What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
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What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
Knopf, 2025
What you can know here about this new novel is limited because it’s a spring-loaded mechanism like the Jack-in-a-Box or, in this case, Jill-in-a-Box. Half-way through, out pops a new female narrator in a different century. To avoid spoiling the surprise, the reviewer must suppress what he knows.
You already know the author of What We Can Know. I don’t know all of his novels, but this one wants to be major McEwan, wider-ranging than some of his recent work, more like his most historically or politically engaged fictions such as Atonement, Saturday, and Solar. Like that last work, What We Can Know is a climate-conscious novel. The first half is set in the future—the 2120s— when the global warming and rising seas warned against in Solar were exacerbated by nuclear wars that resulted in the Great Inundation in 2042. Giant waves destroyed cities such as New York and Paris while turning Great Britain into an impoverished archipelago.
The novel’s other half occurs mostly in the early 21st century around Oxford, England, and focuses on the public and private lives of Francis Blundy, an invented poet almost the equal of Seamus Heaney, and Blundy’s wife Vivien, a younger academic who becomes his dogsbody. After he dies, she writes this second half memoir about Blundy and other men she has known.
I can say that the futuristic first half resembles a David Lodge novel about literary academics with an antiquarian bent. The narrator Thomas Metcalfe and his wife, Rose, barely scraping by at a post-Inundation university, become obsessed with the Blundys, particularly a birthday dinner party that occurred in 2014 at the Blundy home where he delivered an elaborate sonnet sequence called a “corona” written for and presented to Vivien. Because there was only the one presentation copy that was never published and never showed up in archives, news of the poem inspired literary speculation that turned into conspiracy theories bruited around the Internet, which made Blundy a surprise best-seller (of his earlier books).
Thomas records all the research he did on the Blundys and the poem, but his investigation has reached a dead-end—until a chance lead. If Thomas and Rose could find that disappeared poem, it would make their academic careers. So they go on an elaborate and expensive and ultimately comic treasure hunt that recalls Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” though the hunters don’t seem to know it.
The second half of What We Can Know resembles, to keep comparisons British, just about any book by the ever-complaining Rachel Cusk. Vivien’s memoir records her childhood with a distant father, her early life as a promising academic critic, her marriage to the genial (but un-bookish) luthier Percy, and her eventual marriage to Blundy. Unlike Cusk, Vivien has something tragic to complain about: Percy’s early-onset Alzheimer’s that turns her life into a 24-hour, years-long nightmare relieved only by stolen hours of sex with Blundy’s brother-in-law and then Blundy. Vivien’s years with the demented Percy are repetitive, and McEwan allows her hand-written prose to repeat. She could have used an editor, though the redundancies do give an authenticity to her narration, even if I did sometimes think of the protagonist of Atwood’s Alias Grace, probably a victim, possibly a killer.
The future academics complain about their students’ resistance to remembering the century-old past. Percy can’t remember 10 minutes ago. With all of this century’s methods of storage and recall, what, McEwan seems to ask, have we forgotten in our Anthropocene, what could we know and remember that might prevent in our future the novel’s apocalypse?
Literature is memorial. Vivien published a book on the 19th-century poet John Clare. One of the guests at the birthday dinner is a novelist. Another guest is a poet and editor. A third is a journalist with an English degree. McEwan’s bookish characters remember lines of poetry and refer to long-dead writers. Thomas exclaims about an invented novelist named Mabel Fisk, maybe the next Rachel Cusk since the last two letters of the two names match.
What We Can Know is a very literary novel critiquing, I think, much of literature’s fixation on knowing and communicating personal experience. In the novel’s first half, we have a private poem by a writer who rabidly dismisses climate change. In the second half, a private not-for-publication memoir about an individual’s domestic trauma. At least one narrator and many of the literary people the two narrators write about are adulterers, devotees of private personal pleasure. Much traditional and even classic fiction details the lives of such people. Emma Bovary and Molly Bloom on the distaff side. Males too numerous to mention. Perhaps the literary novelist McEwan is suggesting that literature can adulterate our thinking, distract or discourage or replace the kind of impersonal, systems-conscious thinking necessary to stave off climate disaster. Even Blundy’s old-fashioned poetic celebration of local nature, we ultimately find out, was adulterated by personal theft and vengeance.
Rose, the academic from the future, is writing an essay that makes a similar, more narrow argument about one literary form:
The conventions of fictional realism, with its close attention to the mundane, the personal and the assumed continuity of everyday life, were inadequate. New forms were needed to frame the physical and moral consequences of a global catastrophe.
Either McEwan doesn’t agree with his character or didn’t have the wherewithal to imagine “new forms” in What We Can Know. Splitting the novel into present and future is not new. Each half has its own clever plot spring. Each spends most of its pages on realism’s “close attention to the mundane” while the science is perfunctory. Like the poem, the climate disaster comes to seem a MacGuffin. Because McEwan knows that what his characters know and write are far from what we can know about the larger world beyond the usual scope of “realism,” What We Can Know finally seems to be a capitulation to convention. At the famous birthday dinner, Blundy blunders on with his usual denial of climate science. None of the guests offers counter arguments of the kind that McEwan knows—because he made them in Solar.
The novel as via negativa: presenting at length what and how not to know is a risky method of cultural critique. If McEwan’s intent is to indict literature, I worry that he may be “hoist with his own petard” (to imitate for a moment the quote masters in the novel). What We Can Know provides so many comic pleasures and melodramatic horrors it could be welcomed as a continuation of traditional realism’s methods rather than a critique of them, their resistance to new more valuable forms.
But what I think I know about the novel’s purpose could be wrong, and McEwan, with the wisdom of his 77 years, is showing with the novel’s commitment to empirical details that what we can really (and maybe memorably) know is the personal, physical experience that realism documents and that dominates his novel. The problem with this defense of What We Can Know is stylistic. McEwan’s two academically trained narrators write a rather abstract and sometimes pedestrian prose that rarely communicates vital and vivid experience. Even when they describe passionate moments, the prose can sound expository. Beginners at autobiography, Vivien and Thomas are not models of creative nonfiction.
Rose and Thomas were attracted to writers working between 1990 and 2030. It was a period of “brilliant invention and bone-headed greed. What music, what tasteless art, what wild breaks and sense of humor,” says Thomas. Maybe it’s because I’m American that this sounds more like American than British literature of that period. It was in a bookshop in Oxford that I first saw the old British directive made popular: “Keep calm and carry on.” We may never know if Blundy’s poetry disrupts that calm, but McEwan’s English prose is pretty much “carry on.”
Thomas says of Rose’s essay attacking realism, “it was a little too theoretical for my taste.” I hope my reading of What We Can Know is not “too theoretical,” too focused on epistemology, what I know McEwan knows about the earth’s future, knowledge he chooses to communicate only indirectly in this book. To return to Hamlet: “By indirections find directions out,” says Polonius. But he is a fool who dies foolishly. Maybe it’s already too late in this century for indirection. An early reviewer of What We Can Know loved its literary profusion and called the novel a “sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” Just the petard response I feared.
Tom LeClair is the author of four critical books, eight novels, and hundreds of essays and reviews. He is particularly interested in ecological fiction.