What We Can Know

This is Ian McEwan’s second foray into science fiction after his alternative history novel, Machines Like Me. I enjoyed that book but it was far too eager to show off its worldbuilding—at one point a character practically looks at the camera like Tim in The Office. There’s a bit of that in What We Can Know with its expository passages explaining what’s been happening in the 21st and 22nd centuries, but it mostly works. As with all McEwan’s work, it’s extremely English. He just has to have some clashing of the classes in there. The book has an unusual structure, switching between the present day and a climate-ravaged future one hundred years from now. A future scholar is obsessed with a poem from our time period that was never published. At times the book feels like a whodunnit, complete with all the suspects assembled together in a country house. If the structure is unusual, the tonal swings are really something. We go from high-brow pondering of the utility of art in the face of…