Backstory and omniscience in What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

A quick glance at the scene component numbers for chapter five of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know shows that this scene is different from any I’ve studied up until now. It contains none of the components of a live scene, those external elements you could film: dialogue, action, and setting. Instead, it is dominated by backstory, with occasional splashes of character description and interiority from our narrator.

The first paragraph tells us that our narrator, the historian Thomas Metcalfe, is exactly where he’s been for the previous four chapters: in the Bodleian Library, researching a famous poem written in 2014 by the poet Francis Blundy and presented to his wife for her birthday in October of that year, after which the single copy in existence disappeared. We know from previous chapters that the year is now 2119, and Thomas’s Bodleian is not in Oxford but in the Welsh mountains. England is now an archipelago, and the journey from the South Downs to Snowdonia is via an overnight ferry.

The library setting is the container for McEwan’s craft choice. I mentioned the concept of the narrative frame in my post on the structure of V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, in the context of a scene in which Alice is listening to Charlotte narrate a story about her past. We are seeing another variety of a frame narrative here; in this case, a narrator in 2119 is reaching back to reconstruct a single evening in 2014. Thomas isn’t taking a plot journey in this chapter but rather a backstory journey, via the library’s Blundy archives. So the scene he is pursuing can only ever be told, never shown. The opening sentences reveal that our narrator is acutely aware of the difference:

One dominant theme of the book is the power and pain of nostalgia, and we see that pulsing through this passage of interiority. Thomas, as this paragraph shows, has some level of self-awareness that his obsession with the past is coloring his experience of the present. He understands, too, that the lost poem has accumulated an impossible burden of meaning because of its very inaccessibility. In chapter two, he admits, “The issue was not a lost birthday poem read after dinner, it was what the poem by its non-existence had become: a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.” However, he is not always aware of the ways in which his nostalgia, plus his belief that he “knows all that they knew,” might be shaping his almost minute-by-minute reconstruction of this birthday dinner.

Let’s look more closely at a few passages that reveal how McEwan first sets up a confident omniscient narrator, before seeding doubt in his ability to bridge the hundred-year gap he wants to close.

When Thomas returns to his recounting, he starts with the two guests still to arrive, Chris and Harriet Gage, who are still at home trying fruitlessly to calm their eight-month-old baby. Thomas assumes the fullest privileges of the omniscient narrator, taking us inside the minds of not just the parents (“Todd was their first child and their feelings of love for him were unexpectedly disorienting”), but also the teenage babysitter, who “had three younger siblings by her mother’s second marriage and believed that she knew what to do, but that it would be impolite to say so.” It turns out she does know what to do, at least in Thomas’s version of the story, and this confident assumption about both the facts and the inner worlds of multiple characters lulls us into trusting Thomas’s storytelling.

Next, Thomas turns to character summaries of Chris and Harriet. This time we get a hint at his materials:

McEwan is referencing an actual sociological study, “A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment,” which was published in 2013 and widely reported on. Vivien would have seen it and, presumably, our historian narrator would have tracked it down as well. (Chris slots neatly into the class identified as “new affluent workers.”) This paragraph, then, serves to increase our trust in Thomas as a historian and a narrator: He is relying on a primary source, details of which are corroborated by a contemporary secondary source. Perhaps his confidence is warranted, his omniscience justified.

This is a technique to remember if you are using either an omniscient or an unreliable narrator. Showing readers glimpses of your narrator’s sources will build trust—which you can then later undercut, in the case of an unreliable narrator, or reinforce, in the case of an omniscient narrator.

Thomas is at the Bodleian, of course, to consult the Blundy archives, which contain journals from both Francis and Vivien. Francis was a celebrated poet within his own lifetime; both he and Vivien would have expected that whatever materials they left behind after their deaths would be available to future researchers. Both of them might have been aware that their contemporaries, including their 2014 dinner companions, wouldn’t know things about them that historians of 2119 and beyond might know. As it turns out, we learn later in the novel that Thomas might not be taking this awareness fully into account. (I discuss this dynamic more fully in my post about the structure of the novel.)

However, we learn that Thomas does know things that Francis, Vivien, and their contemporaries might have expected would remain private. In chapter three, he tells us that everything once stored in the cloud—email, social media traffic, digital photos, even browsing histories and encrypted messages—is now available to researchers: “As our dean once said in a speech, we have robbed the past of its privacy.”

