What We Can Know is so rewarding a dystopian novel that it is hard to review. In 2119 and beyond, the earth is essentially made up of many islands. Physical infrastructure and documents and artifacts have been lost to the tsunamis that tore through the world. Most of what is left from a historical perspective is digital and even the infrastructure for access to digital information is shaky. Tom, a literary historian specializing in literature from 1990 to 2030 wants to dig deeper into what happened to a poem known for it’s having been epic, based on it’s single reading at a dinner party in 2014, and then lost forever. Francis Blundy, renowned poet, wrote a “corona” as a tribute to his wife Vivian to great praise from their dinner guests made up of family and close friends. A corona is a sonnet made up of sonnets, where the final line of the most recent sonnet starts the next sonnet. Blundy worked on it for months. But Blundy is narcissistic and not terribly deep, despite his talent for writing poetry. Something about his tribute obviously left Vivian with a more negative than positive reaction. Tom’s research includes the day to day emails and Vivian’s journals. They point to her growing discontent with her life and her marriage just as Francis is trying to get her attention with the corona.
What we Can Know also takes place in 2014, Francis and Vivian’s time. McEwan artfully establishes the messy relations between the Blundys and between each of them and others. How did they come to live in this idyllic place in this restored home and how did Vivian, a writer, become a traditional housewife taking care of Francis? She is admittedly discontented and smart enough to see how she cheated herself, but she admittedly made this choice.
Meanwhile, back in the future, Tom and his colleague who becomes his romantic partner, Rose, are challenged by students and others about their love for old literature. The only thing that is relevant is the present. Tom’s and Rose’s own conflict leads to an ultimate decision that results in a literary and real journey through the new world to try to discern more about the old world. Travel is dicey and the likelihood of getting what you are seeking is very slim. And it is fair to say that the novel is not predictable and the resolution is both complicated and satisfying.
An aspect of McEwan’s description of scholarship in Tom’s and Rose’s time sticks with me. Any writer, before ever publishing an article on a scholarly topic, must first write about the material that is genuinely available given the loss of so much. In fairness, despite libraries and archives and historian’s interpretations, we are already limited in what we can know. But when the things that we think have informed us are gone, we become apologists, as if what we knew before was ever reliable and now reliability is gone. The beauty of writing this in the before and after time periods is that, in my mind, what anyone can “know” is always suspect. So we must interpret what is there, sure, and in doing so, we reference things and we have bibliographies and we have photographs or movies, but knowledge is and always has been based on our interpretation of these things. What McEwan does is make less than 100 years ago ancient history. My parents were both alive in 1925 as well as their parents and several grandparents. There is a huge amount of physical evidence of things that happened between 1925 and 2025. We think we know that period of history and have it down cold. But is it really more like the ancient artifacts and writings we find, less “knowable” and more interpreted by us? In 2119, much of the evidence is gone, yet we know it existed. What We Can Know if arguably no different from what we knew while it existed.
This is my favorite McEwan novel and given that he is deservingly renowned and that I greatly appreciate him, that says a lot. The writing is rich, the characters flawed but I mostly cared about them and what happened to them along the way. McEwan gets into the heads of Tom and Vivian, allowing us to know a lot about what drives them and so giving us more than we often can know about another person. The book is entertaining, such that I took a really long time to read it, savoring the sentences and where it was going and wanting to know but not sure I would ever know what the heck happened to Francis’s corona. It’s almost funny how important that becomes to the reader. Like a well plotted mystery but without as many clues as we’d like. Over some complicated sonnet?! There is humor. There is pathos. There is anger at our era for failing to address climate change. There is redemption and a new way of being that is doable, if not what it should be. The food sounds awful. Someday, after I’ve gotten through more of my to be read pile, I will return to What We Can Know. I think it richly deserves more than one reading. I loved it the first time through but I think there is more to receive from this inspired McEwan story.
They Called me Bookworm 