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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
