Review of What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan's new literary fiction looks back upon our present with a cutting 2119 eye. An enthused future academic and a contemporary poet's put-upon wife trade points of view to illuminate across two timelines a calculated rewriting of history, our brave and hubristic present-day existence, and fictional yet hauntingly plausible dangers.

In Ian McEwan's newest novel, we're introduced to characters living in a 2119, post-global-warming, post-nuclear war existence in which the population has been cut by more than half, inland seas spread across the globe, and much of the world's variation, richness, and natural world no longer exist.

Many reasons have been given for the decline of the climate-change movement in the twenty-first century. I would propose Derangement itself. The planet, with almost 200 jostling nations, was already tense.

Within this timeline, Tom Metcalfe, one of our main protagonists, is an academic fascinated by the past (the years surrounding our present day).

I treasured the crazy music and fads and troubled movies and serious science, serious history, serious biography.

My list was long--the suspension bridges, the orchestras, street parties and a thousand forms of music festivals, and people's gardening and cooking, their need for holidays, extreme sports, historical enactments, gay-pride carnivals, the risks they took with AI, the sense of humour, the safe airplanes, the passion for pointless sports. A hundred thousand at a football match! An astronaut playing golf on the moon! Did she know about the cheese-rolling competitions?

In particular, he is obsessed with a famous poet named Blundy's ambitious 2014 poem, the single copy of which was read aloud for the (obtuse, grumpy, belligerent) poet's wife's birthday, then lost to time.

I became the biographer of the reputation of an unread poem. Perhaps I was never anything else.

Regarding the poem, guests' later, well-documented accounts of the evening agree on the brilliance of Blundy's corona (a poem in which the final line of a stanza is repeated as the first line of the next; in this case, a bloated, fifteen-stanza work). But because each person's mind wandered during the performance--and each person drank copious amounts of alcohol beforehand--for them, the details of the masterpiece are fuzzy. Each of those present harbors a resentment regarding the poet but is tied to him in some way, and this dynamic colors their later reviews of this purported once-in-a-lifetime, vanished work. The corona takes on a mythical quality and morphs to serve as a poignant, powerful climate-change warning.

Blundy's wife mildly resents--but is not surprised--that her birthday celebration has become upstaged by her egomaniac husband's much-hyped work, and she realizes that within the corona he has fictionalized an idyllic, nature-focused partnership between them (far from the truth, as he hates the inconvenience of weather and the outdoors); unintentionally negated his own vehement denial of climate change (views he aggressively spouted off that very evening to the uncomfortable gathered guests); and not very cleverly revealed thinly veiled dastardly secrets from their past (which could send them both to prison or result in a death sentence).

Tom's future interest in the mysterious, lost corona is part of his overall fascination with the decades before and after the present. In a chilling reflection from the future upon our real-life, current struggle to discern and disseminate the truth amid the trash, manipulation, and lies swirling all around us, Tom, our academic protagonist says:

I prefer teaching the post-2015 period...when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. Fascinating! It was as if credulous medieval masses had burst through into modernity, rushing into the wrong theatre and onto the wrong stage set. In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated.

In 2119, to prevent destruction of further information, the world's digital file backups ("everything that ever flowed through the Internet") are kept securely in Nigeria, libraries teeter upon mountaintops, and citizens feel confident that due to "advancements in quantum computing and mathematics" they have unearthed all electronic information from the past, encrypted or not.

I’d 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. If you do, we’ll know everything.

But despite advancements in decrypting past secrets, Tom is unable to secure new information about the influential poem, which no one alive has read. Seeing our real-life present through a futuristic eye is jarring and intriguing. Tom and his peers marvel at our excess, our willful march toward global destruction, our exploded population and its range on the earth, our ease of travel, and our unimaginably expansive dry land for walking, farming, and living upon.

Early on, I found the academic focus somewhat tedious, but then the story builds into unexpected, often dark layers. The tone of the book is quiet, shadowy, and reflective, but there are rich, sordid, often unexpected twists beneath the largely academic, intellectual exercises and discussions. Written personal histories are shown to be heavily curated, outrageously selective, and powerfully manipulative. The falsified accounts are later painstakingly examined and accepted as truth, so that history is effectively rewritten. The story ultimately unravels messy realities, secrets, and life-and-death stakes in the past as well as complications and surprises in present-day relationships, careers, and considerations of the future.

Affairs, theft, lies, murder, negligence leading to death, drug-addled decision-making, and terrible mistakes are all essential components of the novel, yet the pacing does not charge along; this is a slow creep through the surface to often-wretched underbellies.

The assessment of our complex current-day messes, soaring successes, sweeping promise, and looming sense of doom is chilling and feels hauntingly pinpointed:

They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain.

...the decades sped by and the Derangement gathered pace, the weapons proliferated and they did little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed. Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike.

After tragedies and disappointments, the novel ultimately shifts to forgiveness, practical adjustments, dispassionate forging ahead, and newly imagined relationships and opportunities. Our main protagonists force or are faced with resolutions, which are not always peaceful or wholly satisfying, but push the characters forward.

I was struck by the stacked surprises that became clear in What We Can Know, and I loved realizing the incorrect assumptions I made about certain characters' motivations and capabilities.

More from Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is also the author of Atonement, On Chesil Beach, Saturday, Amsterdam, and other books.

I received a prepublication version of this title, published September 23, courtesy of Knopf and NetGalley.

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