A New Novel by a Master of the Craft
Ian McEwan is beyond brilliant, and, in my view, he is currently writing at the height of his powers .In What We Can Know, his subject matter ranges widely – environmental degradation, personal deceit and betrayal, and just general unease and bewilderment at the state of the world – as seen from a hundred years in the future.
And the writing – ah, such writing!
‘As was noted long ago, we are all innocent children in the tall forest of our clever inventions.
What brings our students round to the beginning of a mature understanding of history and an appreciation of what the past has imagined is – simply – detail. The everyday life of, say, a mid-twenty-first-century junior doctor as told by her digital traffic, recording her week: dropping her young children at nursery, dealing with intractable illnesses, difficult patients, useless or gifted colleagues, low pay, constant pressure, keeping watch on troubling political developments, meeting friends, loving or ceasing to love her husband, paying bills, streaming new music, planning a holiday, worrying about a pain, ordering the shopping – and so on, a picture made up of countless points of different colours, like a landscape by Seurat, whose work we display and explain, can arouse even the dullest of our students into an acceptance of shared humanity across an immensity of time.’
Much have I traveled in the realm of Ian McEwan’s novels and loved every one of them. (Yes, this is an unapologetic rave.) I began with The Comfort of Strangers, then went on to read Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act, Nutshell, Machines Like Me, Lessons, and now finally, What We Can Know, his latest masterwork.
In 2009, I wrote a post entitled Ian McEwan, Connoisseur of Dread. I was prompted to do so after reading “The Background Hum,” a New Yorker profile of McEwan written by Daniel Zalewski. In that post. I quote this passage from a review of Atonement in The Toronto Globe:
“There are characters you follow with breathless anxiety; a plot worthy of a top-drawer suspense novelist, complete with jolting reversals; language that unspools seemingly effortlessly, yet leaves a minefield of still-to-be-detonated nouns and verbs…. rife with…unforgettable tableaux….”
Stay tuned for another short write-up of yet another terrific new novel. I feel blessed….
Books to the Ceiling