What We Can Know – A flawed masterpiece

Hal Swerissen

I have mixed feelings about Ian McEwan’s most recent novel, ‘What We Can Know’. On the one hand, there are interesting ideas about history and time, the difference between public and private lives, and how that difference might affect how history is presented. On the other, it could have used a tight edit, including an irritating howler, at least for me, about the impact of nuclear explosions on sea levels.

The novel is set in 2119, a post-apocalyptic era called “the Derangement” where the UK is a waterlogged archipelago following a nuclear accident and a cataclysmic rise in seal level. Academic Tom Metcalfe becomes obsessed with uncovering a lost poem, ‘A Corona for Vivien,’ written in 2014. Tom’s literary investigation into the poem’s disappearance and the lives of its creators, the poet Francis Blundy and his wife Vivien, ultimately reveals a story of entangled loves and a hidden crime from our past. The narrative structure, which spans these two timelines, questions the limits of historical knowledge and explores the themes of legacy and regret over climate inaction.

Setting the novel in a dystopian future where Metcalfe is looking back at the present day, which is seen as the high point of history, while at the same time exploring an intensely personal relationship between Blundy and his wife, juxtaposes grand narrative with the hidden, personal interior of everyday life, even if the everyday life is that of a famous poet. McEwan splits the book into two parts with different narrators.

The first part, narrated by Metcalfe, is a quest for the lost poem in the constrained world of the waterlogged derangement. ‘What we can know’ explores how the past is constructed publicly, including fleeting reflections on the historical circumstances that led to the ‘derangement’. The distracting and irritating howler is McEwan’s use of a nuclear explosion at sea to explain a sudden rise in sea level. Climate change, certainly, but not a nuclear blast. True, it’s a narrative device, but still …

The second is an exploration of the private world of the poem. Here McEwan neatly shows how writers can distort and manipulate perspective for their own ends – perhaps a sly caution to the reader about his own work. The grand narrative for truth in part one is completely undermined by the hidden world surrounding the construction of the great, elusive poem. It would be giving the story away to say how, but it’s a salutory tale of the messy world of relationships, artistic delusions and personal compromises and how they are hidden from history through decisive individual decisions that are never known or knowable.

But the two-part structure comes with repetition and a meandering pace, not quite Swan’s Way, but in that general direction. Individual tastes will vary, but for me it needed more narrative pace and less detailed elaboration of everyday life. Arguably, this was a device to contrast the big issues of part 1 with the personal and private world of part 2, but part 2 could have been more focused.

The book is then a flawed master piece. A warning that we are wantonly ignoring what we know about climate catastrophe and an admonishment from a depressed and resigned waterlogged future. At the same time, it’s a clever illustration of the difficulty of ever fully knowing what is behind what we think we know publicly.