialism and a rumor that spread on social media shortly after the Second Immortal Dinner: namely, that the corona was never published because the oil industry paid Blundy a large sum to keep it from the public, fearing that the poem’s release would result in decisive climate action. The idea is promptly ridiculed by the media. As a Financial Times columnist argues, the ‘notion that the oil industry would care a hoot what a poet, however eminent, has to say about global heating is fatuous beyond belief’ (2025, 107–08). But, somehow, the rumor sticks, and functions in McEwan’s novel as a self-deprecating comment on literature’s power to influence attitudes towards climate change—an often-voiced ecocritical aspiration that What We Can Know subtly ridicules.¹⁶ Amplifying the satirical edge of that commentary is Blundy’s earlier characterization as a ‘nuanced denier’ (2025, 41). That idea lends plausibility to his complicity with the oil industry, despite the absurdness of the social media rumor.

Satire and Wickedness

The satirical dimension of the novel will not surprise McEwan’s readers: his earlier Solar (2010) has been widely read—and critiqued—as a satire of climate science (see Garrard 2013). In What We Can Know the focus shifts from science to literature itself: the absent corona becomes a projection screen for anxieties regarding literature’s engagement with the climate crisis. On the one hand, the lost poem invites utopian investments in literature’s power to change the world, a claim that the novel satirically dismisses as inflated. On the other hand, Blundy’s denialism and the conspiracy theory surrounding the poem’s disappearance introduce a sense of complicity between literary institutions and the climate crisis—a complicity discussed by Martin Puchner (2022), who argues that literature owes its existence to material and social processes that, since the advent of agriculture, have contributed to climate collapse. Blundy becomes an embodiment of literature’s ambiguous implication in environmental destruction.

Blundy’s moral ambiguities signal a much more fundamental wickedness of character, however, as the reader finds out in Part Two of the novel (which is set entirely before the collapse). In the last scene of Part One, Tom and his wife (and fellow literary scholar) Rose manage to locate the house where Blundy spent the final years of his life. Their hope is that they may be able to recover the missing corona and put an end to the speculations surrounding its content and Blundy’s decision not to publish it. A line in Vivien’s journal suggests that she may have buried something in the garden, so the two scholars start digging, in what is the novel’s first diegetic foregrounding of soil and layers (metaphorically, as we will see in the next section, geology had been in the novel all along). They recover a box, which Tom describes as ‘a piece of advanced technology of unknown purpose, dispatched across light years by another civilization’ (2025, 201–2). This comparison announces the object’s entanglement in a temporally complex relationship: Vivien’s anticipation of the future (she had wanted the contents of the box to be preserved and found by posterity) meets the narrator’s imagination of a preapocalyptic past. Indeed, elated by the discovery and anticipating being able to read the corona, the narrator takes a moment to wax lyrical about his contemporaries’ relationship with the past: ‘We wrecked much of [the planet], but not everything. Here was the other story, not of the dead but of the descendants of the survivors, whose three-word history was bleakly simple: we scraped through’ (2025, 203; emphasis in the original).

It is significant that this train of thought is initiated by the discovery of what the narrator supposes to be Blundy’s lost poem. Expecting this egregious gap to be filled soon, Tom lets go of his obsession with Blundy’s past and can finally verbalize the existential condition of his contemporaries. What he describes is an experience of lateness—of coming after a collapse—that is simultaneously precarious and empowering. The narrator’s present is a possible future for the novel’s real audience: these reflections on temporality instantiate the ‘future orientation’ that Mark Currie (2007, 24) sees as a hallmark of the contemporary novel. However, the narrator’s musings end as soon as he and Rose manage to open the box and reveal its contents: not Blundy’s famous corona, but a folder containing pages from his wife’s journal. ‘It’s not. . . . It isn’t poetry. It’s prose’, Tom remarks, regretfully (2025, 208). The pages are, the reader infers, Part Two of the novel, which begins at the end of this scene. Significantly, we never get to see Tom’s reaction to the discovery: a laconic note at the end of the novel only informs us that Tom and Rose edited Vivien’s found manuscript and published it under the title The Confessions of Vivien Blundy.

Part Two marks a significant tonal and thematic departure from Part One. Climate change—the Derangement—pervaded Tom’s reflections, but here it is hardly mentioned (an omission that satirically exposes the climate change blindness of our age). Instead, it is Vivien’s romantic life that takes center stage, starting from her relationship with Harry Kitchener (Blundy’s editor). When Kitchener decides to abruptly end the affair, Vivien seduces Blundy to intentionally provoke Kitchener, but the relationship with Blundy proves surprisingly resilient. The only obstacle is that Vivien is married to a man, Percy, who has severe Alzheimer’s disease. The shocking revelation of the Confessions is that Blundy himself killed Percy in Vivien’s home, staging a domestic accident.

