The confessional structure of What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Let’s start this examination of the structure of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know by returning to the question of genre, which I discussed in my post about the opening of the novel. As I noted there, the marketing materials for the book describe it as “genre-bending” and place it in the categories of speculative fiction and sci-fi as well as literary fiction. I agree with the literary fiction categorization, and I’d also label it as a novel of ideas. However, it fits under the umbrella of speculative fiction only because McEwan is focused on whether we can accurately understand anything about the past and future: the past and future of humanity in general, and our own past and future—our individual choices, motives, psychology, and emotions. By adopting a long-range time scale that stretches from our recent past (the mid-1990s) to the near future (the 2120s, a hundred years from now), McEwan gives himself a bigger canvas for exploring the concepts of past and future, and how stories and knowledge move between them.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author makes for a useful contrast (I think a reading group choosing these two novels back to back would have some fascinating discussions!). Okorafor takes us to a far future that looks quite different from the one McEwan shows us—although, interestingly, Nigeria is the dominant world power in both books. Her narrator for that strand of the book is a future intelligence that does not yet exist in our time, and she spends considerable time on world-building to show us a new world that contains only traces of the one we are familiar with. McEwan, on the other hand, creates a fairly sleepy present in 2120 that is defined largely by what is absent (much of England’s land mass, global trade and transport networks, and the monarchy, just to name a few elements) rather than what is new. That backward-looking focus is only enhanced by his choice of narrator, a history professor who has embarked on a kind of Quixotic quest to find a lost poem written in 2014 by the fictional poet Francis Blundy. The poem, however, as even Thomas is aware, is just a focal point for Thomas’s true desire, which is to live in this lost past.

As you might expect, the novel starts quietly from a plot standpoint. Thomas spends the first thirteen chapters dwelling in the past as he reconstructs the events of October 2014, when Blundy read the poem aloud at a birthday dinner for his wife, Vivien, then presented her with the single remaining copy, which he had written out on vellum. Thomas travels to the Bodleian Library (now located in Snowdonia, in Wales) and back to his university in the South Downs, but nothing significant happens in his life until chapter 14, almost a third of the way into the novel, when he rekindles a relationship with his colleague and friend, Rose, but then immediately refocuses his attention on the past.

This illustration will show you the rough shape of the novel, including that first spike of tension at chapter 14. I assign every chapter a rough and subjective intensity score, tracking both external tension (what’s happening in the plot) and internal tension (the point-of-view character’s emotions).

McEwan uses the slow start to inculcate readers into a novel of ideas. Almost every chapter returns obsessively to the question of the title: What can we know? As mentioned above, McEwan deliberately avoids making his future world feel dramatically different. Many elements of 2120, it turns out, are depressingly familiar: the lack of funding for humanities, the feeling of stasis resulting from an interminable project, the messiness and lack of clarity in our emotional relationships, our stuttering self-knowledge and inability to understand what we want and need emotionally and psychologically. In Thomas, McEwan forces us into the company of a man who is not particularly likable or self-aware. While the opening chapters of many novels are intent on hooking readers, McEwan seems only interested in readers willing to follow him into the chilly depths without bait. Are we truly invested in the primary story question of whether or not Thomas will find the lost poem, written in a long and complex structure of interlocking sonnets? Likely not.

Slowly, though, we begin to see that even Thomas has lost interest in the poem itself, which becomes only an excuse to focus his attention (obsession? love?) on Vivien Blundy. In chapter 1, Thomas notes that her journals are “bafflingly mundane,” but he, unlike the other “Francis Blundy hounds” has spotted “sporadic intrusions, bleak, faint cries of honest feeling.” He quotes one— “I’ve never hated him. Never! But.”—and goes on to comment, with a certain longing: “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.” Thomas seems to believe that, through close and dedicated attention, he has managed to create that peephole and can access Vivien’s thoughts and feelings. Later, in chapter 3, he comments of Francis and Vivien: “Scholars see, hear and know more of them, of their private thoughts, than we do of our closest friends.”

The plot seems to prove the truth of his point. In chapter 18, Thomas is blindsided when he returns from yet another trip to the Bodleian to discover Rose, now his wife, is having an affair with a graduate student who staged a rebellion against studying history at all, effectively ending the joint seminar on the history of AI that Rose and Thomas had been teaching. In the ensuing argument, Rose accuses Thomas of being “emotionally dead, detached, closed off to her, careless of her needs.” She argues that “the only person [he] cared for was Vivien Blundy.”

If Vivien contributes to the end of his marriage, however, she also becomes instrumental in their reconciliation. A Bodleian librarian, Drummond, whom Thomas has regarded as both a nuisance and a potential scholarly rival, decodes an obscure mention in Vivien’s last journal and realizes they are a set of coordinates. Both men believe the coordinates, which are on the property of the former Blundy residence, might lead to the lost poem. Only Rose has the money to fund the expedition to what is now a remote island, and she is eager for Thomas to follow the lead. In chapter 21, the last in Thomas’s point of view, they successfully make their way to the small, uninhabited island in the Cotswolds and dig up a large metal container, which does turn out to contain a document preserved by Vivien, but it is not the poem. Thomas can tell immediately that it is prose rather than poetry. Rose leafs through the document for a time, then tries to comfort (distract?) Thomas from his disappointment by revealing she is pregnant. “It’s going to be all right,” she tells him, “and we are too.”

Readers turn the page to discover a Part Two heading and, on the next page, these words: “I was late for my train.” We can guess right away that this “I” is Vivien, and that we are now reading the document Thomas and Rose unearthed, which was buried along with the replica Guarneri violin that Vivien’s first husband, Percy, built before his descent into early Alzheimers. But it takes us quite a long time to understand the purpose of this document, when and why it was written, or even the full implications of the anecdote with which it begins.

