What We Can Know
What We Can Know
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Ian McEwan on What We Can Know
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A poem bites hard, a world already lostThe novel’s premise arrived in two pieces with nothing obvious connecting them. McEwan had been following online communities devoted to preserving practical knowledge against civilizational collapse, and separately had read a corona sequence, a sonnet-crown poem in which the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next, by the English poet John Fuller. The two ideas found each other two years after that reading.
I read it and I was astonished by its beauty, how relaxed it was with all these rules. I didn’t guess for a minute when I read this poem that I was going to write a novel about this poem, but it bit hard into my thoughts and feelings and two years later I was fully engaged with just such a poem that gets lost. [paraphrased from audio]
The logic of the connection is quiet but exact: a poem is as fragile as germ theory or crop rotation, and losing it is its own kind of civilizational diminishment.
McEwan had written about climate change before, in his 2010 novel Solar, where the subject was the run-up to catastrophe. By the time he came to this book, his sense of what fiction could do with the subject had shifted entirely, and that shift determined the novel’s tone from the first page.
I’ve passed the point of thinking that climate change fiction can warn people because it’s already happening. We’re in it. We don’t need to be warned. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel that follows is not a warning. It is an elegy, written from 2119 looking back.
The narrator Tom Metcalfe’s longing for the world we inhabit now is not a purely invented emotion. McEwan named the literary antecedents of his own feeling before explaining how he transferred it to Tom: reading Hardy and Wordsworth had given him decades of practice grieving landscapes that were already gone.
It’s a huge temptation for anyone who loves literature to wish you could still wander through Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. When I read Wordsworth, I can’t help but feel a great longing for the countryside we no longer have. So I’ve projected onto my narrator, Tom, some of my own nostalgia.
How he wrote it
No research, one good note, a poem left unreadFifty years into his career, McEwan has arrived at a working method that runs counter to most advice given to novelists about preparation. The synthesis of his reading and experience has become, in his description, the only archive worth raiding.
I feel that my head is so stuffed with stuff that I try to treat it like a garden. And I prefer to go down those garden paths into my own mind, and my own memories, as research. I didn’t research a thing for this. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s original temporal reach was far greater than what appears in the final book. A trusted first reader heard the draft and offered a single objection. McEwan’s response was not argument but immediate recognition.
As soon as he said it, I felt relief. Yes, it has to be a hundred years — would do it. Fine. [paraphrased from audio]
A hundred years keeps the future grievable. Tom can envy rock concerts and cheese-rolling competitions because they are recent enough to ache.
The dinner party at which the fictional poem is read aloud is the novel’s formal centerpiece. McEwan chose it as the scene that could demonstrate something a film or a biography categorically cannot do: simultaneous access to nine private minds while a tenth person speaks.
I have the privilege of going round the table and entering the minds of all his listeners and what they’re thinking. And of course, a lot of them are daydreaming. And they’ve had quite a lot to drink — a lot of wine, several gin and tonics. So they don’t quite stay on the poem itself. Now, that’s the kind of access we do not have in real life.
McEwan drafted actual lines of the fictional poem and showed them to an early reader, who said plainly: don’t quote it, you are not a poet. He agreed. The decision to withhold the poem’s contents became a structural choice that placed every reader, including McEwan himself, in the same epistemic position as Tom.
It would put the reader in the same position as all of us, including myself. We do not know what’s in this poem. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
His own nostalgia, projected forwardThe novel’s stated ambition reaches across centuries. But its emotional engine is McEwan’s own sense of what is already gone, a feeling he has carried through decades of reading the English Romantics and the Victorians before it found its fictional form.
My ambition in this novel was to let the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time.
McEwan was born in 1948, three years after the end of a war that killed between 80 and 90 million people. That biographical fact sits behind his insistence that the novel’s future is diminished but not ended, and his account of his own generation’s recovery is the evidence he offered when pressed on whether hope was earned or merely decorative.
I was born in the shadow of the war, Second World War, and at my back were somewhere between 80 and 90 million dead. But I belong to that generation. You know, we had rock ‘n’ roll. We had cheap paperback books. We had a lot of access to kids who normally would not have expected to be at university, kids like myself, in fact. And we were rather tired of our elders, parents going on about the war and the Great Depression.
On what the book is wrestling with
What an archive buries, what a novel can reachTom Metcalfe, the novel’s narrator writing in 2119, has access to tens of thousands of items from Francis Blundy’s life: daily emails, texts, every recorded interview and lecture. McEwan posed the problem that abundance creates to NPR, and it is the novel’s central epistemological question, not a subplot.
What we can know about the past, what we can guess about the future and what we can know about each other is crucial to the unfolding of this novel.
McEwan had been thinking about whether the realist novel, with its attention to individual psychology and daily texture, was the right form for a subject as vast and statistical as climate change. His answer turned on what the subject actually requires.
Climate change is a sort of colossal subject, existential, statistical, oceanography, glaciology. Is the realist novel up to it? Can it do it? That’s the question for me, and my answer is yes, because you can’t write about this subject without writing about people.
The dinner party scene is where the novel makes its argument for the realist tradition most directly. McEwan described the formal trick to PBS NewsHour in terms of what it costs and what it returns: a completely artificial convention that purchases something unavailable anywhere else.
In real life, we don’t have access to minds. We’d love it, of course. The realist novel does this completely unreal thing of stepping into nine minds around this table, listening to the 10th person read. And there’s a limit of what we can know. There’s a trick that the novelist can perform, allow you this access.
What he wants us to sit with
We live between the dead and the yet to be bornThe novel’s epigraph is also its plainest statement of where Tom Metcalfe stands: at the midpoint between an unrecoverable past and an unreachable future, working with instruments that are never quite equal to the distance.
We live our lives between the dead and the yet to be born. Of the dead we know a little, but not as much as we think.
McEwan described the novel’s emotional register with deliberate precision when asked whether the future it imagines is hopeless. The phrasing matters: hope is present, but he refused to make it comfortable.
a mix of cataclysm, catastrophe, pessimism and a rather slender, nuanced hope
His defense of the novel as a form is also his defense of this book specifically. He made the argument twice across different interviews, each time arriving at the same formulation: no other instrument exists that can do what the novel does to time and consciousness.
We haven’t yet found another instrument quite as fine-tuned as the novel to measure fates through time, the rise and fall and pulse of thought and feeling and the relationship of individuals to their surroundings, to their societies. And when we do, I guess the novel will be dead. But we haven’t found it yet.