If Part One linked Blundy’s moral ambivalence to his cavalier attitude towards climate change (and possible complicity with the oil industry), Part Two establishes his profound wickedness in unambiguous moral terms. The diffuse implication in ecological collapse here becomes straightforward moral and legal culpability: retroactively, this twist invites the reader to revisit Blundy’s seemingly harmless ‘nuanced denial’ and see it as an expression of a fundamental moral flaw. But the link between Blundy’s crime and his careless views on the climate is diegetic as well as symbolic: a further revelation that surfaces in Part Two is that the idealized nature depicted by Blundy’s corona is in fact based on Vivien’s recollections of Percy, who was—unlike the bookish Blundy—a nature lover. Far from being a ‘prophet of the biosphere’ (2025, 124), Blundy fraudulently appropriates Percy’s experiences to please his wife. Vivien herself puts it as follows in the journal: ‘For his poem, Francis [Blundy] stole my best, most precious times with Percy, inserted himself into our carefree wandering across rich landscapes, into our joy in nature and passion for naming it, into our curiosity, our delight in river-swimming, our rough picnics in meadows and woods. To give his poem force, Francis crept inside Percy’s skin’ (2025, 330–31). This is a grotesque inversion of the poet’s supposed attunement to the natural world. Even empathy—taking Percy’s perspective—is seen as a disturbing form of violence, mirroring the physical violence inflicted by Blundy on Percy’s body.¹⁷

Blundy is simultaneously an implicated subject, a representative of an institution (literature) that is complicit with ecological destruction, and a perpetrator in a more conventional sense. The intractability of climate change as a moral and political problem—its wickedness—is thus mapped onto Blundy’s overtly criminal behavior. Vivien, the author of these Confessions, is also legally and morally implicated by her silence and by the years of benefiting from Percy’s death (which made marriage with Blundy possible). This leaves Tom, the narrator of Part One, in a particularly difficult position: surely, he played no role in Percy’s killing or in its aftermath, but as a long-time admirer of Blundy’s oeuvre he does seem uncomfortably involved in the wickedness at the heart of Part Two. Readers never find out Tom’s reaction to the Confessions (as mentioned, Part Two ends abruptly), but they will no doubt project their own indignation at Blundy’s conduct onto Tom.¹⁸ At the same time, the position of moral condemnation we come to is unlikely to completely cancel out the reader’s sense of also being implicated in Percy’s murder, given the interest we have taken in Blundy’s figure (and in the missing corona) throughout the events of Part One. Put otherwise, an experience of irreducible moral complexity is at the center of What We Can Know, but the novel goes beyond mere acknowledgment of the complexity: instead, it aligns our age’s failure to adequately respond to climate change with criminal wrongdoing. Moreover, this experience reflects the temporally complex position of a future reader-scholar who looks back on the preapocalyptic past. The moral stakes of the climate crisis and its stubborn temporal complexity are thus shown to be profoundly interlinked.

Collapsed Distance and Uncertain Verticality

It is not a coincidence that the defining moment of Tom’s relationship with Blundy’s life is an instance of digging. The past is repeatedly framed in What We Can Know as a physical record weighing down on the present—though it is physical only in a metaphorical sense, because most of the record is in fact digitally mediated. One of Tom’s colleagues remarks, with a double geological metaphor, that twenty-second-century students ‘have before them on their computers a mountain range of unexplored material. Every song, lie, casual thought, opera performance, death threat, punk-band riot—all of it, more than 120 years of the collective human mind rescued for our perusal. The view, he [the colleague] will say, keeping with the alpine imagery, extends from the microbiology of the flora to the peaks on the curved horizon’ (2025, 88). The mountain range stands in for the accumulated layers of information that separate Tom and his contemporaries from the preapocalyptic past. This ‘alpine imagery’ breaks with linear conceptualizations of time (the path schema). Instead of horizontal movement along a path, we have vertical accumulation, but the novel works towards undermining the linearity of that arrangement. The narrator once remarks that he would like to ‘shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen’ (2025, 71). Two aspects of this metaphorical scenario stand out. The first is an inversion in the expected directionality of the layer schema, with the past being on top of the narrator (a ‘ceiling’) rather than a sedimentary layer underneath. The second is the narrator’s desire to eliminate the distance implied by the alpine metaphor, impossibly reaching out into the preapocalyptic past.

