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.
