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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



What We Can Know

by
Ian McEwan


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase What We Can Know


Title: What We Can Know
Author: Ian McEwan
Genre: Novel
Written: 2025
Length: 297 pages
Availability: What We Can Know - US
What We Can Know - UK
What We Can Know - Canada
Was wir wissen können - Deutschland
Quello che possiamo sapere - Italia
from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B : enjoyable enough, but doesn't go far enough in any of its directions

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Financial Times . 11/9/2025 Jon Day
The Guardian . 16/9/2025 Kevin Power
The LA Times . 19/9/2025 Marc Weingarten
NZZ . 21/10/2025 Daniel Haas
New Statesman . 24/9/2025 Christopher Tayler
The NY Times Book Rev. A 12/10/2025 Dwight Garner
The New Yorker . 29/9/2025 Katy Waldman
The Observer . 7/9/2025 Anthony Cummins
The Spectator . 13/9/2025 Adam Begley
The Telegraph . 10/9/2025 James Walton
The Times . 10/9/2025 John Self
TLS . 5/9/2025 Beejay Silcox
Wall St. Journal . 19/11/2025 Toby Lichtig
The Washington Post . 18/9/2025 Ron Charles
Die Welt . 11/10/2025 Jan Küveler


  Review Consensus:

  Generally very positive

  From the Reviews:
  • "This is partly a book about what we can know about the past, and how we can imagine the future. McEwan has always been keen on the idea that the literary canon is valuable not because it registers the strangeness of history, but because it represents a commonality of human experience (perhaps this is one of the reasons his narrators all sound so alike). (...) In some ways this is a McEwan greatest hits album: a carefully plotted literary novel with insightful characterisation and the propulsive drive of a thriller. But on the big questions it’s also less sure of itself, more open to doubt, less certain of the march of progress than some of his earlier work. What We Can Know is aware of its limitations and comfortable in its skin, making it McEwan’s most entertaining and enjoyable novel for years." - Jon Day, Financial Times

  • "Insularity, in both senses of the word, is one of McEwan’s themes in What We Can Know. The book is composed of two islands of prose, linked only by the tenuous bridge of a brief note at the end. And it is about being islanded, in time, in space, in life. (...) What We Can Know gradually reveals itself as an anatomy of, precisely, liberal partiality -- of the insularity of a liberalism busily nostalgic for all the wrong things." - Kevin Power, The Guardian

  • "McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures." - Marc Weingarten, The Los Angeles Times

  • "Darin liegen Stärke und Manko des Buchs: Es verfolgt -- mit virtuos auf diversen Zeitebenen arrangierten Figuren -- die Illustration eines Sujets. Und legt dieses dann für ein weiteres ad acta. Weil Ian McEwan ein brillanter Erzähler ist, entsteht über 460 Buchseiten hinweg zwar ein Gewebe, in dem Motive und Akteure zusammenhängen, aber am Ende bleibt doch die Frage: Was will uns dieser Roman vermitteln ?" - Daniel Haas, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

  • "Is this apocalypse a metaphor for a changing culture, too ? Of course it is; and if there’s a touch of undue buoyancy about McEwan’s waterlogged future, it’s more to do with the continued existence of elbow-patched lovers of English poetry than the fact of bare survival." - Christopher Tayler, New Statesman

  • "(B)rash and busy -- it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It's a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. (...) It's about what biographers owe their subjects. It's about the nature of history. It's about letters, journals, emails and the other things we leave behind. (...) Among this novel's themes is the sheer amount of the civilizational detritus we are piling up and leaving behind, all our digital traces (.....) It's too much for future historians to begin to comprehend. (...) I'm hesitant to call What We Can Know a masterpiece. But at its best it's gorgeous and awful, the way the lurid sunsets must have seemed after Krakatau, while also being funny and alive. It's the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It's a sophisticated entertainment of a high order." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

  • "The new book suggests that human beings have always been declinist, underselling the riches of the present and romanticizing what earlier generations merely made do with. (...) These ruptures serve the novel’s larger project of demystification. (...) The characters in What We Can Know are betrayers: they can’t celebrate the sublimity of what they’ve lost without devaluing what they still have, nor honor the current moment without diminishing the scale of their loss. (...) That idea of denial lends the novel’s title an extra ironic bite. What we can know is far more than what we do." - Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

  • "(T)he novel mixes doomy futurism with a spiky campus satire about the fate of literature in an uncaring world, before finally taking shape as a gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt. The movement between the domestic and the geopolitical hasn’t always been smoothly managed in McEwan’s work, but it’s carried off here with winning audacity." - Anthony Cummins, The Observer

