What We Can Know

 

 

 

What We Can Know (2025)

By Ian McEwan

Alfred A. Knopf, 299 pages.

★★★★

 

I’ve heard people complain that the fiction market is saturated with lightweight junk. If you hunger for literary fiction, Ian McEwan might be your pheasant under glass, if you can stomach a bit of futurism. McEwan writes for a sophisticated audience that wants stylish and intelligent prose, not just a “good read.”

 

His latest, What We Can Know is set in both 2014 and 2119. The dual fulcrum in each time period is poet Francis Blundy and his wife Vivien. At a party not-so-modestly dubbed the “Second Immortal Party–the first in 1817 introduced John Keats to such luminaries as William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb–Blundy reads his latest work. “A Corona for Vivien” is devilishly difficult poem. Coronas usually hail an honored person via a string of joined 14-line sonnets, 3 quatrains with alternating stressed and unstressed rhyme patterns followed by a rhyming couplet. In a typical corona, 7 sonnets are joined with the last line of the first sonnet becoming the first line of the second, etc. Blundy allegedly strung together 15 sonnets, a staggering 210 lines. One can only imagine that Blundy really loved Vivien. But according to records, Blundy presented Vivien with the original and then it disappeared. It was said to be brilliant and mentioned Francis in the same breath as T.S. Eliot. His corona became the most famous poem that nobody ever saw! For a literary scholar, locating it would be like finding the Holy Grail.

 

In 2119, British scholar Thomas Metcalfe teaches American history 1990-2030. The latter date is significant. A combination of climate collapse, dictatorial leaders, and nuclear blasts have altered the planet dramatically. Metcalfe and his on/off lover Rose seek to solve the problem of Blundy’s missing corona. Thomas thinks important clues are in the Bodleian Library where he and Rose teach. That would the Bodleian at Oxford University Snowdonia; the old Oxford campus is under water and the United Kingdom is an archipelago of disconnected slices of land. Most of the world’s digital archives are controlled by Nigeria, as are communications systems. Forget fancy dinners; the drastically reduced populace gets most of its nutrients from protein bars. The humanities are in crisis, though Thomas archly observes, “The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter–it’s the nature of intellectual life …. Thinking is always in crisis.” Ouch!

 

McEwan has written a mash up of Waterworld, a murder mystery, a (metaphorical) ghost story, and tales whose message is what goes around comes around. McEwan’s title encapsulates this. Can we know if there was there a corona in the first place? Metcalfe is a romantic who never considers the possibility that Blundy should have been named Bluffer. He romanticizes his area of study and imagines the 21^st century as inherently more creative and free than the 22^nd. At one point he enumerates the things that once existed that are now gone, a list that runs the gamut from music festivals and gardening to stupid sports (football comes to his mind), and tasty food. He is shocked by students who think he’s an old fogey who excused 21^st century people for screwing up the planet. Thomas and Rose find clues alright, but what really happened? What was Vivien like? Did she return Blundy’s affection? Are they replicating the lives of their quarry?

 

As a historian, it struck me that McEwan was writing about the dilemma of my profession. Consider Pompeii, which experienced what its citizens would have viewed a global catastrophe. If it is the nature of the humanities to be in crisis, is it not the nature of historical clues to lie hidden? Pompeii was lost until an accidental discovery in 1599 and wasn’t excavated until 1748. We didn’t even know the city’s name until 1763, and to this day new finds tell us more. What is lost in a disaster? We know precious little about social relations. What partners were faithful and which were libidinous? Who was gay? Who hated their neighbors? But the reason we write history is that not everything is lost. McEwan cleverly gives us an alt.version of Francis and Vivien to ponder.

 

McEwan may be guilty of being needlessly oblique. He definitely privileges style over narrative, a practice that will infuriate those who dislike ambiguity. What can we know? Like history, we sometimes paint with broad strokes to hide details that we don’t know.

 

 

Rob Weir