What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


My opinion of Ian McEwan‘s novels has been all over the map. I loved Atonement, Saturday, and Machines like Me. On the other hand, I’ve found other novels of his, some of which were widely celebrated, cynical and misanthropic. What We Can Know, McEwan’s latest, is one of his best. It’s probably the one that comes closest to the magic he achieved with Atonement.

It’s best not to know much about this plot before beginning, so I won’t reveal much. The novel has a convoluted structure with many twists and surprises–at least one of which is carelessly revealed on the book jacket. I make it a practice not to read anything about a book before I’ve read the book itself, and was very glad to have done so this time. The general outline is that in the year 2119, humanities professor Thomas Metcalfe is doing research about a lost poem called “A Corona for Vivien” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Blundy read the poem aloud at a now-famous dinner party in 2014, but it was never published or seen since. The novel follows Metcalfe as he researches the poem and the people involved. He is obsessed, to the detriment of his own relationships, with this lost time before war and climate catastrophe upended civilization as we know it.

The sci-fi elements are presented breezily in passing, but they’re all too plausible. The focus of the novel is really nostalgia and obsession with the past. Metcalfe thinks he has an intimate knowledge of all the people in this drama because he reads their journals, their emails, and messages to each other. He is particularly stricken by Vivien, Francis’s dedicated, loving wife, who gave up her own academic career to support her husband’s work and live an idyllic life in their rural retreat. Through clever structural machinations, McEwan questions the stories we tell of the past and challenges us to confront why we sometimes do so little to prevent disasters we can readily foresee.

What We Can Know is a brilliant tour de force. It seamlessly melds the personal, the societal, and the philosophical. While McEwan’s writing can be dense, in this case, the first person voice is academic, so the writing is convincing rather than distracting. The mystery of the poem is captivating and the surprises unexpectedly complex. The result is a compelling, tightly-plotted novel that keeps you thinking all the way through and long afterward.