What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Published 2025 · 320 pages · 92,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Climate Fiction, Mystery
How hard is What We Can Know to read?
What We Can Know scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- McEwan writes in precise, educated English—the vocabulary of literary criticism (corona, prosody, the archive), of climate science, and of a diminished future—without reaching for the obscure. Readers meet the occasional specialist term, but context carries them, placing this a notch above The Great Gatsby's accessible elegance.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- McEwan's hallmark is the lucid, well-balanced sentence, capable of long descriptive runs and controlled subordination that never lose the reader. The prose has the rhythmic poise of Gatsby rather than the nested difficulty of late Henry James.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Beneath concrete scenes—a dinner party, a scholar at his desk, a drowned coastline—the novel keeps turning over abstractions: what an archive can preserve, what the future can know of us, how memory and evidence diverge. The ideas stay grounded in character but press harder on the reader than straight realism like The Remains of the Day.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Two eras run at once—a reconstructed 2014 and a built-from-scratch 2119—layered with literary-scholarly detail and a slowly accreting mystery. The book rewards attention to who knows what and when, though McEwan's clean staging keeps it flowing.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The past reaches us secondhand, filtered through Thomas Metcalfe's biased reconstruction from decaying records, so the reader must weigh inference against fact—then revise it all when the second half corrects the first. The demand is closer to reading an unreliable frame than to Gatsby's single filtered narrator.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The drowned England figures entropy and loss; the vanished corona of sonnets stands for everything a culture fails to preserve; the rotting digital archive mocks our faith that data outlasts us. The symbols are legible and purposeful rather than densely woven, in McEwan's realist register.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- A sustained dramatic irony drives the book: the future scholar's reverent, romantic account of the Blundys is steadily undercut by the truth the reader comes to learn, so confident scholarship reads as poignant misreading. The gap between what Thomas believes and what happened is the novel's engine.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The second half delivers a definite revelation about Vivien and the poem, closing the plot, yet the title's question stays open—the corona remains partly lost, and the limits of knowledge are the point. Less withholding than 2666, but far from tidy closure.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- A two-part architecture spans a century: a first-person academic frame in 2119, stitched from letters, emails, and archival fragments, then a shift into the 2014 past itself, with the point of view and register changing between halves. The design is intricate but clearly signposted, nearer Midnight's Children than the fractured Pedro Paramo.
How What We Can Know is regarded
What We Can Know holds a literary regard score of 51 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.