The enigmatic title of Ian McEwan’s latest novel might more accurately be phrased as a question: What can we know? How are we to understand the world we inhabit, except by extrapolating the venality and compromises of the present? And what better medium for such an inquiry than fiction?
While reading What We Can Know, I could not shake the memory of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Each work is an intellectual high-wire act, in which one generation of scholars attempts to reconstruct the lives of an earlier one from fragmentary evidence—documents, marginalia, artifacts that have outlived their creators. Where Stoppard’s characters look back two centuries, McEwan’s scholars inhabit the early twenty-second century and look back at us. Both works are haunted by the same ghostly reciprocity: one generation watching another, unknowingly observed in return.
McEwan’s novel is not science fiction in any sensational sense. It feels instead like a plausible extension of the world we already know—a future shaped by environmental neglect and geopolitical recklessness, their consequences long deferred and then catastrophically realized. Europe has splintered into archipelagos; America has devolved into a feudal landscape ruled by warlords; and what remains of human knowledge is preserved in remote libraries and through the aptly named “Nigerian Internet Network.” The novel operates as a layered cautionary tale, not least in its treatment of privacy. We, clinging to the illusion that encryption and passwords protect us, are gently mocked by a future narrator who knows better:
“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, just whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard on the screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.”
By the mid-2030s, the term “the Derangement” comes into common usage, a litany of climate catastrophe—its effects so often rehearsed that they weary activists and skeptics alike. The phrase carries an added implication: a collective cognitive failure, our bias toward short-term comfort over long-term survival. Humanity itself is deranged. More quietly still, belief in progress collapses, along with belief in a future.
By the mid-twenty-first century, the world confronts what the novel chillingly calls “the fatal concept of limited nuclear war.” A poorly engineered Russian missile, aimed at the southern United States, detonates prematurely in the mid-Atlantic, triggering tsunamis that devastate Europe, West Africa, and the eastern seaboard of North America. Suspicion that the blast may have been deliberate pushes the world to the brink of retaliation before a fragile peace is hastily imposed.
If this sounds fantastical, it does not read that way. McEwan writes with such assurance and precision that the imagined future feels less like prophecy than consequence. He is very much at the height of his powers, able to compress centuries into a sentence, as when he observes that “the mighty past wears hard against the present, like oceans, wind, and rain on limestone cliffs.”
Yet all of this is prologue. The heart of the novel lies with two future scholars, Professors Thomas Metcalfe and Rose Church, among the dwindling number of literary historians in a world that now overwhelmingly favors the sciences over the humanities. Their shared obsession is a legendary 2014 poem by Francis Blundy, one of the great poets of the early twenty-first century: Corona for Vivian, written for his wife, Vivian. Blundy is likened to T. S. Eliot—“both poets had a Vivian in their lives…and a comfortable kind of English existence that masked turmoil and carelessness with the lives of others.” Only one copy of the poem is known to exist, handwritten on parchment for Vivian’s birthday.
The lives of Thomas and Rose in the twenty-second century are subtly braided with those of Francis and Vivian a century earlier. Thomas becomes so absorbed in Vivian’s story that he might be said to fall in love with her. Reflecting on his research into what came to be known as the “Second Immortal Dinner,” where the poem was first read in 2014, echoing the famous 1817 gathering attended by Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb, Thomas observes:
“If I look up from my papers… I can’t believe that I’m in a dream, and that my waking reality is within the pages of my hands… I could’ve been there. I am there. I know all that they do—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful… Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love.”
The emotional and sexual vitality of Francis and Vivian’s world stands in stark contrast to the diminished lives of Thomas and Rose. If McEwan is passing judgment, it may be here: seize the day. The novel is at once a mystery as well as of murder, infidelity, and secrecy, and a meditation on love in its many forms. It is a work of suspense, but also of tenderness, beautifully composed and deeply felt.
The twenty-first-century sections teem with characters and subplots; the twenty-second is spare, almost austere, survival having displaced social abundance. Yet even amid catastrophe, life continues, if with reduced expectations. Outrage follows outrage; democracy erodes; and still people cook, teach, love, and endure. McEwan’s structure reinforces this vision: a first part that moves restlessly across time, followed by a second composed almost entirely of Vivian’s journal.
Until then, Vivian has existed largely in outline—as Francis’s devoted wife. Her journal transforms her into something richer and more autonomous. She recounts her intellectual formation, her first marriage to Percy, and her long-standing love affair with Francis’s brother-in-law, Harry—also Francis’s publisher. The journal is exquisitely written and becomes, through Thomas’s dogged persistence, recovered from a time capsule.
It also gives McEwan license to write some of his most piercing passages. After Vivian and Francis’s relationship becomes public, Francis publishes Feasting, a poetry collection that includes a love cycle devoted to her. Against all expectations, it becomes a bestseller and is later adapted into a film. Vivian finds herself transformed—first exposed, then abstracted, finally erased into symbol. McEwan captures this with surgical precision:
“I felt sliced open and pinned wide for public inspection, like a dissected frog….I did not complain, and later, I was glad I hadn’t, for this was a vanishing process. It was me when I saw the proof, then me and not me when I saw my first finished copy, until finally, diluted and disseminated in multiple thousands of printed versions of myself, I faded into the typeface, and it was no longer me at all. What remained was not even a woman, but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination.“
To avoid spoilers, I will end this impression (“review” feels too exhaustive) abruptly. Whether that time capsule also contains the full text of Corona for Vivian is best left to the reader. For me, the novel’s deepest truth lies in Thomas’s reflection near the end:
“Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this is what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending—or, Vivian, Rose, and I—teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk [a literary superstar of the 2030s], and the rest…. We can’t care. We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less…. Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.”
To give Vivian’s journal, The Confessions of Vivian Blundy, its final measure of verisimilitude, McEwan appends a brief note as the end of the novel, one I reproduce below. It is not a spoiler. It simply closes Confessions the way history so often does: with a record, not an explanation.
