Recent Reading: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
It's been a long time since I read a novel by Ian McEwan. Some combination of his dwindling reputation among readers in my general vicinity, and plot descriptions that I found unappetizing kept me away from an author who was once one of my gateways to literary fiction. What We Can Know, the 2025 novel through which I've chosen to become reacquainted with McEwan, is a potent reminder of the skill and artistry that once made him a must-read. It is also extremely strange. Its first half is one of the most exciting pieces of writing I've read in months, but the novel only works with its second half, which completely changes what it is and what it's about.
The first half of What We Can Know is narrated by Tom, an academic in the early 22nd century. Tom's specialty is literature published between 1990 and 2030, a period known as The Derangement, when runaway technological innovation overshadowed looming climate catastrophe. In the novel's opening chapters, we follow Tom as he makes a somewhat arduous journey from his home to the Bodleian Library—now located on a mountaintop in Snowdonia, not in Oxford, as the latter city has, like much of the UK, been inundated by rising seawater. Tom's purpose in this journey is to examine the archives of the poet Francis Blundy—considered second only to Seamus Heaney—and his wife, Vivien. In 2014, Francis and Vivien hosted a small gathering of friends and relatives for a dinner in honor of Vivien's fifty-fourth birthday. The evening has become known as "the Second Immortal Dinner", a reference to an 1817 dinner party attended by Keats, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and others, in which poetry, witticisms, and song were lobbed across the table.
Drawing on emails, letters, journals, newspaper articles, and other detritus of the early 21st century (the promised degradation of electronic records has not occurred; Tom has access to an entire cloned, decrypted copy of the internet, stored on servers in Nigeria, his world's superpower), Tom walks us through the years, weeks, and days leading up to the dinner, the evening's events, and the preoccupations of its hosts and guests. The latter include Blundy's sister, a well-regarded potter who simmers with jealousy over the attention her brilliant brother has always received over her; her husband, a middling poet in his own right who has hitched his star to his more famous brother-in-law, but who is now contemplating abandoning the task of writing Blundy's biography; a famous writer (though her fame, as Tom informs us, outlives her by only a few decades, and by his era she is forgotten) and her husband, who on their way to the party revealed to one another that they are both having affairs; a freelance journalist currently bowed under the demands of new motherhood; her husband, a handyman whose disinterest in literature the Blundys overlook because he's useful around the house; and a gay couple who, to be frank, feel a bit like an afterthought, though one of them, a veterinarian, relates an affecting anecdote about performing spinal surgery on a snake.
Readers of this review might now be raising their hand to point out that none of these people sound like wits and intellects on the level of Keats and Wordsworth. Indeed, the tale of how and why the Second Immortal Dinner came to be known that way is a major component of the narrative Tom is spinning for us, one that reflects as much on his own era as on the Blundys'. It is rooted less in what is known about the dinner, than in what is absent from the historical record. As the night's chief entertainment, Blundy recited a corona—a sequence of linked sonnets—in honor of his wife's birthday, and gave her the only copy. Tom's recreation of Blundy's thought process (which he persists in despite the scolding of his wife, Rose, a fellow academic who prefers a drier, more rigorous approach) suggests that he expected the poem to be published eventually, if only after his death. But Vivien—a former academic whose married life was spent in the shadow of her husband's career—never commented publicly on the poem after that evening, and as a result, "A Corona for Vivien" has become one of the great lost artworks of the 21st century.
The focus on the lost poem, and on the incidents and personalities that caused it to become so, places What We Can Know squarely in a well-known tradition, the literary-academic mystery, whose most famous example is probably A.S. Byatt's Possession. But the fact that the history being related to us in connection with this loss is a future history, that the academic searching for the poem is doing so from his home on an archipelago that is all that is left of the United Kingdom, that separating him from the period he is writing about are mass civilizational upheaval, the deaths of billions, and the complete rewriting of the world's physical and geopolitical map, does fascinating things to the story and its emotional impact.
Even in the increasingly crowded field of climate fiction, McEwan's approach to the material is unique and invigorating. It recalls post-apocalypses like A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which roving scholar-monks traverse a wasteland dotted by surviving citadels of knowledge (Tom is frequently advised to search for information about the corona in the archives of Blundy's biographer, but demurs, because he fears being killed by roving gangs on his way to the university in northern Scotland where they are housed). But there is also an echo here of gentler apocalypse stories like Station Eleven, in which the love of knowledge and literature persists even after the modern world's collapse.
The twist that McEwan adds to this material is his focus on the quotidian. Tom isn't trying to solve a world-changing mystery. He's just trying to find a specific poem, and through it, to shed light on the lives of people who were, the reader must inevitably conclude, not actually that interesting. There's something genuinely disorienting—and, in its way, optimistic—about the idea that even in the post-climate-catastrophe future, there will still be academics willing to immerse themselves in the minutiae of a subject that is of no objective importance. It is though the interstices of Tom's painstaking recreation of Blundy, Vivien, their friends and family, and the evening of the dinner, however, that we gain a growing sense of his scholarly perspective on their era (which is to say, our present moment). Which is both incisive, and flattening.
