Book Review: What We Can Know

Ian McEwan has described What We Can Know as "science fiction without the science," which is both a fair warning and a precise advertisement. The novel is set in 2119. Rising seas and a cascade of nuclear wars (including a misfired Russian warhead in the Atlantic and something called the Third Sino-American War) have halved the world's population and turned Britain into a sleepy archipelago of mountain peaks connected by ferries and funiculars. The Bodleian Library has been relocated to Snowdonia. The global currency is the Nigerian naira. The United States is a lawless territory of feuding warlords. People navigate between islands in electric canoes. Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre is underwater. And the people of this era look back at the early twenty-first century with the specific mixture of envy and contempt that we reserve for civilizations that had everything and squandered it. They call our time "the Derangement." They study us the way we study the late Romans: as a case study in spectacular, voluntary decline.

McEwan builds this world with the offhand confidence of someone who has thought about it for a very long time and decided that understatement is more frightening than spectacle. He never dwells on the catastrophe. He simply places you in its aftermath and lets you feel the weight of what is missing. The future is rendered in small, devastating details: a literature professor teaching to near-empty rooms, "a relic of the humanities in a world that no longer values them, a poor cousin to the water scientists." The only growth industries are data recovery and atmospheric management. Meanwhile, future scholars study the period 1990-2030 under the rubric "90.30 literature," and their verdict on us is brutal: "They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away."

Into this world McEwan places Tom Metcalfe, a literature professor who has devoted his career to reconstructing a lost poem. The poem, "A Corona for Vivien," was written by the celebrated (and, as we will learn, monstrous) poet Francis Blundy. A corona is a chain of linked sonnets where each begins with the final line of the previous one and the sequence closes when the first line returns, forming a circle. Blundy read it aloud at his wife Vivien's birthday dinner in 2014. The few who heard it called it the capstone of his career, comparable to The Waste Land. He then destroyed all drafts, making the single vellum copy a unique gift. The poem was never seen again.

Tom has access to the complete digital archive of the early twenty-first century. Quantum computing broke all the cryptography of our era, cracking open every encrypted data silo, every private message, every corporate vault. The result is total transparency: every email, every text message, every shopping list, every social media post, all of it preserved in servers in New Lagos, all of it legible to anyone with a library card. He can reconstruct the dinner party guest by guest, message by message. And here is the novel's central, quietly devastating paradox: having all the data changes nothing. The fundamental truth about the poem, about the people who made and destroyed it, remains hidden. As Tom observes with the wry frustration of a man drowning in information: "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." Everything, that is, except what matters.

This is McEwan's epistemological argument, and he pursues it with the rigor of a philosopher and the patience of a novelist who has been thinking about narrative and knowledge for fifty years. The past, he argues, is always a reconstruction. "Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question." A journal "fixes events like beads on a string," but lived experience refuses to be sequential. The imagined, he writes, "lords it over the actual, no paradox or mystery there." What we can know, it turns out, is bounded on all sides by what we want to believe, what we can remember, and what we are willing to see.

The novel's second half detonates everything the first half has built. Vivien's own memoir surfaces, and in it we learn that Francis Blundy, revered poet, climate change denier, man of letters compared to Heaney and Larkin, murdered Vivien's first husband. Percy Greene, a luthier with early-onset Alzheimer's, was pushed down the stairs and finished with a mallet. Blundy framed it as mercy. He then absorbed the dead man's suffering into his poetry, transmuting private horror into public art. The famous "Corona for Vivien" was, in coded form, a confession of this crime and an aestheticization of the grief it produced. Vivien, recognizing the poem as a beautiful counterfeit that stole her real memories and repackaged them as literary accomplishment, fed the vellum into a dairy stove. The poem burned. She then buried her prose account, ensuring that the truth, rather than the artful lie, would reach the future.

McEwan has always been drawn to people who believe their own brilliance exempts them from ordinary moral constraints, and Blundy is the fullest realization of this obsession. The novel asks whether great art can launder terrible acts and has the courage to leave the question genuinely open. When Vivien destroys the poem, you feel the loss and the justice simultaneously, and that simultaneity is the point. The beauty of the work and the cruelty of the man who made it occupy the same space, and McEwan will not let you collapse one into the other.

If you have read Atonement, you will recognize the engine: nested narratives, the question of who controls the story, the devastation that arrives when the reader's reconstruction collides with the truth. But where Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know goes further. It suggests that the possibility of redemption was always a comfortable fiction, and that what remains is persistence. A colleague's pregnancy near the end is described as "the next link in the chain of futility and care," with the emphasis falling equally on both nouns. You keep going because the work of reconstruction (of poems, of knowledge, of a livable world) has its own dignity regardless of outcome.

The novel is dense, and it is about more things than any single review can cover. It is about the humanities and whether they survive catastrophe (they do, barely, and in diminished form, and the novel argues this diminished survival is still worth something). It is about climate change as a moral solvent that dissolves familiar categories into entropy. It is about the specific longing of looking backward at a world you never knew, for which McEwan observes we need a word "beyond nostalgia, which pines for what was once known." It is about the relationship between scholarship and love, between archival precision and emotional truth, between the living and the dead.

McEwan's prose has loosened with age. The earlier novels were watchmaker-precise, sometimes to the point of airlessness. Here the sentences breathe. There is humor (dry, English, arriving when you least expect it) and a warmth toward the characters that his earlier work sometimes withheld. The New York Times called it "the best thing McEwan has written in ages." The Scotsman called it his masterpiece. I think they are both right. It is the rare novel that will make you feel as deeply as it makes you think, and the rarer one still that earns the right to that ambition.

McEwan has said that his goal was "to let the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time." He has succeeded. If you are reading this in 2026, the novel's future scholars have already rendered their verdict on you. The fact that you are reading a book review rather than doomscrolling may, by the standards of 2119, constitute a minor act of civilization. Make the most of it.