3 hours ago
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By Peter Craven
September 24, 2025 — 12.00pm
FICTION
What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, $34.99
There’s no doubting how formidable Ian McEwan is. It’s many years now since he wrote The Child in Time with its ravishing strangeness and its heartbreak. That belongs time-wise with The Comfort of Strangers, with its deep mystery and creepiness. It’s not even that long since On Chesil Beach, in which an ordinary unpractised couple fumble with the mysteries of sex.
But there’s one aspect of McEwan’s fiction that can drive the reader stark mad. He loves to pull the narrative rug from under your feet to tell you that some whole section of a novel you’ve just been lapping up for the mimetic power of its realism is, in fact, the artful concoction of one of the characters. This happens in one of his most alluring books, Atonement, and it also happens in his new and in some ways spectacularly ambitious novel What We Can Know.
Early on we are told about a disguised poet who performs what he calls a Corona. It is a gift to his wife, and the poems involved are sealed in a vellum bag. The time is the early 21st century but the book we’re reading begins with an academic and archivist whose period of specialty is 1990 to 2030. Then 60 pages on, we discover that the narrator’s method is this: “When faced with the essential but undisclosed inner life, invent within the confines of the probable.”
So What We Can Know is another of these McEwan novels that wants to assert, pretty self-consciously, its own fictive character. The idea of the novel within the novel is deftly executed, but it is also just a tad tedious, even though the prospect of a hypothetical future world is done with a prodigious power of variation and shapeshifting.
It’s also, however, a novel in which anything can happen with a pungent and virtuoso power of variation. What We Can Know is also a bizarre book because it treats us with a chilling summarising power to the various catastrophes that have overtaken the world, whether through climate change or wars that have turned the world into an aggravated ruin in which England’s Cotswolds have become a series of islands and everything is a ravaged cartoon of itself.
Ian McEwan’s 18th novel imagines a bleak future.Credit: Getty Images
There are horrors a plenty in the envisioned human drama of What We Can Know, which does its damnedest to present the dark side of human life so that the background apocalypse works as a rationale for the horrors of everyday happenstance. In an epiphanic moment, a man claims a child who is waiting for his mother but doesn’t know the child’s name.
Then there’s the horror of the mental afflictions that are part of ageing. The main character is talking to her partner, who says he would be happy to father her child if she wants one. Shortly after, he has no recollection of the conversation, and he goes on to take refuge in cartoons and suffers the full gamut of the depredations of Alzheimer’s. This is done with a wholly convincing attention to medical detail, but there’s a sense in which McEwan seems close to the pornography of heartbreak.
In one of the most powerful sequences, murder (of all things) rears its head, and we are suddenly in the midst of a narrative that is blood smeared and guilt-racked in a way that seems a bit forced but also has a tremendous power. Yes, it’s a bit of an easy get for McEwan, but the idea of deep and deadly grief in the Greek islands comes across (believe it or not) as a relief.
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It’s a moody book by an old master who seems to be pleasing himself, and the reader is likely to find it maddening and disturbing and full of dazzling shifts of perspective. It has all of McEwan’s usual tricks but at a high and hectic tempo.
What’s so instructive, though, about this half-sunken galleon of a book is the way it can suddenly surge back into a drama it can seem to have put to one side. Anyone who persists with this book will be struck by the power with which he goes through every apparent barrier or crooked byway.
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