Although his society is sophisticated and affluent enough to support universities and humanities departments, Tom can't help but compare it to the society of the Derangement, which to him feels more vibrant and more truly alive. He envies the freedom to get up and travel for hundreds of miles in any direction, to hop continents on a whim. Living on small islands, constrained by limited materials and goods, Tom worries that people of his era have become small-minded and conformist. At the same time, Tom shares in his era's view of us as criminally negligent and foolish, sleepwalking into a disaster we recognized, but could only gesture helplessly at through fruitless protest and solipsistic works of art. It's not entirely unfair, but neither is it a complete picture, and its effect is to remind us that even the most diligent scholar can't help but dehumanize and instrumentalize their subjects, and that our present moment—so vital and fluid in our eyes—will one day be subject to the same effect.
Blundy's corona ends up emblematic of Tom and his era's confused perspective on our own. Despite never being published or performed after Vivien's birthday dinner, it amasses a reputation, especially after one of the guests, the freelance journalist, writes an essay in which she filters her recollections of the poem through her own climate anxiety. She describes the corona as an ode to love standing defiant against the rampant destruction of the natural landscape (despite the fact that Blundy, to the embarrassment of his inner circle, was a vehement climate denier). When a rumor spreads on social media that an oil company paid Blundy a vast sum to suppress publication of the corona, it becomes a symbol for environmentalists, one that persists into Tom's era.
In other words, the corona itself is a work of climate fiction (however inadvertently). By focusing his story on such a work, McEwan touches on a question that has been the subject of much discussion in our own critical ecosphere. What does climate fiction achieve, and what is its purpose? Vivien, Tom tells us, is vaguely uneasy about the climate crisis, noticing changes in her immediate vicinity such as increasingly mild winters or disappearing wildlife. For those of us who are much like her, climate fiction can be a release valve, a way of imagining that the worst that we believe is coming has already happened. To people of Tom's era, however, such a release is yet another symptom of the Derangement, and yet the corona itself seems immune to such judgment. By virtue of not actually existing, it gains a power that the actual poem—even if it had said the things that the people who wrote about it thought it did—could never have had.
Tom's growing obsession with the corona and with Vivien (in a particularly unfortunate moment, he tells Rose that Vivien is the person he most would have liked to marry) runs in parallel to our increasing conviction that the poem is nothing like the thing that he, and the popular imagination of his society, have made of it. The fact that he doesn't reach the same conclusion suggests that for all his keen dissection of our era's faults, Tom's era is prey to similar ones. Or perhaps those faults are less the future's as a whole, and more Tom's specifically. His attempts to involve his students in his quest trigger a revolt. Why, they ask, does he repeatedly tell them how wasteful, short-sighted, and even criminal the people in the past were, and then expect them to be interested in those people? What is the point of studying the thoughts and opinions of people who destroyed the world? What is the point in learning history when history led to this?
There's an echo here of present-day conversation. As Tom tells us, the humanities in his era are under attack by people who insist that the only things worth studying are the science and technology that will allow humanity to rebuild and make a more plentiful future for themselves. This is, of course, an argument that is being made in the here and now. But the question of what the humanities are for—and more specifically, whether there is any value in dedicating one's life and mind to the study of one particular artist or work, or to examining a particular corner of history in excruciating detail—is given additional heft by the novel's setting. As optimistic as it might feel to imagine that there will still be literature professors in the 2120s, it does seem reasonable to wonder whether this is the best use of their time.
McEwan doesn't offer an answer to this question, because Tom's pursuit of the corona eventually leads him not to the poem itself, but to a long prose narrative by Vivien, which makes up the second half of the novel. In it, she reveals that most of the assumptions made, in her own era and in Tom's, about Blundy, herself, and their relationship were completely mistaken, and that the corona itself had a meaning that was obscure to everyone but its author and subject. It's a well-written novella, told by a sharp-tongued, clever narrator whose comprehensive dismantling of everything we'd been led to believe about her makes for a fun read. A child's abduction is thwarted, another child is killed by neglect, multiple extramarital affairs are begun, abandoned, and rekindled, and a murder is committed (maybe Tom has a point about the past being more exciting, and offering more scope for a variety of human experience). Most importantly, at every turn Vivien reveals to us how much of what we had previously been told about her and her husband, which had been presented as sober historical recreation backed by documentary evidence, was in fact complete, and completely misguided, fabrication. (My personal favorite of these revelations: while Tom imagined Vivien as an avid home cook, Vivien casually mentions that the birthday dinner was, of course, catered.)
This is a trick that McEwan has played in previous novels, most notably in what is perhaps his best work, Atonement. A sudden metafictional rug-pull that asks us to consider how fiction distorts reality, especially when it doesn't acknowledge that it is fiction. In the context of What We Can Know, however, the trick feels pointless. It removes the novel's preoccupation with climate and climate fiction—the Vivien we discover in her own narrative is coolly indifferent to both—and replaces it with what feels like a gag. A coda even reveals that Tom published Vivien's narrative to great acclaim, which indirectly answers the question raised by his students, though perhaps not in a way that satisfies: what is the purpose of studying the humanities? Why, it's to publish, of course!
It's unfair of me to complain that the novel McEwan wanted to write was not the one I wanted to read, but the first half of What We Can Know was so exciting and thought-provoking, that I almost wish I could recommend it to people on its own (I could imagine that half of the novel on the Clarke shortlist, for example). Without the twist that closes out its story, however, What We Can Know feels sadly unfinished, and yet it is that twist that also reveals that what had felt like the novel's core subject was, to McEwan as well as his characters, merely a sideshow. Whether this means that I should continue to rediscover McEwan, or conclude that my instinct to leave him behind was the correct one, is left as an open question to the readers.
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