Indeed, the past and the present tend to merge in the narrator’s imagination, or rather the past seeps into the present, destabilizing the narrator’s understanding of his current predicament. Memory itself is seen as a ‘sponge’ that ‘soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question’ (2025, 100)—a simile that captures the ‘percolation’ of sedimentary layers, to use Olsen et al.’s (2012) terminology. Another elaborate comparison expresses this ambivalent coexistence of temporalities. Paradoxically, the narrator imagines standing on a bridge that has given way: ‘The waiting figure on the modern bridge is me. The collapsed bridge downstream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represent the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved’ (2025, 96). The verticality of the layers or strata is here transferred to the physical position of a bridge that is in two places at the same time, signaling that the past remains inaccessible despite its retrospective readability (because of the abundant digital detritus it has left behind). In the narrator’s metaphorical scenario, past and present become superimposed, but confusedly—without merging or aligning. Likewise, this uneasy experience of nonlinear temporality is encapsulated by Tom’s observation that he and his contemporaries are ‘trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts’ (2025, 203). With minimal modification, this would also serve as an apt description of the experience of reading What We Can Know, trapped as the real readers are between three temporal planes: real-world temporality, the eerily similar preapocalyptic world evoked by the novel, and the narrator’s present after the Derangement. By disrupting path-like progression and linear verticality, McEwan’s metaphorical language—the paranarrative constructed by the novel—renders this uneasy instability of the present, the intractable wickedness it presents in both imaginative and moral terms.

Working in tandem with the narrative structure of the novel and the moral implication emerging from Blundy’s life, this instability reinforces the paradox at the heart of What We Can Know. When Tom and Rose recover the box with Vivien’s journal, Tom comments that ‘Vivien had wanted us, strangers from an unknowable future, to find what she had buried’ (2025, 201). The idea of future’s unknowability is key here. On a superficial reading, it refers to Vivien’s inability to predict the future. However, the novel strongly implies that the future climate collapse—the Derangement—could and should have been known by Vivien’s contemporaries. Unknowability does not stem from lack of scientific knowledge, but from willful negligence. Instead, the future becomes unknowable in a stronger sense, not from Vivien’s perspective but from the vantage point of a narrator who is struggling to define what it means to live and assign ethical responsibility in the wake of ecological destruction. The moral failures of twenty-first-century individuals like Blundy and Vivien continue to shape their descendants’ lives, placing them on uncertain—and perhaps unknowable—moral grounds. This seeping of the past into the present signals a profound crisis of intergenerational relations.

Conclusion

The starting point of this article was the idea that climate change gives rise to considerable temporal complexities, on three levels: it prompts a reconsideration of human history’s relationship with the nonhuman world, as signaled by debates surrounding the onset of the Anthropocene; it disrupts the collective imagination of the future; and it brings up difficult questions about intergenerational responsibility, given the unique temporal reach of the climate crisis. The challenges posed by this nonlinear temporality are imaginative: they trouble the path image schema, which is our default way of conceptualizing time. But there is a moral dimension to the challenge, too: commonsense notions of ethical culpability break down; instead, more diffuse forms of implication in environmental destruction come into view, as I have argued in dialogue with Jamieson’s (2014) and Rothberg’s (2019) work. Under headings such as ‘climate fiction’ (see, e.g., Mehnert 2016), contemporary writing is tackling the imaginative and ethical difficulties that define what has been called the ‘wickedness’ (or stubborn intractability) of climate change.

In this article I have focused on how geological or archaeological metaphors for temporal complexity—and the underlying schema of layers and strata—take on particular significance in climate fiction, reflecting the central role of these fields in climate discourse at large. Especially when orchestrated in a coherent paranarrative, such metaphorical language helps fiction come to grips with temporal complexity and its moral ramifications by activating image schemas alternative to path. My example was McEwan’s novel What We Can Know, which combines a postapocalyptic narrative with a metafictional (and largely satirical) reflection on literature’s role vis-à-vis climate change. McEwan stages different levels of ethical failure, exploring how a writer’s criminal (and in that sense wicked) actions tie in with, and to some extent mirror, his climate denialism and complicity in environmental harm. But that character’s moral bankruptcy is seen through the lens of a future reader (and literary scholar), whose obsession with the famous poet’s life and oeuvre implicates him in moral abjection. Surfacing repeatedly throughout the novel, McEwan’s metaphors use spatial scenarios to render the deep nonlinearity of time—how past mistakes and failures are still shaping a postapocalyptic future (the narrator’s present) and determining its inability to know itself. One of the many ironies of McEwan’s novel can thus be traced to the title, with the confidence of ‘what we can know’ breaking down under the weight of moral implication. That experience is recreated, repeatedly, in McEwan’s metaphorical usage as the past appears to seep or collapse into a fundamentally opaque experience of both present and future temporalities.

In that way, McEwan’s novel represents a useful template for climate fictions aiming to avoid the pitfalls of didacticism without being overtly experimental. The novel combines plot, themes, as well as narrative and stylistic strategies in a coherent and highly accessible manner. This involvement of both narrative and stylistic form (primarily through metaphor) greatly amplifies the imaginative challenges that more conventional types of climate fiction merely hint at thematically. Moreover, What We Can Know implicates its readers in these challenges, immersing them in moral difficulties that the novel deliberately refuses to resolve. The burden shifts to interpretation and discussion, then, which may well be the most significant way in which climate fiction can affect contemporary audiences.¹⁹

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.