Returning to Oxford after visiting a sick friend, Vivien discovers a young boy alone on a train platform and manages to prevent a would-be kidnapper from taking him. Buried in the tale is a puzzling reference that doesn’t fit anywhere in the narrative of Vivien’s life that Thomas has constructed: “I went toward the boy cautiously, not wanting to frighten him. I knew what I was walking towards, the ghost I lived with, and I even wondered if I should turn round and leave. I felt the day's heat coming off the stone slabs beneath my feet. Stupidly, I felt relief that the child was not a girl.” We later learn that Vivien had an unplanned pregnancy in her twenties, giving birth to a baby girl, Diana, who died in infancy—a death Vivien blamed on herself because it occurred during a night she was drunk and forgot to check on her.

But even before this revelation, we get the shock of realizing that Vivien is recounting a period early in her marriage to Percy, and that she is also having an affair with Harry Kitchener—a character we are familiar with because he was present at the famous birthday dinner Thomas has chronicled so obsessively. Harry was Francis Blundy’s brother-in-law as well as his editor, and his affair with Vivien has entirely escaped Thomas’s knowledge. What else, we wonder, is Thomas wrong about if he had no suspicion of this relationship?

It turns out, Thomas has been wrong about almost everything, particularly when it comes to Vivien. He imagined her, the day before the dinner, driving to town to buy ingredients for a home-cooked meal. In fact, the meal was catered and Vivien had gone to meet Harry for a tryst. Thomas imagines Vivien visiting the kitchen before the dinner itself to check on the meal. In reality, she visits the kitchen after the meal, not to check on the food but in order to quickly reread the birthday poem Francis has just recited to the guests. Only upon this reading does Vivien realize that the sonnet sequence depicts Francis’s murder of Percy, who was suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s.

Finally, at the very end of Vivien’s narrative, we learn what has happened to the poem: Vivien burned the sole copy on the night of her birthday, believing the poem to be both a miracle and a lie. “Wrenched by time from its context, the poem would attain perfection,” Vivien is convinced, so to burn it, she thinks, is a way to avenge Percy’s murder.

McEwan leaves us to speculate on Thomas’s feelings at discovering that the Vivien he’d conjured and perhaps fallen in love with is not the true Vivien. After Vivien’s narrative is finished, we get only this dry note:

And yet there is a lot to unpack here. To start, the title Thomas gives the narrative positions it within a rich literary history of confessions, notably those by Saint Augustine and Rousseau. By their nature, confessions are expected to be truthful, especially about episodes that might be shameful or unflattering. But they are also cleansing and redemptive. The bravery of the confessor, and our nuanced understanding of their motives, is expected to redeem them.

Vivien seems to follow the confessional protocol. Over the course of several scenes, chronicling events from the late 1990s through the night of the birthday dinner in 2014, Vivien is unsparing in her own self-assessment. She shows us her restless passion, her selfishness and disregard for others, her desire for revenge—against Harry, Percy, and finally Francis. She recognizes her complicity in Percy’s death, which she calls “my Faustian bargain . . . marrying Percy’s murderer in exchange for an interesting and comfortable life.” The Vivien of these pages is—to me and many other readers, I suspect—more attractive than Thomas’s version, which showed a woman who slowly allowed her life to be subsumed by another’s genius. This Vivien is fierce, sharp, funny, and clear-eyed. McEwan gives her shades of an Austen protagonist; her deeper affection for Francis after touring the site of what will become his beautifully restored stone barn recalls Elizabeth Bennet’s change of heart after touring Pemberley.

And yet, looked at another way, these confessions are another indictment of Vivien. She intends her narrative to be like an ouroboros, hungrily devouring the historical tail of every future recounting of her life and that infamous birthday dinner, Thomas’s included. Or we can see this document as a palimpsest, Vivien metaphorically scraping away the top layer of the vellum containing the poem and replacing it with her own narrative.

Which interpretation does Rose take in her introduction to the Confessions? Which reading does Thomas emphasize (or even construct?) in his edits and notes? McEwan declines to tell us, so we cannot know; we can only wonder.

There is also the potent metaphor of Percy’s violin, buried with the manuscript. Vivien tells us that it was unfinished, without a bridge or strings, so it would never have been played. And while it looked “beautiful, ancient,” it was in fact a copy of an original that was never held or played by its creator—reconstructed from diagrams in a book Vivien bought as a present for Percy while feeling guilty about her affair with Harry. In one moment she recounts in her narrative, the violin provoked wild rage in Vivien: “It was [Percy’s] brain, not mine, that was ruining us. Our lives were wasted. His violin stood for the life we once had.” She almost smashes it until she catches sight of another artifact, an apron and goggles Percy had kept for their nephew to help him in his shop, and remembers her husband’s warmth and kindness before his illness.

After recounting this incident, Vivien includes an extended reflection on her history of journaling, noting that she often had to force herself to continue: “like Francis, I believed that most of life is oblivion. To rescue fragments of the past would be to claim a bigger existence.” She aspires to the honesty and “high standards” of diarists like Samuel Pepys, but admits that she failed. “Subtly, my journals were becoming the report of a better self. I would have denied it, but over time the entries ceased to be private. I had a reader in mind.” She tells her sister a version of her encounter with the violin, one that elicits sympathy, then records that version in her journal: “I was teaching myself to lie by omission. Most useful, for behind and ahead of me were acts that were too shocking to own.” Has she now owned them by the end of this narrative? By shocking us, has the truth indeed set her free?

I think McEwan’s title once again warns us against an easy answer to those questions. We cannot know, and we must find a way to live with the ambiguity. It is a consolation, perhaps, that the ouroboros is never finished, can never completely consume itself. It is the eternal return of the same.