Book Review: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

March 2026

A classic “would you rather” question is “would you rather be rich or famous?”

I hope I'm famous before I'm rich (WHAT?) It's easier to get rich if you're famous than it is to get famous if you're rich (HUH??) Look, if you're famous it's like hi, I'm famous, give me a lot of money. But if you're just rich, you're all WAA! WAA! Pay attention to be so I can be famous, too!

This comic is an embarrassingly large and load-bearing pillar of my worldview.

I think the answer to this question is that it’s a trick question, and not in the sense of “it doesn’t matter; you should try to cultivate a sense of satisfaction and gratefulness no matter what your life is like” but in the much more funny sense of “it doesn’t matter; both rich and famous people are actually dying to be influential.”

Ian McEwan is a very famous author who is probably also quite rich, and his latest novel Has Something To Say.

Future tense

The book is kind of this meme –

A graph of world GDP over the last two millennia showing a flat line that spikes exponentially near 2015, with a stick figure at the peak saying 'My life is pretty typical, I have a good grasp of what is normal vs weird, and people imagining very different futures with digital people and AI and space travel are indulging themselves in silly sci-fi speculation.'

But flipped –

The same GDP graph flipped horizontally, now running from 2000 to 2100 with a sharp decline, and a stick figure in the future saying 'OMG How could you not have known how lucky you were?'

The first part takes place in the 2100s after a mild apocalypse. Our main character is an academic obsessed with the early 2000s, and how well-off and careless people were back then. This entire setup seems like an excuse for the author to comment on Problems With How We Live. I even agree with the author on a lot of these problems, but the way they were handled in the book felt like reading a ~~Tumblr~~ ~~Twitter~~ Bluesky feed. Almost every liberal hobbyhorse got a mention.

(quotes omit words for readability)

Trees felled, pastures and their wildflowers vanishing, steam engines belching filth, open country enclosed for private ownership – an ancient way of life and its animals and birds discarded for profit. Those creatures and plants were our companions. Without them our loneliness deepened.

The Second Industrial Revolution was bad.

The nastiness of social media, then run for profit rather than as a public service.

AI had to be wrenched away from private companies.

The problem with tech companies is that they’re not nationalized.

Did the students want their NAI to be conscious and more intelligent than they were, so that their decisions in life would be sound and their dependency complete?

The problem with conscious superintelligent AI would be that students would depend on it too much.

The idiocy of those times, the warming they ignored and all that, their stupid wars, the animals they killed, how skin color meant so much.

That about sums up all of it.

Millions of white British travelled south in summer to spend hours each day beneath a ferocious sun. The purpose was to turn white skin brown, which was considered a healthy and attractive look.

Oh also, tanning is unhealthy.

All this pontificating got tiring really fast.

Past perfect

I did really want to like this book. “People living today are very lucky and very flawed” is basically one of my personal ten commandments. I just wish we could have gotten to the point without all the unnecessary moralizing. In fact, one simple fix for this book would be to flip the timeline –

The same GDP graph, but now the stick figure stands in the distant past around year 400, looking forward at the exponential spike and saying 'OMG How could you not know how lucky you are?'

Write it from the perspective of someone in the past who gets a magic mirror to observe modern-day people.
✅ The guy would still think we’re very lucky to have electricity and antibiotics and airplanes.
✅ The guy would still think we’re very flawed for being jerks to each other.
🛑 And the guy would absolutely not moralize about social media companies not being nationalized. It’s the perfect book.

This book works when it’s about people and it doesn’t work when it’s about society. The book knows this too! Here is a quote from near the beginning:

The novel was the froth of recent centuries. It had developed to meet the needs of intelligent, privileged women excluded from formal education and meaningful work. Indeed, ‘work’ was the word Jane Austen and others used to describe womanly hours of incessant and pointless embroidery as they chatted about their neighbours. And so, Mary insisted, the novel grew into the paradigm of higher gossip. Love, marriage, adultery, contested wills – the stuff of neighbourly fascination.

Mary is an asshole who is cheating on her husband while simultaneously castigating him for cheating on her, so we’re supposed to think this is wrong. This novel wants to address more than “the stuff of neighbourly fascination.”

But I think this impulse is misguided. Not only is it fine and good for novels to be about higher gossip, the only reason climate change and the rest of our problems matter is because they interrupt people spending time on the higher gossip. It is good that one of our primary artforms is dedicated to focusing on ordinary people, their trials and triumphs, their thoughts and temptations. Not everything needs to, or is well-suited to, changing the world. Render unto boring policy jobs the things which make a difference; and unto novels the stuff of neighbourly fascination. Stories don’t need to ~~Make A Difference~~.