The confessional structure of What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

This post discusses the entire plot of What We Can Know, including the ending.

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 on 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 science fiction 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 science 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 offers a useful contrast. She takes us to a far future, spending considerable time on worldbuilding to show a new world that retains only traces of our own. McEwan, on the other hand, creates a fairly sleepy present in the twenty-second century that is defined largely by what is absent (the monarchy, much of England’s land mass, and global trade and transport networks, 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 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 fourteen, 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.

The figure below shows you the rough shape of part one. Notice that external intensity is very low through the first third of the book, and even internal intensity is only moderate. (See my post on the structure of S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes for more about the technique of intensity scoring.)

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. Thomas contends with problems that could be our own: the lack of funding for humanities, the feeling of stasis resulting from an interminable project, the messiness of emotional relationships, and an inability to understand what he wants and needs, 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.

As we saw in my post on the opening of Death of the Author, a low-stakes, inward-focused start can be the right choice for any book that slants toward literary fiction. You are communicating to readers that they are going to be asked to slow down rather than race ahead, to think rather than react.

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 one, 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 seems to believe that, through close and dedicated attention, he has managed to create the peephole we saw him long for in the opening of the novel and can access Vivien’s thoughts and feelings. In chapter three, he claims, 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 eighteen, 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. 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. Thomas gets a tip that the poem might be buried on the property of the former Blundy residence. Rose funds and joins the expedition to what is now a remote, uninhabited island, and they find a document that, crushingly, turns out not to be the poem. Rose tries to comfort (or distract?) Thomas from his disappointment by revealing she is pregnant. “It’s going to be all right,” she tells him, “and we are too.”

We’ve spent more than half of the novel following along with Thomas as he painstakingly constructs a convincingly realistic portrait of Vivien. Thomas’s quest for the poem is also a quest to prove his version of events, and the quest finally raises the stakes and intensity of the novel to a peak.

In other words, by the time Thomas is holding that document in his hands, the one he hoped would be the lost poem, we are nearly as invested as he is in his portrait of Vivien. That investment is about to be completely undercut by part two. It is the payoff of what we saw McEwan set up in my scene study: Thomas grounding his access in sources until his version of her felt authentic. But, as I noted there, McEwan was already hinting that a narrator this charmed by his own reconstruction might be missing the truth—and part two is about to prove it. This is a quieter, more literary version of the reversal technique Gillian Flynn used so famously in Gone Girl.

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. McEwan could have simply shifted narrators on the other side of the part break or perhaps woven in chapters from Vivien’s POV all along. But grounding the shift in a physical document, carefully preserved for a century, seems to promise that we are going to now get the full truth Thomas couldn’t access, including the answer to what happened to the poem. It’s the frame narrative again, the nested-account device from my scene study—here handing the story from Thomas to Vivien herself.

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. The puzzles begin with the first sentence. Vivien opens her account with a story about preventing a young boy from being kidnapped on a train platform. The anecdote has the effect of keeping the overall intensity of the novel at a high level on the other side of the part break, but as you can see from the figure above, the intensity quickly drops away.

This story of the kidnapping ends here at the train station, but it connects to a much earlier event in Vivien’s life, one that isn’t included in Thomas’s portrait of her: “I went toward the boy cautiously, not wanting to frighten him. I knew what I was walking towards, the ghost I lived with . . . . 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 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.

Thomas has told us nothing of this “ghost” Vivien carries with her. Nor, we discover next, did he know that she had a long-term 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. Thomas 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. What else, we wonder, is Thomas wrong about if he had no suspicion of this relationship and no knowledge of Vivien’s lost baby?

It turns out, Thomas has been wrong about almost everything. The one thing he had right was that there was an undercurrent of tension in the relationship between Vivien and Francis. Vivien’s narrative reveals the source: Her first husband, Percy, suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s. She began an affair with Francis to get revenge for Harry dumping her when her caretaking responsibilities became too onerous, but the two fell in love. Francis, believing there was no other way for them to be together, killed Percy and made it look like an accident. The sonnet sequence Francis wrote for her birthday depicts the murder, in an oblique way, and Vivien burned the sole copy on the night of the gift, 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.

If there’s a consolation here for Thomas the historian, it may be this: The document seems, at least, to give him the truth—even if it isn’t the poem he’d wanted or the Vivien he’d conjured.

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

After the emotional peak of the confession, the narrative intensity plunges to the flatness of a bibliographic 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, Thomas’s included, of her life and that infamous birthday dinner. Or we might see the confession 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.

Notice the dramatic turns McEwan takes in What We Can Know: A slowly constructed biography of a woman is undercut by the sudden appearance of a primary account, only for the writer of the account to admit she does not know if she has—or even can—write the truth. The form and telling of the story carry more drama than the events of the story themselves. This is a hallmark of literary fiction, but it’s a technique any writer can use to add a second layer of drama and surprise to their work.

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