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I can’t remember when I stopped reading Ian McEwan’s novels. It was probably sometime after reading Saturday, which I found intellectually performative and a bit dry. I’ve matured a lot as a reader in the twenty years since I read it, and now I wonder if I would like it better if I read it again, because I picked up his new novel What We Can Know and loved it. 

What We Can Know is set roughly one hundred years in the future in an apocalypse driven by climate change. Much of the world’s major cities are submerged in water, and the internet seems to come from Nigeria now. In this isolated and lonely environment, scholar Thomas Metcalfe is researching the whereabouts of a lost poem written by the famed poet Francis Blundy for his wife Vivien. 

Thomas believes he’s on the verge of restoring an important environmental poem to the canon. He works the way historians do, piecing together fragments, making connections, and building a coherent story from what survives. He becomes fixated on a dinner party where Francis supposedly reads the poem to his wife, and fancies himself in love with Vivien – or what he believes he knows about her.

In the second half of the book we read Viven’s diary and see how incomplete Thomas’s reconstruction really is. He isn’t careless, but he is working with gaps, and his imagination fills them in ways that feel plausible without necessarily being true.

By pulling back the curtain on Viven’s truth, McEwan turns the novel into more than a mystery about a missing poem. It becomes a reflection on how history is built, and how fragile that process is. The title of this book is perfect, as it’s ultimately a novel about how little we can truly know about the past.