The Knowing by Madeleine Ryan review – intriguing ‘phone-free' premise falters in execution

The Guardian

20-02-2025

Smartphones aren't nearly as intrusive in today's novels as they are in our daily realities. I suspect we don't want our fictional counterparts to stare at their phones as much as we do.
Mobile technology can disrupt plot, and date fiction fast, and so some novelists opt to set their stories in times or places beyond its reach. Madeleine Ryan's solution in The Knowing is simpler. Her protagonist, Camille, lives in present-day country Victoria, commuting to a high-end floristry in Melbourne. But on the particular Valentine's Day the novel spans, Camille has left her phone at home.
It's a plausible scenario and compelling premise, propelling Camille 'deeper into herself; deeper into all the places she'd rather not go' over the course of an otherwise ordinary day. Ryan is good on the startling discomfort of being phoneless; the absurdity of our addiction ('the current temperature isn't outside, it's on her phone'); and the way technology can suppress, soothe and provoke feeling. Camille reflects at one point on how she typically goes to her phone 'looking for relief and comes away from it feeling remorse'.
It's also a clever device, enabling Ryan to interrogate grander questions around time and around knowledge. Phones are emblematic of a hustling mindset where optimisation, productivity and efficiency are the order of the day. Camille suspects they are 'altering her DNA'. She fantasises about having a different relationship to time, longing for the sense of 'immersion' of her ancestors, and envying the 'stillness' and 'steadfastness' of a stranger she meets in a sauna.
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As its title suggests, this is also a book concerned with epistemic questions. As in her debut novel A Room Called Earth, Ryan is primarily interested in embodied forms of knowledge, of the sort gained through introspection, intuition and observation. In The Knowing, Camille's lack of a phone is an invitation for her to experience the world in this more direct manner. The world is usually 'peripheral', but today it is 'a wonder waiting to be discovered'. At moments, she can feel it 'humming'. She recalls her very first encounter with her partner, Manny: they could sense the 'quite possibly ancient knowledge' that lay dormant between them; a knowledge 'intimidating' and 'intoxicating'.
Knowledge, for Ryan, is also gendered. Camille ponders how the world is run by 'penises' and the female body is expected to adapt itself around 'whenever the workday begins and whenever a penis might want to tip its tip into it'. In Ryan's framing, women like Camille (who bleed and are emotional) are incompatible with this culture. Camille recalls an older woman she met at a music festival describing period pain as the 'collective feminine crying out in anguish … a call to slow down, and to become more receptive'. Ryan's casual references to the 'divine feminine' suggest similarly essentialist beliefs.
Much of the novel's latter half comprises interactions between Camille and Holly, her toxic and ruthless boss. The contrast between Holly (exploitative, unfeeling) and Camille (victim, all-feeling) is a little black and white. Likewise, their respective strains of feminism (girlboss v mystical) edge into caricature. As a result, their exchanges become quite predictable, as does the narrative development.
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The Knowing is ostensibly interested in what the likes of Camille might call 'presence'. So it's curious that its various moments of transcendence or epiphany – taking in a sunset, observing a woman in a burqa, admiring a floral arrangement – are situated in the past. The most physical and vivid scene (Manny helping remove Camille's menstrual cup) is also a memory. Granted, present attention can conjure and renew the past. But it means that as readers, we're at a remove, and the unfolding present-day narrative feels relatively lacklustre.
Motifs from Ryan's first novel – flower essences, star signs, full moons, anti-medical rhetoric – re-appear. There is recurrent mention of the 'mystical', the 'sacred' and the 'ancient'. There is nothing wrong with any of this per se and The Knowing contains occasional moments of gentle lyricism. But it also contains sentences like this: 'Cultivating an enlivened mind-body connection is sacred'. I wanted Ryan to make a more concerted effort to find her own words for the indescribable and the mysterious, rather than resort to pre-packaged language that has a patina of spirituality, but contains no real trace of the author.
In short, The Knowing has an intriguing premise, but falls short in its execution. Camille's fantasy of herself as 'engrossed' or 'consumed' by the world appears to remain a fantasy. I wanted richer observation of her present surroundings. I wanted to feel more precisely and viscerally how her attention shifted. And I wanted to venture far further into those 'places she'd rather not go'.
The Knowing by Madeleine Ryan is out through Scribe ($29.99)