Book Summary and Reviews of What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

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Ethan

Is History Ever True?
Is History Ever True?

Ian McEwan may be approaching his eighties, but his prose has lost none of its sharpness or daring. In this novel, he hits an exceptional balance between speculative fiction, literary mystery, and a touch of romance. Moving between two timelines—2119 and 2014—McEwan crafts a story that feels both intellectually rich and emotionally alive.

Part One unfolds in the distant future, the year 2119, when the world has finally suffered the consequences of all the ignored warnings. The UK has become a cluster of islands, America is ruled by scattered warlords, and ordinary life has shrunk to survival on synthetic “protein cakes” made from carbon and soil bacteria. The internet, miraculously, has endured—thanks to Nigeria, which now safeguards every trace of recorded data: emails, texts, journals, articles, anything ever written. Humanity has, in a sense, archived its entire soul. But McEwan poses the haunting question: does preservation equal truth?

Thomas Metcalf, an earnest humanities scholar, believes that through this digital eternity, one can uncover the essence of the past. His obsession is a vanished poem—a cycle of fifteen sonnets titled A Corona for Vivien, written in 2014 by the celebrated poet Francis Blundy. The poem was read only once, at a private dinner on Vivien’s 54th birthday, and then lost—perhaps purchased and buried by a climate-denialist corporation afraid of its influence. A century later, Thomas combs through the archives, piecing together emails, letters, and diary fragments, chasing ghosts made of data. He is driven not only by academic ambition but by a strange love for the long-dead Vivien herself, whom he romanticizes more than anyone living, even his sometime lover, Rose.

McEwan uses this futuristic frame to ask piercing questions: If everything we say and write is saved, can we truly know someone? Or do we only see the fragments they allowed to exist? Thomas’s introspection captures this beautifully:

“It was reckless to invade this dream buried in a century-long sleep. I was here to disturb phantoms… And that these ghosts were my own creations made them no less terrifying.”

Part Two returns us to 2014—the night of that fateful dinner. The change in tone is remarkable: the prose glows with vitality, humor, and sensual detail. What began as a cerebral exploration in Part One becomes a feast of life, passion, and deceit. Around the elegant dinner table, we meet writers, intellectuals, and Francis Blundy himself—whose brilliance and ego shape the tragic chain of events. The contrast between this lush past and the barren future is striking. McEwan’s cleverest trick is to make readers nostalgic for our own present, as if we are already living in a lost world.

Without giving away too much, the final pages tie both timelines together with elegance and inevitability. The closing of Part One feels slightly sardonic—a wink from McEwan to the reader—but the conclusion of Part Two delivers both heartbreak and satisfaction.

Ultimately, the novel is less about finding a poem than about finding the limits of history itself. McEwan reminds us that even if we record every word, emotion, and event, the human heart will always be a mystery—impossible to archive, impossible to decode.

Betsey V. (Austin, TX)

Is history accurate?
Ian McEwan may be on the upper end of his 70s, but his writing is certainly not geriatric. He hit the sweet spot with this one, in his dual timelines of 2119 and 2014, weaving a literary detective novel with cli-fi and subversive romance. Part One was slow and cerebral, but the state of the world was intriguing, as well as the mystery of the missing poem. There’s plenty plenty of catastrophes—floods, disease, hunger, nuclear calamity, to name a few. Part I starts in the future, 2119, after the warned-of but largely ignored crises have altered the world we live in. The UK is now an archipelago, the US is beset with fighting warlords, there’s no more air travel (except the military), and people survive mostly on protein cakes made of carbon and soil bacteria. Thankfully, the internet was saved by Nigeria, where all recorded archives are now stored. Every email, text message, journal entry, chronicle, or written article about someone is accessible. Does that mean we can know everything about someone else?

Foodie experiences have perished; I mention that because the major set piece is in the past, in 2014, where a classy barn-turned-private dinner salon of literary hotshots and a celebrity poet, Francis Blundy (whose home this is), is the central nugget of the story, where all vectors proceed. The irony of the sweet and savory night is such a contrast to the diet of 2119. Another layered irony is how McEwan is able to create nostalgia for the time we live in now, as we are reading!

Thomas Metcalf, the protagonist of Part One, is a relatable humanities academic who, in 2019, is trying to untangle the clues to a lost or hidden poem of 2014—a set of 15 sonnets, each stanza starting with the last line of the previous one. The corona is called A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy wrote and read aloud to his wife and private party on the night of Viben’s 54th birthday. There is no other copy. Francis gave the only copy to Vivien, and 100+ years later, a certain breed of academic is still hunting this elusive poem down empty trails and rabbit holes. Ironic that everything that Francis and Vivien wrote--text messages, emails, journals, social media—it’s all saved. And this is what the central theme is all about. Is the truth recorded? Can we get at the truth of something if we mine all that they put down in writing?

“It was reckless to invade this dream buried in a century-long sleep. I was here to disturb phantoms...That these literary ghosts were my own creations, conjured by library archive, made them more forbidding.”

Thomas pursues a potential clue to the hidden poem and enlists help from his on and off again lover, Rose, also an academic, but weary of Thomas’ obsession of Vivien. Anyone who knows Thomas well would realize that he is more in love with the long-dead Vivien that he never met than he is anyone alive—even possibly, more than he loves Rose. Is it the time period he yearns for? McEwan explores that, especially through the eloquent prose of Part I. The poem itself is rumored to have been bought for a hefty fee by a climate-denier /annihilator corporation. Blundy is so famous and successful that his views on climate and nature preservation in the poem may penetrate the zeitgeist and cause a swelling of support.