  • "Tom gets it wrong, and so does humanity. His is a local, personal instance of a global syndrome known in the 22nd century as the 'Derangement'. (...) Dreaming up a ravaged 22nd century is good clean fun when you know you won't have to endure it. But the extravagant imagining is also something of a necessity. As Tom points out (with McEwan hovering over his shoulder): 'The Derangement could not have been addressed by fictional realism. It was inadequate to the scale of the problem." - Adam Begley, The Spectator

  • "(A)s post-apocalyptic dystopias go, this one isn’t so terrible. Give or take the odd gang of bandits roaming the islands of the former Lake District, British society has readjusted rather than collapsed. Life goes on. (...) This novel is pretty copious too. As well as a detailed account of post-apocalyptic daily life and geopolitics (...) McEwan gives us a carefully constructed, if somewhat implausible, personal plot. (...) In McEwan’s earlier career, you suspect, What We Can Know might have supplied enough material for at least four books (.....) Cramming them all together means that, while no readers are likely to complain about feeling short-changed, they may also think that McEwan’s undiminished ability to produce elegant and unhurried sentences isn’t enough to disguise the fact that this novel is ultimately overstuffed -- or, if you prefer, a bit bonkers." - James Walton, The Telegraph

  • "His new novel, What We Can Know, may be his strangest yet. It brings together poetry, dementia, social and personal memory, the progress of human development, murder and more. (...) But how much fun the reader will have is an open question. This first half is slow-moving with none of the dramatic action scenes McEwan has made into an art form (.....) Some readers may bail out at this stage. They shouldn’t because the second part of the book is where McEwan has been hiding all the action, all the passion, all the nastiness, the twists and dark comedy we expect from him. (...) Does it all work ? No: the whole premise of an unheard poem achieving legendary status is plainly fanciful. Does he try to stuff too much in ? Most definitely: some topics and characters are brushed past. But that sense of pure excess, with the chewiness it brings, and the rereadings it will demand, is all part of this strange book’s curious charm." - John Self, The Times

  • "What We Can Know can be read as an optimist's manifesto, a rage against our consensus of decline. It can also be read as a cautionary tale of unchecked nostalgia (.....) There is cryptic marginalia, a love triangle or two, the lure of buried treasure, a whiff of whodunnit. (...) As Tom searches for the lost vellum, the truth about Vivien's silence is revealed. Neither story brings a great deal of surprise, but that is the pleasure of this book: in uncovering all the ways -- petty, profound and predictable -- that Tom is wrong about Vivien. The harder question is whether McEwan has wronged her, but to pursue it is to divulge a pivotal trauma (that phrase, perhaps, is damning enough)." - Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement

  • "Whatever the duty of the biographer, that of the novelist is unquestionably to vitality, and there is much about “What We Can Know” that teems with life. As a novel of ideas, it is faultlessly fecund, and nowhere more than in its take on time. It encourages us to think about our present era historically, especially in terms of culture (.....) Its self-referentiality is both fun and thematically apposite. (...) When it comes to the earthier matter of world-building, the author is on somewhat less sure footing. (...) Still, what we can know is that Mr. McEwan is a novelist of consummate skill, and his latest book a deeply intelligent addition to -- perhaps even a crowning of -- his oeuvre." - Toby Lichtig, Wall Street Journal

  • "McEwan carves this fictional vanishing act into literary history with a knife sharpened by decades of making it himself. For a novelist, he puts a lot of faith in poetry. (...) This is a story of scholarly obsession, with all the twinned pleasures and diversions such a story necessarily involves. If you survived reading A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale you have some idea of the doggedness of Metcalfe’s endeavor, but McEwan’s plotting is far more engaging and evocative than Byatt’s notorious novel. And his narrator speaks with such casual elegance, shedding profound insights and self-deprecating asides, simultaneously confirming and resisting his own effeteness. (...) This is all brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

  • "Die eigentliche Faszination liegt im doppelten Boden. Unter der beinahe barocken Handlung entfaltet sich ein philosophischer Roman über die Grenzen historischer Erkenntnis. Was bleibt, wenn alles gespeichert, aber nichts mehr verstanden wird ? Welche Geschichten überdauern -- die nüchternen oder die erfundenen ?" - Jan Küveler, Die Welt

