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

I’ve been deliberately steering our Novel Study choices away from literary fiction so we could find out what is happening on the more commercial side of the bestseller lists, but our final book of this season—What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan—is squarely located within the literary fiction genre and will provide a useful contrast. The novel is also described in its marketing materials as “genre-bending” and is tagged in the science fiction and speculative fiction categories. So one of the things I’m going to be paying attention to in my posts on the novel is how it does and doesn’t follow what we expect from literary fiction, and how those expectations might be different from those we have of other genres, including science fiction.

To begin with, I think readers expect a slower start and less plot from literary fiction. If a mystery often opens with a murder and a romance with a meet-cute, then how does a lit fic novel open? There are fewer expectations, but often we find a close character study and that’s the case here—though perhaps the character we are studying most closely is not the narrator.

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? As I’ve noted in previous Novel Study posts, this question is interesting to us, but it doesn’t carry a lot of story suspense because our narrator already knows the answer even if we do not.

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 7, is categorized rather distantly as a “friend and colleague.”

The next paragraph is also the next day, and we are introduced to three more characters. The first is an assistant librarian named Drummond, and our narrator’s suspicion that he is “ferociously clever” and “writing something of his own” perhaps tells us more about our mysterious narrator than about Drummond himself. The next two are characters from our own time, the fictional poet Francis Blundy and his wife Vivien. Our narrator is researching Blundy’s “famous lost poem,” which was written for his wife’s birthday in 2014, so this is our second open story question: 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.”

Amongst details about her birthday—the ingredients of the meal she cooked for guests that night, the weather that day, the arrival of a bottle of champagne from their nephew—are quotations from her journal: “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.”

Beautiful, rich, surprising sentences like this one—with its extended peephole metaphor—are what we expect from literary fiction. Before we return to our characters, I want to note one more: “As requested, [Drummond] brought to my desk 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!

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.

After the arrival of the champagne, which Francis treats as a hassle, our narrator imagines him returning to his study. On this day, the narrator knows from previous examinations of Francis’s papers, he was making notes for his poem “String,” partly inspired by the champagne-sending nephew’s explanations of loop quantum gravity. A quotation from Francis’s journal represents the final words of the chapter:

This last sentence is a reference to W.H. Auden’s 1962 poem “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”—and, yes, I had to resort to Google to decode that reference! But when I did and read the poem, I was rewarded with this verse:

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 planted by our coy and elusive narrator? More apparent is the way this final chapter 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 the narrator in whose company we find ourselves? What might we understand about Vivien and Francis, these contemporaries of ours, that the narrator 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. As we read on, we'll discover whether McEwan uses this familiar literary fiction framework to explore unexpected territories, or if the genre-bending elements promised in the marketing materials will emerge to challenge our expectations about what this novel—and perhaps literary fiction itself—can be.