Backstory and Omniscience in What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

A quick glance at my scene tagging numbers for chapter 5 of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know shows that this scene is different from any I’ve analyzed 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. (Read my analysis of the opening chapter.)

Here are the opening sentences:

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 coloring his almost minute-by-minute reconstruction of this birthday dinner.

That’s why my scene-tagging, awash in the gray color I’ve assigned to backstory, doesn’t effectively capture the subtle textures of the chapter. Let’s look more closely at a few passages that reveal what McEwan is up to here.

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, Jess, 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 once the Gages are on their way to the Blundy house, 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.

Thomas is at the Bodleian, of course, to consult the Blundy archives, which, we learned in the first chapter, 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 2114 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’ll examine this 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 3, 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.”

Thomas seems to show off his access and omniscience in a later moment in the chapter, when he recounts a long glance between Mary and Graham Sheldrake. They were the first guests to arrive, we learned in an earlier chapter, and are in the midst of an intense private drama. During the car trip to the Blundy house, Mary forced a confession from Graham of his infidelity. Soon after their arrival, Graham found a message on Mary’s phone revealing her own infidelity and they had a bitter fight in the guest room before the arrival of the other dinner guests. Now, after a few drinks, Mary realizes that perhaps their marriage could be open rather than over and 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 more than Vivien’s assessment of Chris, this moment works to convince Thomas, and perhaps readers too, that he does indeed have almost God-like access. Francis, Vivien, and the other guests are unaware of the private drama. 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.

I discussed the concept of narrative layers in my piece on the opening of Layne Fargo’s The Favorites, and I think it’s useful to revisit here to see the complexity of what McEwan is doing.

That outer layer representing Thomas’s narration has, as I’ve noted, no action, no dialogue, no setting beyond the bare knowledge that he is at the Bodleian in Snowdonia in 2119. The purpose of the chapter is to pierce those intervening narrative layers as Thomas reaches back in time to the 2014 birthday dinner he is chronicling. 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 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…. The term suggested not only madness but the vengeful fury of weather systems. There was also a hint at collective responsibility for our innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Humanity itself was deranged. The term did not stretch to include the related Metaphysical Gloom – the collapse of belief in a future, or more specifically, the fading of a belief in progress.”

As McEwan’s immediate readers, his implied audience of 2025, 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.” And this alignment shapes our understanding of Francis Blundy and that 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 recreation of the conversation on that, as well as secondary from the period. (McEwan once again models the specifics on an actual UN report that was officially published in 2014 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. The plates were warm.” He imagines that Vivien is “irritated by [Francis’s] certitude, his entitlement, his capacity for repetition. A brilliant man, and such a fool.” Thomas seems unaware 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.