Book Review: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The spoken or written poem was as old as literature, perhaps as old as speech, with roots in song, in the rhythms of daily life and the body’s pulse, in the hunger to catch the passing moment and to glorify love… it was the poets who made the book of life.”

What We Can Know is Ian McEwan’s latest book, and what I do know is, I have this compulsion to read every book of his. This novel is perhaps the furthest thing from a comfort read. McEwan’s is a brilliant mind that looks at our changing world and writes stories that place contemporary challenges beside messy human nature: chaos controlled in the tidy safety box that a good novel is.

 
Written in two parts, the first one depicts a dystopia set in 2119, where the remnants of civilization are dealing with a post-nuclear war landscape almost entirely taken over by water. AI and the internet are controlled by governments and run as a public service, the global leader is Nigeria, and to be purely Caucasian is to be a minority. And yet a literature professor still seeks a famous lost poem written over a century ago: the pursuit of art in the face of global near-destruction, the brave mission of a scholar soldiering on in a world greatly diminished.

To be frank, the first act was a bit of a drag for this reader, as it depicted a future world all too plausible, and horrible to imagine in reality. But the second half of the novel is where McEwan metaphorically gripped my throat in the chokehold of a good mystery thriller.

What was initially a search for a literary treasure turns into an account of the lives of the author and his friends and family, and it becomes far more than a poet presenting his wife with a birthday corona (apparently the supreme test for an author, as it is a kind of poem that requires technical brilliance to write).

There is passion, both tender and illicit. There is death and decay, both physical and moral, as lovers live and part, and try to write books and think of art in a vain attempt to elevate themselves from the animal within. And despite the numerous emails and text messages that surround the events, McEwan shows that this “theft of privacy” still cannot reveal the hidden shadows of the human heart.

The last chapters are unforgettably tense, and if this were a mere suspense thriller the time reading it would have been well spent. But all throughout, McEwan writes of the present through the lens of a future generation, and manages to both sound a warning and pen a love letter to our contemporary, crazy way of life.

We cannot know what the future holds for certain, but in this book, McEwan sings his song of endurance: that humanity, its sins and weaknesses, its art and poetry, will survive all that is to come.

“The weapons proliferated and they did little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed. Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike… In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated… the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved. When too few understood how sublime their natural and man-made worlds were… not only a lament for what we have mindlessly killed, but a passionate reminder of what is still there and must be loved.”

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