Brash and busy ... It’s a piece of late-career showmanship...from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing ... 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.
Impish, goading ... McEwan puckishly draws on his catalog of favored themes ... 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.
Stylish, cunning ... The novel ranks high among his oeuvre ... Explores what we can know about the fates of language and literature, as though McEwan is clinging to an eroded cliff or a flimsy footbridge. Yet he’s asking the right questions.
[A] bracing new time bender of a novel ... 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.
Cerebral ... Engaging and evocative ... This is all brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted ... There is a daring realignment that boldly shifts the perspective and demonstrates with shocking intensity how little we can ever really grasp about the strange evasions of the heart.
McEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses … The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane.
He has always filtered his philosophical preoccupations through the prism of domestic drama. What We Can Know feels like a direct descendant of Atonement, McEwan’s most beloved work ... The speculative scaffolding falls away and the perspective shifts .. McEwan leans into dishy melodrama ... To wrest the climate crisis into a form we can grasp, he casts his elegy and protest as a novel of adultery ... McEwan’s view is starker. We are the homewreckers. We broke faith first, and yet many of our contemporaries deny the breach.
The science fiction scenario, the secret histories eventually disclosed: these are fun, and handled with great brio, but they’re not exactly original. The book’s value lies in what it is prepared to omit – nothing new, this, but a classically realist virtue.
n his new offering, McEwan stumbles into a classic trap of speculative fiction: mistaking heavy explanation for solid world-building ... McEwan’s novel reminds us – because we need reminding – that the future of literature, like the future itself, is being written right in front of us.
The 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.
Satisfying ... 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.
The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane ... Continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless ... McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.
A daring project infused with his signature beauty, rigor and sweeping ambition, with a heavy emphasis on thought rather than feeling ... His prose remains polished, every sentence carefully tuned. He has a remarkable ability to take abstract concepts and render them in lucid, even lyrical, language. There are moments where science, literature and history intertwine beautifully, and readers will recognize the intelligence and clarity that have defined his career ... A brave and ambitious exploration of uncertainty that challenges more than it comforts, but reminds us why McEwan remains one of the most vital and cherished voices in contemporary fiction.
Clever ... Casts a rueful eye ... The novel is epic in scope, straddling a century without losing McEwan’s trademark attention to the fine grain of our emotional lives. The narrative is compelling and often moving. But McEwan makes a slightly goofy prophet ... A timely and typically thoughtful addition to McEwan’s impressive corpus. If it finds enough readers, perhaps we can avoid the future it depicts.
cEwan delivers pleasure on the page with the ticktock reliability of an expensive Swiss watch. Even the lesser novels are immaculately written and cleverly plotted, full of provocative ideas, captivating characters and compelling incidents. In the better novels, he achieves a kind of elevated self-awareness ... What We Can Know is not lesser, and the pleasures – bookish pleasures, especially –are in abundant supply.
May be his strangest yet ... The setting for all this is wild and richly imagined, and McEwan has some fun with it ... 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.
Ambitious, daring, and very enjoyable ... It is very rare for a novelist to write his best work when he has been writing novels for half a century, but McEwan has done just that. If several of his much-praised novels written in middle-life seemed to me lacking in lively imagination, he has now written what may be judged his masterpiece. Remarkable. This novel has a rare and delightful vitality.
The ambition is nothing less than 'to let the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time', and, in his own fashion, McEwan actually pulls that off ... So, in his 18th novel, McEwan once more first gives and then takes away the very story he is telling. What can we know? It is high craft. Sure, it’s absurdly literary, daftly invested in the power of poetry, blind to religion, loftily bourgeois and Oxford-orientated, all of that, once again, and hardly the voice of youth either — but a must-read nonetheless.
Seemingly unusual occurrences – extreme weather events, say – interfere with the novel’s ‘calculus of probability’, and also have an unhelpful tendency to turn into metaphors ... A form devoted to ‘individual moral adventure’ isn’t well adapted to thinking about a collective-action problem like climate change, in which individual choices are more or less meaningless ... The novel is paid out with such elegance and expertise that the mild preposterousness of some of it barely registers ... McEwan brings off a large-scale narrative turnaround ... He’s found a way to estrange our mundane present from the future’s perspective without anything overtly science-fictional happening on the page. It’s a clever, uncanny effect that Tom, and maybe Ghosh, might applaud.
The novel will not satisfy readers hoping for the McEwan version of cli-fi ... A distinct and disjunctive take on the climate change narrative ... For a novel self-consciously commenting on the need to invent a prose form appropriate to the climate crisis, What We Can Know spends a great deal of time focused on an obscure sonnet sequence ... [The] plot snakes wildly through the two sections, buffeted by the genre-switching and the constant turns to poetry, but still moving to a stimulating conclusion ... There are deeply moving and often lyrical portions of Vivien’s narrative.
McEwan wraps the whole bundle neatly in a twist worthy of O. Henry or Rod Serling, capably numbering himself among such masters, whatever genre you might place him in.
Psychologically acute ... Satisfies expectations even as it generates fresh anticipation. Its keen insights about some of the darkest and most mystifying aspects of the human psyche are presented in the way one would expect from a novelist of Ian McEwan's experience and talent as he leads readers through the complex emotional labyrinth of this memorable story.
The only fault I can find with Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know, is that I had trouble thinking through its thorny intellectual issues while turning the pages as fast as possible to find out what would happen ... Eager to reach the novel’s conclusion, I flipped the pages so quickly that my own questions about language’s shifting nature and its effect on our understanding of literature, history, and the world around us will require a second, closer reading to answer.
A very literary novel critiquing, I think, much of literature’s fixation on knowing and communicating personal experience ... Provides so many comic pleasures and melodramatic horrors it could be welcomed as a continuation of traditional realism’s methods rather than a critique of them, their resistance to new more valuable forms ... McEwan’s two academically trained narrators write a rather abstract and sometimes pedestrian prose that rarely communicates vital and vivid experience. Even when they describe passionate moments, the prose can sound expository.
Deeply intelligent and endlessly supple ... The novel keenly brings to life a post–climate change world and conveys the struggle of humanities scholars to prove the value of their work. McEwan is in top form.
