A hundred years from now, the planet has been ravaged by natural disasters and nuclear wars. Most of what used to be England is submerged under water. The rest is inhabited by “brown people” (this is not my language, of course, but the way it’s put in the novel). The world is mostly ruled by Nigeria, and it’s a miserable, degraded existence. White people are a tiny minority, abused by the “we are honey, we are golden” brown people (again, this is a direct quote from the book. I have nothing to do with it.)
Most of the brown people exist in a state of bovine indifference to the lost civilization. A few, however, do understand that something precious perished. They try to imitate the literary and scholarly life of the departed world in a clumsy glass-bead game type of fumbling. But they simply lack the capacity to understand what a life of the mind is. Their efforts to make contact with the intellectually and culturally rich life of 2014 fail. All they manage to uncover from the past is a long, self-serving narrative by a whorish, narcissistic woman from a century before their time whose smug stupidity and utter immorality mirrors their own.
What We Can Know has two parts. The first one is narrated by a “scholar” of literature in 2120 who is obsessed by a poet’s wife from 2014. The second part is narrated by that wife. The novel plays a bit of a trick on the readers. Primitive minds with no knowledge of how to read a literary text will look at the text from the same limited perspective as the fake “scholar” from the future. They will take first-person narratives of the scholar from the future and the poet’s wife from the past completely literally. To people who do have a bit more of an understanding of how literature works, McEwan’s novel offers great surprises.
I’m not sure if I can recommend What We Can Know because McEwan takes quite a gamble, dedicating the whole first half of the novel to the painfully earnest mewlings of the future “scholar”. I barely got through it, to be honest. But once you hit the 50% mark and the story switches into the poet’s wife’s narrative, it gets good and you start figuring out what the point of everything is. But only if you have the capacity to figure it out, as I said before.
I don’t like futuristic dystopian narratives but What We Can Know isn’t really about the future. It’s about the need to appreciate art and intellectual pursuits because most people are tragically incapable of either, and if you are blessed with the rare capacity to do it, make sure you treasure it. Also, if you are not a vapid whore, treasure that, as well.
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