Tag Archives: Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

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Ian McEwan, What We Can Know. Jonathan Cape hb 2025. 301 pp. Library copy

I’ve always been drawn to and (mostly) enjoyed the novels of Ian McEwan. In What We Can Know, his latest, he’s even more ambitious than usual, and there’s a strong literary element, in that a central character is a famous (fictitious) poet of the late 20C-early 21C: Francis Bundy, said to have been up there with Seamus Heaney.

The novel deals in the first half with the nature of biography, hence the title. The protagonist here is Tom Metcalfe, a literary scholar specialising in the period 1990-2030. So yes, it’s a sci-fi novel of sorts, in that it’s set in 2119, and the times we live in now have become as distant and different as the Bloomsburys are to us. He’s employed at the University of the South Downs, and he has gone to the Bodleian Library in Snowdonia. After a disastrous series of nuclear conflicts, which have exacerbated the effects of climate change, Britain (and most of Europe) has been inundated, and the habitable territory reduced to a few dozen square miles of former high ground.

I suppose dystopian novel of the future would be a better genre description than ‘sci-fi’. McEwan works in a lot of grim stuff about the lack of creature comforts and technology we take for granted today: food and other basic resources are limited in scope, transport is largely by ferry and boat, and nature has been decimated.

Tom’s on a quest to track down a long-lost poem by Blundy, a ‘Corona’, a sequence of 15 linked sonnets dedicated to his wife Vivien. He’d read this poem aloud to her and their guests at her 54th birthday party in their rural barn house. He’d handwritten it on a piece of vellum, and there were no copies. By its ‘non-existence’ it had in the century that passed ‘become a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.’

The poem, through no merit of its own but the folly of its admirers, had leapt its bounds to plunge into the mire of political economy, global history and suffering.

With its references to wild flowers, country picnics and river swims, it had taken on the kind of pastoral, idyllic reputation of the poetry of the great Romantics, and Blundy – and in particular this dinner-party ‘corona’ – was seen in the tradition of Wordsworth and Keats. Tom has spent countless hours wading through digital and other archives of largely trivial journals and records of the time, attempting, as all biographers do, to tell a story about a long-dead person’s life that combines textually attested evidence with imagination.

His quest takes him to some dangerous places, and his obsession causes him to neglect his personal relationships. He feels more affinity, in some ways, with biographer Richard Holmes in his account of reproducing RL Stevenson’s travels in the Cevennes with a donkey than he does with his wife.

We hear a great deal about the guests at that birthday dinner. As the novel progresses our perception of their relationships with each other and with the Blundys shifts dramatically, and our view of Tom’s quest and the legendary lost poem MS shifts with it. McEwan handles all this with gusto, and it’s hard not to keep turning the pages to see where he takes us with this motley cast of characters, past and present.

Then the narrative in part two is taken over by another voice, and the novel becomes something very different again. A whole new dynamic replaces what we thought we knew about that dinner party, its hosts and its guests. Plot twists and revelations resemble those found in golden age crime fiction – but all narrated with McEwan’s customary edgy originality.

This was an immersive, rewarding reading experience, yet after finishing it I felt a little like one does after eating a delicious dessert: deep pleasure followed by a realisation that it wasn’t really very nutritious. Some of the dystopian tropes, the surprises and uncovered secrets in the plot seem, in retrospect, too contrived, and the characterisation implausible. But there’s no denying McEwan’s mastery of his material, and ability to tell a cracking good story.

Most of my reading of McEwan was done pre-blog. I posted a brief note on his 2023 novel Lessons HERE.

Secrets, guilt and redemption: recent reading

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Work projects and an enjoyable river cruise in Germany have filled my time in recent weeks, so this is another brief roundup of recent reading. All four novels were passed on to me by Mrs TD.

They all deal with the way the second world war (or other traumatic experiences) blighted the lives of those who survived. All of the central characters found ways to blur their vision of what had happened, and how their lives continued. This involved keeping secrets – and that doesn’t always work out well for us, does it?

Ian McEwan, Lessons (Vintage, 2023, first published 2022).

The secret that Roland keeps involves a transgressive relationship in his youth. He replicates the flaws in his parents’ relationship in his own marriage, and has to cope with the consequences. I struggled to engage with this at first, but gradually came to relish the force of the narrative. It has some of the slow-burning passion of the great 19C Russian novelists, but is of course very much of its own time.

Josie Ferguson, The Silence in Between (Doubleday, 2024)

This is the heartbreaking story of the terrible impact of the Russian occupation of Berlin towards the end of WWII, and then of the sudden construction in 1961 of the wall that divided the city. A mother is separated from her sick baby when the barriers go up, and her teenage daughter resolves to get her little brother back from the other side of the wall in the hope that this will redeem her in her mother’s eyes. The girl can’t understand why her mother can’t seem to love her. The reasons are revealed when the backstory is given – it’s a gut-wrenching, moving story.

William Boyd, The Blue Afternoon (Penguin, 2019, first published 1993)

There was too much plot and intrusive researched detail in this otherwise entertaining novel. It starts with a talented woman architect in art deco Los Angeles in 1936, cheated by her crooked partner and starting out in her own business. A mysterious older man shows up claiming to be a lost part of her past. For reasons she doesn’t entirely understand (I didn’t either) she follows him in a quest to find a long-lost lover that takes him first to New Mexico, then to Lisbon. Much of the novel takes the form of this man’s history from 1903 in Manila, where he’d been a pioneering surgeon. There are numerous plot twists in what develops into a steamy murder mystery. All this doesn’t quite gel with the romantic plot line involving his affair with a married woman (he’s also married). It’s another entertaining holiday read in Boyd’s sub-Greene mode – but ultimately not so great.

Yael van der Wouden, The Safe Keep (Viking, 2024)

There’s a fine review of this over at the Lonesome Reader (link HERE), with an excellent spoiler-free plot summary (not an easy feat with a novel that has such a huge plot twist two thirds through). Like The Silence in Between and The Cut Out Girl (a novel by Bart van Es, which I posted on in Dec. last year – link HERE), it deals with events in the German-occupied Netherlands, and the ways that the rest of the population accommodated themselves to what ensued. It makes for another uncomfortable, moving read, raising questions about guilt, cowardice and complicity in crime – but there’s also some element of redemption and healing love. Although it’s not too difficult to figure out fairly early on what’s going on beneath the surface of the first part of the novel, it doesn’t entirely rely on the mystery aspect of the story. As Eric says in his review, it’s difficult to sympathise fully with Isabel, the spiky character at the heart of the narrative; as in Boyd’s novel, the characterisation isn’t entirely convincing. But its sustained by its tense and shocking background story, and by its clear-eyed depiction of ordinary people looking the other way when terrible things happened.