WHAT WE CAN KNOW, by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is brash and busy — it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.
McEwan has put his thumb on the scale. This is melodramatic, storm-tossed stuff. There is murder, a near kidnapping, a child hideously dead of neglect, multiple revenge plots, buried treasure and literary arson. Writers treat other writers’ manuscripts and reputations the way Sherman treated Georgia. No one is a moral paragon.
Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled “A Corona for Vivien.” They are the last, it seems, historians alive.
This can sound like a bit much, and perhaps it is. But below and beyond these (mostly sly) surface machinations is a different sort of novel, a quite careful one. It’s about what biographers owe their subjects. It’s about the nature of history. It’s about letters, journals, emails and the other things we leave behind.
It’s about the talented wives of certain literary men and their bright resentments and wars against misfortune. It’s about affairs and empty wine bottles and quail with mushrooms and A.I. and animals and how the best poets read their work aloud. The small things scrape against the large. This other book is inky and thinky, as the poet Frederick Seidel said of the offices of Partisan Review.
Some aspects of “What We Can Know” will put readers in mind of McEwan’s early novels, which helped give him the nickname “Ian Macabre.” But the novel this most resembles, its historical sensibility, its metafictional touches and its jumping back and forth in time, is his stately 2001 classic, “Atonement.”
In the 22nd century, the planet has been decimated (populist leaders, A.I. run amok, climate disaster, resource wars, rogue nukes, tsunamis and mega death). America has become a wasteland filled with inland seas.
What’s left of libraries and museums has been moved to high ground. The human store of digital knowledge is maintained in Nigeria. This is standard dystopian-nightmare fuel, but McEwan, who has a scientific bent, caresses the details.
A scholar, Thomas Metcalfe — his period of study is 1990 to 2030 — becomes interested in a 2014 dinner party in rural England during which a great, irascible, vaguely Philip Larkin-like poet, Francis Blundy, read aloud “A Corona for Vivien” and dedicated it to his wife. He gives her the only copy, and that copy disappears.
Over the decades, the missing poem’s reputation has grown. (As the art critic Robert Hughes once put it, “There is no tyranny like the tyranny of the unseen masterpiece.”) It may be buried. Metcalfe and his on-again, off-again lover and later wife, a scholar named Rose, decide to search for it.
Before this happens, we are treated to an account of the 2014 dinner party itself. It’s a bravura set piece, as guests arrive, drinks are had, fires lit, couples threaten to split and rejoin in new configurations and old enmities are dragged to the surface. Thomas has recreated the event using all the means at his disposal, including the guest’s overlapping emails, journals, search histories and texts.
Everyone in the past is exposed in this manner. Advances in quantum computing have rendered old encryptions obsolete. Thomas provides this cri de coeur, aimed at you and me:
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.
Among this novel’s themes is the sheer amount of the civilizational detritus we are piling up and leaving behind, all our digital traces — the songs, memes, regulations, porn, novels, diplomatic traffic, grocery lists, clips, television shows, emails, films, casual thoughts, social media posts, you name it. It’s too much for future historians to begin to comprehend.
We come to learn that Thomas, in relating the dinner party in a book he is writing (and we are at times reading), is inventing somewhat — within reason, he thinks. This makes Rose, a stickler, go mad. He tells her that his historical duty is to vitality. He wants to avoid what he calls “the dead hand of academic neutrality.” This novel has you off balance from beginning to end.
One thing that “What We Can Know” does, improbably enough, is make one nostalgic for the present. Thomas and Rose, a century in the future, list the things they never got to see. Here is Thomas:
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 A.I., the sense of humor, the safe airplanes, the passion for pointless sports. A hundred thousand at a football match!
In the future, people subsist largely on protein bars.
The impact of Vivien’s own story, which she has cannily left behind, grows and grows. How will she treat Francis in her version of events? Will he get what he deserves for his casual mistreatment of her, and for a subtle remark in his poem that may upend her life? Well, as David Mitchell wrote in “The Bone Clocks,” his 2014 novel, “If you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.”
As the world begins to burn, Thomas suggests, novels and poetry will rise to the occasion. He and Rose teach a class on our period and years just beyond it. (No one wants to take it. To the young people of the future, we are not merely old news but moral idiots who ruined everything.)
“Amid the disasters,” McEwan writes, “world literature produced its most beautiful laments, gorgeous nostalgia, eloquent fury — and those masterpieces, so we promised, we would study together.”
I’m hesitant to call “What We Can Know” a masterpiece. But at its best it’s gorgeous and awful, the way the lurid sunsets must have seemed after Krakatau, while also being funny and alive. It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.
WHAT WE CAN KNOW | By Ian McEwan | Knopf | 303 pp. | $30
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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