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       What We Can Know is presented in two parts. The longer first is narrated by academic Thomas Metcalfe, of the University of the South Downs, his account beginning in 2119, in a much-changed world. The historical period he specializes in is 1990-2030, and he has long been researching a famous, lost poem, 'A Corona for Vivien', and the: "ineptly named Second Immortal Dinner" of 2014 at which poet Francis Blundy -- one of the greats of his time, "second only to Seamus Heaney, according to some, to others, second to none" -- presented the poem to his wife, Vivien as a birthday gift. The second part consists of an autobiographical account by Vivien, dated July, 2020 (with Francis having died in 2016), presented as then having been published Metcalfe in 2125, as The Confessions of Vivien Blundy.
       Metcalfe's account is in part personal history, as he describes his personal and professional life (as a struggling academic, in the under-appreciated humanities) in this new world where climate change and a few major international wars have made for very changed conditions, the 'Inundation of 2042' having washed away many Atlantic coastal cities and some inland as well: "Lagos, London, Rotterdam, Hamburg and most of Paris did not emerge from the counter-surges that raced up estuaries, or from the savage storms that followed". Britain was swamped, becoming: "an archipelago, its population halved", and getting around continues to be difficult; there hasn't been much serious re-industrialization -- though the internet still functions, though with new power Nigeria its contemporary hub. Life expectancy is decent but not great -- sixty-two -- and there have been some scientific advances, as apparently nourishment is abundant -- if not particularly tasty-sounding -- as they have the ability to: "make cheap, edible protein from atmospheric carbon dioxide and cultivated soil bacteria".
       AI -- NAI here, the national AI service -- seems similar and not much more advanced than it is today, though its use is somewhat restricted: the university students eagerly embrace it but are allowed only limited access -- one dose every five days -- whereby the AI also: "knows when it is being asked to write a student essay and will terminate the session". Meanwhile, the "privileged allotment" of academics in the Humanities Department like Metcalfe is (only) every other day.
       McEwan sketches out a serviceable future-world, but his concern is not so much with imagining where history -- geopolitics and climate change -- might lead; if anything, it's a conveniently conservative vision he offers, life somewhat less technologically and commercially advanced but otherwise quite similar to our own, and thus quite easy to relate to. McEwan seems not only aware of this but makes a point of it: among the things Metcalfe muses over is why the English language hasn't changed significantly over the past hundred-plus years. (Convenient, that, when assuming the voice of someone writing in the 2120s.)
       What Metcalfe focuses on in his account is the missing poem; his grand ambition is to find it. He's spent much of his time researching poet Francis Blundy -- and one of the problems that he faces is the sheer amount of relevant material. Much may have been washed away by the deluge, but electronic files, in particular, have been preserved -- "three million mentions of Francis Blundy in his lifetime, the 219,000 messages that were written to him and by him and the near-infinite references since". There are paper records as well -- letters, as well as the journals both Francis and Vivien kept, for example, with much material also digitized. It is a surfeit of information, and a huge problem for the would-be biographer -- leading of course also to the question implied in the novel's title: what can we know ? (about any particular person or event).
       All this excess of data -- about Blundy -- is nicely juxtaposed with the one great missing piece: while Metcalfe can (certainly at least to his mind, and to the general standards of biography) reconstruct the dinner at which the poem was presented in close detail, the poem remains a blank page. Indeed, right from the beginning and over the years the poem 'A Corona for Vivien' has: "by its nonexistence had become: a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger, and a focus of unhinged reverence".
       Metcalfe does understand that:

