It just keeps happening. Each time that I finish another book by Ian McEwan, there is a thought I cannot get rid of: this might be his best work yet. I believed that when I finished Black Dogs all those years ago. Later, Amsterdam. Later, Saturday. Four years ago it happened with Lessons. And this is where I am now, having just finished his latest novel. The only difference this time is that What We Can Know got me into this state of mind two pages into the second part. Which is exactly the moment when you begin to get the sheer scope of what McEwan is about to accomplish here.
At its heart, What We Can Know has the sort of idea any writer would kill for. We are in 2119, the world has gone through wars, climate cataclysms and economic disasters (McEwan does not get into many details, but if anything, it only strengthens the effect), and the narrator is trying to piece together the past. The past is our present, our time, namely the beginning of the 21st century. The narrator is mostly interested in trying to find one legendary poem that was once written but has never been made public. It may have been called "A Corona for Vivien", and it was a birthday gift from the famous poet Francis Blundy to his wife Vivien. We get into many details about the circumstances of the gift and the birthday party during which the poem in question was recited.
What We Can Know is not about the present, though. It is about the past (or, basically, our present). The past has been analysed, dissected and 'robbed of its privacy'. And yet the past looks impossibly distant and unknowable (though admittedly, doesn't it seem sometimes that 2014 happened at least half a century ago?). You could dig around it for years but still there would be limits to what you can know. Sometimes time goes faster and sometimes it slows down almost to a halt. The past gets trapped in it, and the important circumstances are coloured in dark secrets and inevitable subjectivity. 'The past', writes McEwan, 'survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present'.
It is not always easy to get into a McEwan novel. You need time to get your bearings and settle into the right rhythm. But do bear with What We Can Know. His prose is always rewarding, as are the details (as soon as you finish this book, you will want to read it all over again), as is the mood of uncertain and slightly compromised elation you get while reading. He does get across this idea that what we have now, every little thing, is a miracle. It may not feel that way, but waiting until 2119 to make sure is not a good option.
I remember that when I first saw the title of McEwan's new novel, I immediately thought of what Salman Rushdie once said about Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: "It is one word too long". The reasons for Rushdie saying that were of course quite different, but it just felt to me that the title didn't seem right. Too many words. Too many short words. And yet some titles prove to you their inevitability once you start reading the book. And What We Can Know is inevitable. If anything, he could have thrown another short word in there - 'not', for instance. Which, however, would slightly cheapen the effect.
