What We Can Know
Satisfying ... In some ways this is a McEwan greatest hits album: a carefully plotted literary novel with insightful characterisation and the propulsive drive of a thriller. But on the big questions it’s also less sure of itself, more open to doubt, less certain of the march of progress than some of his earlier work. What We Can Know is aware of its limitations and comfortable in its skin, making it McEwan’s most entertaining and enjoyable novel for years.
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Bonkers ... It’s ultimately overstuffed.
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The novel mixes doomy futurism with a spiky campus satire about the fate of literature in an uncaring world, before finally taking shape as a gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt. The movement between the domestic and the geopolitical hasn’t always been smoothly managed in McEwan’s work, but it’s carried off here with winning audacity.
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