"What We Can Know" Threads Literary Mystery Into a Dystopian Future

Most Ian McEwan fans have been touched by his beautiful writing, innovative themes, realistic characters and moral dilemmas… and how the outcomes of those dilemmas can flip a narrative topsy-turvy.

I fell in love with McEwan over Sweet Tooth, in which MI5 — England’s legendary intelligence agency — is determined to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with the government’s. Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is the perfect candidate to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer named Tom Haley and offer him a grant. The story blends espionage, romance, and metafiction in an utterly satisfying way.

McEwan takes us to even more impressive levels of psychological depth, moral complexity, and elegant prose with his latest novel, What We Can Know. (I received an ARC of the novel; it’s currently slated for publication in September 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf.)

The title is spot-on, given the story: it’s about English scholar Thomas Metcalfe, living in the year 2119, as he hunts for a mysterious poem from over 100 years earlier. It was written by noted poet Francis Blundy, and read to his wife at a dinner party celebrating her birthday in 2014. Yet the poem was never published, and its whereabouts never discovered.

Complicating matters is the fact that in 2119, much of the Western world has been submerged in water following a nuclear catastrophe — making information and links to the past exponentially more difficult to trace.

But this doesn’t stop Metcalfe. He spends the first half of the book rehashing the dinner party, its participants, and the storylines of each character as best he can from the research gathered. It becomes his driving mission to find and understand the content of the poem, unpack any political and social issues it may or may not address, and ultimately figure out why it never made it into the public domain.

Somewhat unexpectedly — or from another perspective, inevitably — the heart of the story revolves around the character of Vivien, Blundy’s wife. Their relationship is hardly tidy, though, and only through a grand revelation does it start to make sense in the second half of the book.

“We live our lives between the dead and the yet to be born,” McEwan has said of the novel’s essence. “Of the dead we know a little, but not as much as we think. About the present, we disagree fiercely.

“People of the future are beyond our reckoning, but we’re troubled by what we’ll bequeath them. As they look back at us, what will our descendants think, when they contemplate the diminished world we left them?”

This hypothetical relationship, this reckoning, was apparently of utmost concern to Vivien — and it becomes Metcalfe’s obsession as well, more than a century into the future. (The thematic parallel is underscored by the fact that Metcalfe, like Francis and Vivien, has no dearth of issues in his own personal life.)

At one point in the novel, Metcalfe muses: “That our presence here, screened from each other by time, constituted a separate reality, was at the core of my obsession, and perhaps the obsession of all dedicated historians, biographers and archaeologists.

“A million historical movies, novels and serious histories expressed a yearning to keep the past with us. Kind or cruel, it haunted us, and its ghosts, unlike most, were real.”

So what is the crux of Blundy’s poem? What will it tell us about the past and our history? Why is it significant — if it is significant at all?

And what possible reference does Blundy make in his poem about our environment from a physical and sociological standpoint? In McEwan’s brave new world, one rumor is that big business has paid to keep Blundy’s work out of the public eye. Do the academic whispers prove true?

I won’t say what is eventually revealed about the poem. But I can tell you that as McEwan’s own literary prowess goes, this book shows him at the top of his game. In What We Can Know, McEwan completely captures readers with his marvelous writing — painting moods, settings, and descriptions to whet just about any literary appetite. His characters are complex and flawed. His story structure of searching for the past (our present) via a narrator of the future is intriguing, creative, and brilliant.

All that said, the question remains: what can we ever really know? To answer in a non-spoilery fashion, I’ll return to the author himself.

“Through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving somehow,” Mcewan has said.

“In our times, we know more about the world than we ever did, and such knowledge will be hard to erase. Our great-great-grandchildren will scrape through, [but] we won’t be around to count the cost or take the blame. My ambition in this novel was to let the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time.”

More about Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan’s works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999.

He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film.

In 2006, Ian McEwan won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards, where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.