Simon McDonald

This is an elegantly written, smartly-conceived post-apocalyptic novel masquerading as a literary mystery investigated by humanities professor Thomas Metcalfe 100 years in the future, that I wanted to love—and did in parts—but ultimately felt too emotionally detached from its characters, who sometimes felt like they were being orchestrated by the machinery of the plot rather than their own motivations.

What We Can Know is divided into two parts. The first occurs in the present—our future. The year is 2119, and per our current trajectory, the planet is well and truly fucked; decimated by climate change and irradiated by nuclear war. Metcalfe is obsessed with a poem read at a dinner by Francis Blundy more than a hundred years ago in 2014; “A Corona for Vivien.”

Read once, never seen or heard again, Metcalfe is certain it would’ve been treasured, and hidden somewhere as yet undiscovered. He has a deluge of digital data to sieve through, and spends his time reassembling the lives of Francis and his wife Vivien, certain he will eventually unlock clues as to the poem’s location. Vivien takes over the second half of the novel, revealing secrets never digitally ascribed, and ultimately the fate of Blundy’s corona.

I admired the ambition of McEwan’s story, and was always engaged, even when the prose kept me a certain distance from its narrators. It’s not that the novel doesn’t have heart, it’s just I couldn’t always feel it beating. Enjoyable, absolutely; a hair’s breadth from being magisterial.