What We Can Know

Set in 2119 after climate and nuclear disasters McEwan calls the Derangement, the novel turns on a scholar trying to recover the text of a celebrated lost poem, written decades earlier for a poet's wife's birthday, and in doing so runs into the limits of what the historical record can actually tell anyone. It's McEwan revisiting territory from Atonement, but stripped of that novel's irony, since the catastrophe his characters once joked about elsewhere has now simply happened. The opening stretch is slow going, heavy with world-building, before a run of late reversals sharpens the book considerably. The result reads as a culmination of his long preoccupation with unreliable knowledge rather than a new direction.