The strongest proof of Thomas’s access comes a little later in the chapter, when he recounts a long glance between Mary and Graham Sheldrake—a private drama none of the other guests can see, though Thomas reveals the inner thoughts of both. The Sheldrakes, the first to arrive, are in the midst of a relationship crisis: During the car trip to the Blundy house, Mary forced a confession of infidelity from Graham; soon after, he found a message on her phone revealing her own infidelity, and they fought bitterly in the guest room before the arrival of the other dinner guests. Now, after a few drinks, Mary wonders, as the glance goes on, whether they “were falling in love again.” The moment is interrupted by general small talk and Mary begins to doubt herself: “She had read too much. Everything was like something else. That was what weakened her hold on the real. Idiocy, to have assumed that her kind of intense communion was also Graham’s. She could no longer read him. He had given nothing away.”

Even Mary, in this moment, is unsure of reality. But Thomas, in the next chapter, finishes the story for us via Mary’s journal: Graham’s thoughts do mirror hers and they reconcile that night after the dinner is over. In the previous chapter, Thomas has reassured us: “My sources for the evening stretch across the entire company and are collated here. Email and social media traffic are held centrally these days, and easily accessed by those who work for an institution. Where necessary, I have added a few touches, but always within the bounds of the highly probable.” This long excursion into a private drama playing out during a more public event seems to prove that we can trust him.

Let’s return to the frame narrative I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. I’ll cover this concept in more detail in my post on Layne Fargo’s The Favorites, but the figure below illustrates the basics. The central event, Vivien’s 2014 birthday, is surrounded by frame layers that get further and further from the event itself.

That outer layer representing Thomas’s narration has, as I’ve noted, no action, no dialogue, no setting in this scene. Thomas is uninterested in his current place and time—the Bodleian in Snowdonia in 2119—but focused instead on piercing those intervening narrative layers in the frame to reach back in time to the 2014 birthday dinner he is chronicling. In this chapter, we start to see a gap opening between the readers Thomas addresses in 2119 and the readers McEwan actually has in 2025 and beyond.

This is a reason to reach for a frame narrative in historical or speculative fiction, where a narrator looks back from one time to another. That distance opens a gap you can use deliberately—letting readers know more than the narrator’s imagined audience does—to build dramatic irony and the tension that pulls a reader forward.

So far we’ve looked mostly at what the writers of the chapter are producing: Thomas’s narration, Vivien and Mary’s journals, even Mary’s private text messages. Let’s move now to one more moment from the chapter that reveals what’s happening with the readers of all of these communications. Soon after Harriet and Chris’s arrival, the talk turns to climate change, and here the gap between the reader Thomas believes he is writing for and the immediate reader McEwan is writing for yawns wide.

Thomas comments to his implied 2119 audience that climate change was “the mild term” then used for a phenomenon that, by the mid-2030s, had come to be known as the Derangement, “respectfully capitalised”:

As McEwan’s immediate readers, his audience of the twenty-first century, we don’t have Thomas’s advantage of hindsight, but McEwan is inviting us to inhabit exactly that frame with his future setting. He’s asking us to align ourselves with an implied 2119 reader who is, like Thomas, living in an England that is now a “sleepy overlooked archipelago-republic,” following “the upheavals of wars, pandemics, nuclear exchanges, the catastrophic Inundation and the Derangement driving scores of millions northwards out of Africa into Europe.”

This alignment shapes our understanding of Francis Blundy and the missing poem at the heart of the narrative, for we learn in this chapter that Francis is a climate denier “to his core.” The rest of those at the dinner disagree with him, but “believed that the views of a poet made no difference to the earth’s fate and it was never worth making old Blundy furious.” Thomas tells us that the subject came up during Harriet’s interview of Francis for a Vanity Fair profile: “Harriet had tactfully excluded his opinions from her profile,” but Thomas has access to her full transcription of their interview and bases his re-creation of the conversation on that, as well as secondary materials from the period. (McEwan once again models the specifics on an actual UN report that was officially published in 2013 but leaked and widely reported on in late 2012.)

As readers in 2025, we may experience these glimpses of a possible 2119 future with the kind of reluctant but fascinated horror of witnessing a car crash we can’t prevent. How vividly do we want to imagine ourselves into this seemingly diminished world?

At the same time, our narrator Thomas is feverishly trying to pull himself into the past, into our world. After Francis’s diatribe, Thomas imagines Vivien retreating to the kitchen to check on the meal: “The quail, the sliced ceps piled about them, the cauliflower with anchovies, and the roast potatoes were ready”—a variety of foods that are unobtainable in 2119 England. He imagines that Vivien is “irritated by [Francis’s] certitude, his entitlement, his capacity for repetition. A brilliant man, and such a fool.” And here the gap this chapter has traced opens to its widest: We can see what Thomas cannot—that he might be describing himself, another brilliant man wielding his sources like certainties, unwilling to face the truth that there are things he cannot know.

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