In Ian McEwan’s ‘What We Can Know,’ the past is an irresistible riddle

The Booker Prize winner’s new novel is set in an apocalyptic future as a professor becomes obsessed with finding a lost series of poems.

By Ron Charles

For years, Ian McEwan was nominated for the Booker Prize so often that the judges kept him on speed dial.

But then there came a moment — say around 2016 — when he published “Nutshell,” about a ruminative, vengeful fetus, and it felt like we might have lost McEwan to the kinds of weird little novels that writers produce after they win the Nobel Prize. The sex robot in “Machines Like Me” and the large insect serving as prime minister in “The Cockroach” suggested he’d caught late-Coetzee.

Fortunately, “Lessons,” a grand, retrospective novel in 2022, brought England’s finest stylist back to serious fiction. And now, with his cerebral new book, “What We Can Know,” that spasm of fablettes appears permanently behind him — at least until the Swedes come calling. Read the full review at the Washington Post.