What We Can Know

I bounced off this after a few chapters, annoyed by the show-off intellectualism of the characters and subject. McEwan seems to often frustrate with cleverness over story, and this seemed to be the case here. After talking it over with another reader I gave it a second chance, and I’m pleased now to have read it.

The novel is set in a post climate-disaster world where society continues albeit in a far more basic manner, though this is all secondary to the development of the story. The pursuit of poetry is ostensibly the central pillar, but more so is the question (as per the title) of how or what we can know if we’re basing our knowledge on fragments and electronic capture. What about emotion, and what about what is not spoken. McEwan cleverly addresses those latter questions by flipping the narrator late, and it works.