The reader should not know beforehand who narrates Part Two, when we are back in time to 2014. The prose in this section is told with megawatt and light-hearted brilliance (until it gets sinister), a sound juxtaposition from the passive and sometimes heavy narrative of Part One. It’s a gift, this part of the book. A reward from the almost bleak digestion of Part One. The cerebral, intellectual former Booker winner lets go in the final section and pulls off a web of romance, intrigue, secret entanglements, violent crime, deceit, betrayal, and more! Only a writer of his clout could do what he did---start with a serious and heavy new order of the world (that the masses accept in stride), and then move to a life the reader will miss, despite the fact that we’re pretty much in it now. I almost cried for the past until realizing that the book’s past is the reader’s present. Well, not exactly, because ten years ago we thought we had it good.

I won’t divulge except to say that the finale is absolutely satisfying and inevitable. The end of Part One—the last few sentences, is what I call an FU moment, a bit twee for thee. But, of the end of Part Two, all I could say was “eff ME!”

Robin H. (Darien, CT)

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
With the exception of "Lessons" (2022) , I have not been captivated by McEwan's novels during the past ten years. " Nutshell", " Cockroach" and " Machines Like Me" were too quirky and absurd. I am thrilled to say that with " What We Can Know", McEwan is back on track as an erudite, philosophical, historical and emotional story teller - and what a story he has to tell!

In the world of 2119, global disasters which began in 2030 have resulted in plagues, tsunamis and famines. The UK is an archipelago; the US a wasteland governed by warring tribes. Somehow, literature has survived and professor Thomas Metcalfe is obsessed with locating the only remaining copy of a poem recited by the renowned poet Francis Blundy on the occasion of his wife Vivien's birthday dinner. As Thomas shifts through all the digital records from that era , he realizes that he will never really know what motivated Francis and his friends.

The book takes a very personal turn when the second half is revealed to be a journal written by Vivien. And this is where McEwan comes into his own , relating stories of kidnapping, adultery, murder and deceit. He makes a very good case that people today don't know how good their lives are and how foolish we are being to avoid acting on the perils of climate change. The depth of Metcalfe's longing for the pleasures of 2014 England are so poignant as is Metcalfe's realization that the famous poem may not even have been that good!

" What We Can Know" would be a wonderful book club book selection, although there are some very disturbing scenes with a main character succumbing to the ravages of dementia which could upset readers affected by a loved one with the disease. In all, the tone of the book is witty, wistful, intelligent and extremely thought provoking.

Henry W. (Lake Barrington, IL)

Slowdown and savor
This is a book to be enjoyed over time. Any attempt to read at race car speed will cheat you of the quality of this title. Ian McEwan puts your mind through the wringer as you attempt to determine the significance of a poem written before apocalypse. He shuffles you back and forth over the pre and post apocalypse eras. He treats to his view of what is left of the earth and humanity afterwards. The characters are intriguing and very much consistent with the theme of the book and add force to the idea of how little we can know about anyone. The last part of the book is built on demonstrating what we cannot know. McEwan's writing is flawless as he describes people ,places, and events.

Eileen C. (Litchfield, CT)

What can you know?
In 2119, in a world radically altered by nuclear exchanges and catastrophic climate change—they knew it was happening, why didn't they do anything to stop it—a professor of humanities struggles to convince his students that studying the past has value while he obsesses about a legendary poem that no one has read or heard for 108 years. Although the novel is a splendid example of showing not telling, McEwan explores the whether the life or the mind has any value in a devastated world, and how we justify the places the forces of desire and obsession take us. The first part interweaves an imagined far past with the present while the second part strips away the opacity of time revealing a whole different story that is both shocking and justified. A truly marvelous read.

Rule_B

How Poetry Connects Us to Our Pasts & Futures
I was drawn to review What We Can Know because I was sure I would love reading it as I had McEwan's earlier novel, Atonement, and had enjoyed watching its movie version. I knew that What We Can Know took place in two time periods : around the beginning of both the 20th & 21st centuries and that there was a missing poem, a corona, from the earlier period as a focus for a later search. As an English major, that structure & determination to recover a poem written so long ago fascinated me.

I was curious as to why McEwan was interested in time travel of a sort, from a century when the effects of extreme climate change came due & destroyed much of the planet; then moving on to a later epoch with a long-lost poem as focus of a quest.

I was fascinated to follow a description of the searcher's focus as a literary mystery & a symbol of long ago lost loves & connections emerging through a dedication to literature.

The various relationships & changes within them over time were engaging & indicative of the author's focus on what could occur if we aren't more attentive in looking out for what matters : both with nuclear accidents along with the power of human relationships colliding & hidden words in lines.

His descriptions of the "new" England were shocking but believable. Travel was primitive; food choices very limited & high ground the best locations to safely inhabit.

The most prescient lines for me were on page 178: "With civil action barely 10,000 years old, an eyeblink of time, we hardly know our cycles yet…In 500 years there might be a Literature Department somewhere on the planet. In 5,000 ? Five million ?"

That the story is such an amalgam throughout: full of the poetic life of academia in a majority of the chapters, yet also marital journeys, love affairs, betrayals, even a brutal murder along with nuclear destruction friendships & migration. What also held its significance for me was how deeply poetic forms & research midst preserved manuscripts became even more of a valued template for unity, reverence & talent.

Needed was a pushing forward midst the knowledge rescued from their least ancient cataclysm, hoping to preserve even more of the first part of the 21st century for those millenniums ahead. To search for evidence of the past's mysteries is a unique trait of humanity , first in the present until the future looks back as well. We will always have wanderers from "now" looking for "then", no matter within which realm of discovery.



The various relationships

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