Outwitted

I recently read Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know. A full week has passed since I finished the book, and I still don’t know what I think of it. At times during the reading, I was impressed with the quality of the prose and totally taken in by the storyline. At other times, I felt that the plot had lapsed into a soap opera account of a not particularly likable character’s love life, and I was tempted to quit reading.

What We Can Know is on several literary critics’ list of the top ten books for 2025. This is usually an indication that I won’t like  it. In my experience, critics tend to prefer books with complicated prose and lengthy periods of introspection. I prefer simple prose and a straightforward story. Last year the critics and I basically agreed on James by Percival Everett, but otherwise we liked very different stuff.

I was, however, drawn to What We Can Know for its unique premise. The story is about a historian from the 22nd Century in search of a long lost poem written by an early 21st Century poet. The book is not so much science fiction as an imagining of what a scholar from the 22nd Century might think about the role of the liberal arts at a time in history when humanity could have saved the planet from climate change, but did not.

The first third of the book was very good. Except for a weak attempt to sneak in a sentence that any reader of crime fiction would recognize as an important clue, the first one hundred pages were solid prose about one man’s hunt for a missing poem. Then abruptly, literally from one page to the next, the novel became a completely different book. Rather than the future, the story fell back into the present. Gone was the future, gone was the original narrator, gone was the search for the lost poem. In its place was the wife of the 21st Century poet describing her love affairs with three different men.

If not for a curiosity as to how McEwan was going to bring these two stories together, I would have stopped reading. It was good that I continued. McEwan not only brought the stories together, but did so in a way that I did not see coming – even though he’d put down clues throughout the entire book pointing out what the inevitable end had to be. I even think that the obvious clue early in the book that had bothered me was put there to lull readers into thinking that they had the book figured out.

I remember only two other novels where I finished the book and felt totally outwitted by the author. One was Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The other was Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. Now I have a third.