     The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato's cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry. [...]
     The imagined lords it over the actual -- no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.
       (So, again, the issue is one of: 'what we can know'.)
       Nevertheless, Metcalfe is determined to find the poem -- and thinks that he can. His account is also that of a treasure hunt, culminating in a very real and somewhat challenging expedition to the Blundys' old property, where he thinks he'll find buried treasure -- practically certain he will literally unearth the poem. (This hidden-treasure aspect of the novel is so prominent that an amusing -- and perhaps necessary ? -- Author's Note at the end of the novel has McEwan warn: "Interested reader, please note that nothing related to this novel is buried anywhere".)
       Along the way, we learn a lot about Vivien and Francis, including about Vivien's first husband Percy, whose physical and mental deterioration Vivien long endured as he suffered from Alzheimer's. A variety of friends and relatives also figure, especially those who were present at that well-documented birthday-dinner where the poem was read.
       The second part of the novel, Vivien's memoir -- an eye-witness account, as it were --, serves as something of a corrective: despite all the material Metcalfe had access to, maybe the picture he put together from it wasn't entirely accurate ..... This second part, covering some of the incidents and relationships that Metcalfe had introduced readers to, is practically a stand-alone -- though much of the fun of it comes, of course, from how it contrasts with the information and inferences Metcalfe had offered in the longer first part, and the significant things he missed or misread. Unsurprisingly, things apparently were not all exactly as they seemed. So Vivien's account -- packaged by Metcalfe for publication as a 'confession' -- offers an alternate version of much that we have learned about and, as actual witness and participant, hers must surely be taken as the version that is closer to what actually happened -- to the truth.
       As far as the question of: 'what we can know' goes, Metcalfe presumably *can* know less than Vivien; after all, Vivien was there ..... Nevertheless, McEwan suggests that Vivien too might be reshaping the actual record -- indeed, that there can be no such thing as a meaningfully 'actual' record: as Vivien is writing it she reads selected parts of it to Francis' sister, Jane, who has been: "supportive of the project" she has in mind -- and:
Is it, she asked me on two occasions, a novel ? Each time, I shrugged.
       (Vivien has already admitted that some of what she put down in her journals was ... misleading: "Not untrue, but not the truth", and that she had been: "teaching myself to lie by omission". Perhaps there are reasons to believe this 'confession' is different, but readers should certainly harbor some doubts: for many of the same as well as additional reasons, autobiography does not necessarily get closer to the 'truth' than biography does.)
       Taken as a stand-alone, this second part is ... a typical McEwan novel, set in (our) contemporary times and involving people and relationships and some things that go quite terribly wrong, and the consequences thereof (specifically here, in the form of a warped relationship between Vivien and Francis).
       Vivien's account begins with a terrific set piece, McEwan showing off his chops, but the heart of the matter here is the relationship between Vivien and Francis -- how it comes about, and its (true (?)) nature. There is a big reveal here, an incident mentioned by Metcalfe where he took the accounts from that time at face value but which Vivien reveals as having unfolded rather differently. This, in particular, is something that could be straight out of many earlier McEwan novels -- though one problem with it is that comes entirely too predictably; maybe not all readers are as cynical as I am, but when Metcalfe originally mentioned the incident it seemed obvious that he was missing ... the obvious. (Yes, McEwan does add a few frills and twists -- it's Vivien who reveals who ... uh, nudged things along, and she adds a few details, but basically: its hard to see how one could not have seen this (admission) coming.)
       It all makes for a somewhat odd doubled book. Yes the second part plays well enough off the first, and each tells an entertaining story -- and there's the suspense of whether we will ever get to see, or even just learn more about, the poem -- but it's all also a bit pat and simple. The ending of the first part -- the discovery of the treasure ! -- even feels rather sappy, while the second doesn't quite offer enough to justify the elaborate structure of the novel as a whole: it's a solid little McEwan-novella, but given how much time readers spent wading through the first part one would have hoped there would be a bit more to it.
       Metcalfe's obsession with the material -- the poem, the birthday party, those involved -- makes for an entertaining academic portrait, Metcalfe well aware that his field isn't exactly respected. The students, too, aren't very interested in the past Metcalfe wallows in -- uninterested in: "The morons of long ago" responsible for the current, post-deluge world; as a student-leader tells him and new wife and colleague Rose: "We're saying, no more, thank you very much ! Enough of what you think we've lost". A class literally walks out on him and Rose, their spokesman telling them: "We're not interested in the value of historical thinking and the screwed up past and we won't be attending your course".
       It's an attitude that could have been explored more. Metcalfe certainly believes it's important to recall and try to understand the past -- history, and how we got where we are -- but given how Vivien's account rather makes a fool of him and his work one has to wonder whether the kids aren't right -- why bother ? (Indeed, Metcalfe would surely do well around that point to pay more attention to his own romantic relationship; similarly, he stuffs an envelope in a coat pocket unread, and it's two months before he comes across it again and finally opens what turns out to be a pretty good tip regarding his research-efforts; he really should try living in and focusing on the moment a bit more ...) Indeed, McEwan has Metcalfe in some ways living in a fantasy world, becoming way too attached to his subject(s) (which of course can't be helpful regarding any would-be scholarly objectivity) -- to the extent that he makes personal missteps that he recognizes only way too late:
     It was a terrible idea to have once said to Rose that I could imagine myself falling in love with Vivien and marrying her.
       No kidding ..... (On top of it, at the time they had only been married for a few weeks .....)
       What We Can Know is engaging, and enjoyable throughout, but pulled in a few too many directions, leaving it feeling a bit baggy. There are some fun elements and twists -- not least the poem --; indeed, there's a lot here of interest, including questions of how to capture any truth, about a person or events. (Among the most amusing bits Vivien describes is a long-term project of the undermining of one person's archive -- in contrast to the overabundance of material relating to others, like Francis --, essentially 'disappearing' them.)
       What We Can Know is ... fine -- well-done, but there's not quite enough to it.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 February 2026

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Links:

What We Can Know: Reviews: Ian McEwan: Other books by Ian McEwan under review: Other books of interest under review:
  • See the index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       British author Ian McEwan is the author of many fine novels. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998.

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© 2026 the complete review

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