A love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
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.
