Genre and theme in the opening of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know

So far, I’ve analyzed a few books with at least one foot in literary fiction: The God of the Woods, Death of the Author, and Wild Dark Shore. Literary fiction is often treated as the opposite of genre fiction, meaning any novel marketed as romance, thriller, fantasy, and so on. I think it’s more accurate to regard literary fiction as just another genre among others, but one with fewer fixed rules, expected beats, or firm style conventions.

As a writer, you should be thinking, perhaps even before you start writing, about which genre categories best fit your own manuscript. Learn what readers will expect from your genre, starting on page one, then decide whether to meet those expectations or subvert them. Subverting them comes with risks but can work well if you are writing across genres, and especially if you are mixing literary fiction with another genre.

The marketing materials for What We Can Know describe it as “genre-bending” and place it in both the science fiction and literary fiction categories. However, I think we see literary fiction conventions dominate the opening. McEwan offers us lower-suspense story questions that hook into his theme rather than action or character.

But let’s start with the setting because that’s where McEwan himself starts, and it’s also the aspect that places the book in the category of speculative fiction since it is set in the future. Here’s the first paragraph:

The date is the very first piece of information we get and it colors every detail that follows as we watch McEwan speculate about what will be different (English geography, transport, general levels of comfort) and what will be the same (libraries, phones, small talk) a little less than a century from now. The phrase “everyone discovers” reaches out to us readers, inviting us to consider how we might react to a world where an overnight journey sleeping upright on a wooden bench is a normal occurrence. (There are no personal jetpacks or flying cars in this version of the future!)

So the first open story question of the book is an existential one, and perhaps one that we already know the answer to: Has climate change affected the UK, both in ways we might expect and those we might not? A story question based purely on setting, like this one, doesn’t offer a lot of suspense because the narrator already knows the answer even if we do not. Compare this, for example, to the first story question of The God of the Woods: What happened to the missing girl, Barbara? (See my post on the opening of The God of the Woods for more on story questions and how they work.)

If you are writing a story set in a future world, this is a technique to remember. Opening with a concrete date introduces an immediate, if low-suspense, story question. If you want to lead with a more suspenseful story question, the date can be tucked into a time stamp before the chapter even opens, allowing you room to dive straight into the story.

We don’t learn much about our first-person narrator in this first paragraph, not even their name or gender, only that they are perhaps a solitary sort. The small talkers aren’t named or remarked on, supper is eaten alone, and Rose, who we don’t hear about again until chapter seven, is categorized rather distantly as a “friend and colleague.” As we’re about to see, our narrator recedes so another character can come into focus.

Next we come to a new story question, one that we know from the book description is the plot’s central hook. Our narrator has made this arduous trek to the Bodleian to research a “famous lost poem” written by the fictional poet Francis Blundy as a birthday present for his wife Vivien in 2014. What has happened to the poem?

Our narrator is trying to answer that question in a way that will be familiar to historians, by scouring the archives for details about what happened on the day it was presented to Vivien for her fifty-fourth birthday. Here the narrative takes a perhaps unexpected turn, becoming preoccupied with Vivien’s life choices and her happiness. We learn that she was once a professor but gradually gave up her own ambitions in order to serve her husband—a state of affairs that a friend later called “medieval serfdom. . . . Francis never stirred from his chair, never did a thing. I don’t think it crossed his mind that the household, the meals or even the state of his underwear might have something to do with him. He was, after all, a genius!” Another mutual friend, hearing this interview, remarked in a “light-hearted piece for the Spectator” that “the awkward truth was, [Vivien] was a good deal happier and physically fitter than [Francis] ever was. She was bound to outlive him.” Is Vivien, then, the key to the lost poem?

An assistant librarian named Drummond brings the narrator “the twelve volumes of Vivien Blundy’s journals from her archive, which, for reasons scholars have never resolved, once rested marsupially within her husband’s.” Remember the delight and precision of the adverb “marsupially” the next time you hear someone tell you to cut all adverbs from your writing! Of Drummond, our narrator tells us he is “ferociously clever” and “writing something of his own,” perhaps revealing more about our mysterious narrator and their anxieties than about Drummond himself.

The narrator zeroes in on specific phrases from the journals: “I wonder if I sometimes enjoy disliking him” and “I’ve never hated him. Never! But.” The narrator almost seems to address us directly when interpreting this last passage: “You might try to guess at the truncated final sentence or gaze at the middle letter of ‘but’ as though it might swing open on its hinges to reveal a peephole through which you could see a disappointed heart, reduced by lost opportunities.” This kind of direct address, reaching out to enlist the reader, is a tool we also saw in Death of the Author (see my post on its opening). Beautiful, rich, surprising sentences like this one—with its extended peephole metaphor—are what we expect from literary fiction. The note of longing in the narrator’s tone begins to hint at the theme.

The peephole transfixing our narrator reveals a third story question, or set of questions: What was the state of the relationship between Vivien and Francis? If she was unhappy, why did she stay? Did her unhappiness have something to do with the missing poem? Did she outlive him, in the end? Once again, our narrator knows more about the answers, at least that last one, than we do.

At the end of the chapter, our narrator returns to Francis, imagining him in his study. On this day, the narrator knows from previous examinations of Francis’s papers that he was making notes for his poem “String,” partly inspired by his nephew’s explanations of loop quantum gravity. A quotation from Francis’s journal represents the final words of the chapter:

This dense, prickly passage almost challenges us to find its meaning—and that is, in fact, part of its meaning. Francis is asking, in effect, what can a physicist know and what can a poet know? Are their fields of knowledge as different as they appear?

The last sentence of the passage presents a puzzle that even I, with a PhD in English, had to resort to an internet search to decode. “Wystan” is W.H. Auden and the reference is to his 1962 poem “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics.” The poem pulls us back to the questions we have about Francis and Vivien’s marriage. Auden proclaims that “marriage is rarely bliss,” but better than being particles pelting around a universe “wherein a lover’s kiss / would either not be felt / or break the loved one’s neck.”

Is the reference to a rarely blissful marriage and the collision of love and violence in the last line of the verse a coincidence? Or a tiny oblique clue, one our narrator is confident he has spotted? More apparent is the way this passage brings us back to what are, effectively, the first words of the novel, the title: What We Can Know. What can we know about our fellow humans? What will we be allowed to know about this narrator, who stays so carefully out of view? And what might we come to understand about Vivien and Francis, these contemporaries of ours, that the narrator, despite all of his archival sources, does not?

Returning to the question of genre, what we see in this first chapter is an emphasis on theme rather than plot, which is common in literary fiction. So far, the only speculative element is the future setting and the impacts of climate change; otherwise, this story world operates in ways that are familiar and expected. The challenge the opening sets is less about the strangeness of its world than about its central question—how much we, and the narrator, can ever really know.

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.