What Can We Know, by Ian McEwan, 2025

“On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at the small quay near Maentwrog-under-Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library.“

Thus opens Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know. It is a gripping, fascinating, thoughtful narrative. Immediately we know we are not just in the future, but in a reshaped world where there are overnight ferries to the Bodleian Library, which is now in Snowdonia. We quickly find out that a deadly combination of nuclear war and climate change have transformed the world. The Atlantic Ocean has flooded much of the British countryside and reshaped the geography of Europe and other parts of the earth. Britain is a now a scattered collection of small islands, hard to navigate around, but somehow still surviving as a nation. A new normal has emerged (or been imposed), which in some ways is strangely similar to our own. Instead of a brutal dystopia, Britain seems well run, with universities (in which the study of Liberal Arts is still pursued), libraries and archives. Our tour of this new world is narrated by Thomas Metcalfe, a researcher from the University of the South Downs. Thomas is researching a largely forgotten 21st century poet, Francis Blundy and specifically his lost poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” which he read at a dinner party thrown to celebrate his wife’s birthday, known in academia as ‘the Second Immortal Dinner’. The end of the world has not prevented people being obsessed with obscure literary detail it seems. Thomas is confronted with the question posed in the novel’s title – what can be known about the lives of these long-dead people?

Thomas is able to recreate many of the events leading up to the reading of the poem in part because the archives of the principal characters have survived and also in part because the digital footprints of the participants has been unlocked due to advances in de-encryption technology. So he has access to everyone’s emails, bank statements and social media. Using this data and the surviving paper records he pieces together what he believes happened on the night the poem was read, together with the lives and back stories of the participants, focussing primarily on the poet Francis and his wife, Vivien. As Thomas believes Vivien was the person most likely to know what happened to the manuscript, (she outlived Francis, and the poem was ‘hers’ in that it was dedicated to her and given to her as a birthday present) he works principally on her timeline. We are given his reconstructed account of her life. Originally an Oxford don she married to Percy, a violin maker, who after a few brief years of happy marriage was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This cruel illness slowly robbed him of his independence and his personality and Vivien’s life became overwhelmed by the daily demands of having to care for him. In one of her brief moments of escape she met and formed a relationship with the distinguished poet, Francis Blundy. Eventually Percy died, thereby freeing his wife to pursue her relationship with Francis, and they married and moved to the English countryside.

Thomas’s visit to the Snowdonian Bodleian proves unproductive. The archivist there, Donald Drummond, tries to interest him in a theory about a note in Vivien’s diary which is believed to be a phone number, but he is dismissive. In the new academic pecking order researchers outrank archivists it seems, or more likely Thomas is just intolerant of anyone who shows an interest in his specialist subject. He returns to the South Downs, and eventually resumes a romantic relationship with fellow academic Rose Church. For some time the project remains stalled as Thomas and Rose get on with their lives. Thomas continues to read the papers of the dinner party attendees, but in a largely desultory fashion. A return visit to the Bodleian proves disastrous, because when he returns home a day early, feeling defeated by the brick wall he is facing, he discovers Rose in bed with a student, which even in 2119 is out of order. He buries himself in yet more detail of Vivien and Francis’s life, until one day he discovers a note from Drummond, passed to him during his last visit to the Library but left unopened until now, in which Drummond explains the mystery of the phone number – it is in fact a set of map coordinates. This is a clue that has been left in plain sight for almost the whole novel. Rose is (partially) forgiven and recruited into an expedition to the site of the former Blundy home where they believe the poem is hidden. The cottage is now on an abandoned and remote, hard to find, island, and the journey there is complex. There is an element of ‘Five Go Camping’ about this part of the narrative with lots of detail about the equipment they purchase and the navigation processes they follow, but eventually the coordinates are located and after some frantic digging an airtight box is unearthed. Will it contain the missing poem?

At this point the first half of the novel ends. We never return to 2119 and have to fill in the gaps ourselves as to what happens to Thomas and Rose, although there is one brief clue, which I will come back to.

The second part of the novel is a transcription of the buried manuscript, which takes the form of a confession by Vivien. She tells the real stories of her marriages to Percy and Francis. She reveals that during her first marriage, even when it was happy and before his diagnosis, she was having an affair with Harry Kitchener, Francis Blundy’s brother-in-law and literary agent, one of the attendees at the fabled dinner party. Harry gives her something that Percy cannot, which she claims is ‘intellectual stimulation’. Percy is an artisan, with no interest in books and poetry. In a moment of crisis, Vivien reveals a dark secret to Percy – but shortly thereafter he can remember nothing of what she has told him, which is the first point his illness begins to show itself. His slow degeneration takes its toll on her mental health, which is worsened when Harry casually breaks off their affair. In revenge she pursues an affair with Francis, largely to hurt Harry, but finds in this new relationship some solace from her role as Percy’s carer. I can’t go much further in this ‘what happens’ narrative without spoilers, but is quickly becomes apparent that most of what Thomas has worked out about Vivien’s life is incorrect. Her papers and her digital footprint kept secret much of what was really important in her life. A lot of the assumptions that Thomas has made about the dinner party are shown to be mistaken. (One that stood out for me is his careful reconstruction of what the guests would have eaten at the party, and how Vivien would have lovingly prepared the meal, whereas in her version of events (which we are invited to read as the ‘real’ version) she employs caterers! The novel ends with brief return to 2119 and an announcement that the Confessions of Vivien Blundy, edited by Thomas Metcalfe, with an introduction by Rose Church and a preface by Donald Drummond, was published in 2125, giving them a happy ending of sorts.

It is in the difference between the two narratives – Thomas’s findings from the papers and memoirs of the dinner guests and his background research, and the ‘real’ explanation of what happened recorded in Vivien’s confessional – that McEwan poses the question ‘What Can We Know?’ His short answer seems ‘not a lot’. People are adept at keeping their secrets, even in the digital age. The things we are confident about often turn out to be wrong. Thomas’s warning – “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, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.” is only part of the story. Time quickly destroys the present and much of the knowledge we take for granted as unimportant is lost. (I am reminded of the fact that we have only a couple of pictures of the Bronte sisters for example, and even fewer of Jane Austen, and that there is no known recording of George Orwell’s voice let alone film of him as an adult, even though he lived well into the modern era and worked for several years at the BBC (which I may have already mentioned!). The point is we lose the past so quickly, and what can be known changes fast, to the extent that after one hundred years (let alone the end of the world) the past is largely lost to us.)

In part we are back in Atonement territory, where the revelation of a second, more authentic version of ‘what happened’ at Dunkirk reveals a devastating truth. What We Can Know also obviously owes a significant debt to A S Byatt’s Booker prize winning novel Possession featuring as it does academics conducting a literary investigation across a gap of a hundred years, with the climax of the novel involving the lost text being disinterred.

What We Can Know was hugely enjoyable. There’s never much doubt that Thomas will find out what happens to the lost poem – the paperback blurb gives some of this away (“When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem….”) – but the detective element of the story is fun. As a portrait of a dystopian future (I have seen the novel described as a climate change novel which is misleading) the future is a bit depressing but it is hardly The Road. People are still employed studying medieval poetry, and AI is more of a benevolent agony aunt than an existential threat. ‘Try to reduce global warming because otherwise it might be more difficult to investigate literary mysteries’ is not the stark warning of an unbearable future that it might have been.

Which is where we come to what I think of as the case for the prosecution, very well summarised in this review of the novel in the Guardian:

“The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.”

That’s the sort of critique that can’t be unread and I have to admit that it has tainted a little my appreciation of the novel. Because he is right – all of McEwan’s main characters are profoundly middle-class, and his settings are resolutely English, infused with a nostalgia for a countryside about to be lost. There are exceptions of course – the token named working class character in this novel, Chris, is a handyman, who when visiting Francis and Vivien’s home (a converted barn, with a dairy as an annexe, of course) for drinks has his use of language rudely corrected by Francis

“Hopefully is not a word. You’re murdering the language. Don’t say it.”

It is of course good that McEwan has noticed that middle class people police the language use of the working class, telling them when they have ‘got it wrong’ rather than recognising the obvious, that right and wrong in language use is imposed by the powerful on the less so. But everyone else in the novel is busy writing sonnets, hand-crafting violins, editing books and teaching literature.

The profoundly middle class nature of the characters is best summed up on one brief incident at the dinner party. One of the guests, Mary, accidentally breaks a salad bowl that another of the guests gave Francis and Vivien as a wedding gift. A broken hand-crafted salad bowl represents the kind of drama that can engulf a middle class dinner party. The jokes in the novel are about academia (“The reading break began and those who liked books stopped reading”) and the things people worry about include the standing of the arts in the pecking order of university courses. These are middle-class people with middle-class mindsets, assumptions and interests, including a largely feigned interest in poetry. The Corona is eventually exposed as a lie, recreating the times Percy spent with Vivien rather than anything genuine about her marriage to Francis. None of this really spoiled the novel for me but it did introduce an element of doubt or middle-class guilt – shouldn’t novels be about struggle, and dystopias about cannibalism and starvation? Before reading the Guardian review I was genuinely thinking about the chances of McEwan being nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature. He is approaching the end of his career (he is in his late seventies) and has a considerable body of work to look back on. Among the many awards and prizes he has received he been nominated for the Booker six times (winning only once). But I suspect he would be thought too similar to the recent British winner of the award, Kazuo Ishiguro for that to happen. His novels are always interesting and worth reading, which can’t be said of all modern novels.

What Can We Know, by Ian McEwan, 2025