Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know is a brilliant narrative that often seems to defy its own rules – a formal exercise that transcends considerations of form or conceit; a dystopian climate-fiction novel that is also a comedy of manners; a meditation on both the value and limits of art in a world gone mad; an exploration of what we can know of others, whether across the centuries or the domestic spaces of our own homes.
Its metatextual elements evoke Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. McEwan’s book, like that one, divides itself between a story and a manuscript within that story. But where Nabokov’s book contains a text of dizzying lyricism that would be narratively incomprehensible were it not for the commentary, all of McEwan’s book is pointedly written in prose. The difference between prose and poetry, in fact, represents one of the novel’s most significant thematic concerns, where the story concerns a scholar’s search for a famous lost poem. But McEwan also shows a great faculty for marrying the prosaic and the lyrical. One line gives information, the next evokes images with staggering emotional reach, phrases that would have been impossible in the previous descriptive mode. This is a novel that both resides at the nexus of prose and poetry and yet comments meaningfully on their clear distinction.
McEwan’s scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, draws focus in the novel’s first half. Metcalfe lives in an imagined 22nd century world that has become ravaged by climate change, or what people of that time refer to as “The Derangement,” our own age’s denial of the danger that climate change had always represented. By Metcalfe’s time, ecological disasters and nuclear wars have made the world a very different place. Bands of warlords have overrun North America, leaving the United States and Canada in ruins, and the coastlines of the United Kingdom, like most of the world, have drastically risen. The country exists now as an archipelago rather than an island, with diminished but stable infrastructure. While the Internet still exists, housed on servers in Nigeria, the world seems less technologically obsessed. People travel less and live more modestly. For instance, Metcalfe is employed by one of the few existing universities in England but lives in a series of rented rooms. Real estate has become complicated in the remaining land above the sea.
But in spite of the disasters and mass extinctions that have ensued since the Derangement, Metcalfe harbors deep affection for our own benighted era. The 21st century constitutes the subject of his study, and he often squabbles with his students and colleagues about the value of its culture, doggedly trying to reconcile the beauty of our literature with our wanton consumption and waste.
The retrospective nature of McEwan’s narrative achieves a curious and wonderful effect. We’re allowed to see the present through the lens of memory, to understand the here and now both from the perspective of an inevitably diminished future and through the scholar’s nostalgia. It’s a haunting but beautiful form of presentism that insists the current world not be taken for granted, as if one could be visited by a ghostly version of oneself who urges, “cherish what you have; it is fragile and precious.” But McEwan is just as interested in dismantling this nostalgia, and, as the title would suggest, his conceit promises a troubling epistemological thesis.
The 21st century appears in Metcalfe’s study as a time uniquely exhaustive in the historical record. Infinite emails, social media posts, and other such memoranda give him a very clear picture of what the people of the 21st century were like. Unlike the ancient and medieval periods, everyone in our time had computers in their pockets, where they often revealed their innermost thoughts and recorded even mundane movements in their world. Everything from medical records to pornography use has become public record to the historians of the 22nd century. And yet, for all this mass of information at his fingertips, certain elements about the past elude Metcalfe’s grasp.
The scholar’s project focuses on a famous poet named Francis Blundy. In particular, Metcalfe writes about a poem Blundy gave to his wife, Vivien, at her fifty-fourth birthday dinner party. Metcalfe describes this event as the “Second Immortal Dinner,” recalling the first event with that name from the Romantic era, when William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charles Lamb dined together. In this second version, Blundy’s guests include a famous novelist, another well-known poet and Blundy’s editor, a journalist, and Vivien, who was herself a writer and scholar. Blundy reads aloud “Corona for Vivien” after dinner, a series of fifteen interlocking sonnets, where the last line of each sonnet repeats in the first line of the next, until the fifteenth sonnet, or the “crown,” repeats the first lines of the preceding fourteen verses. As one might expect, this poem made an immediate impression on the party attendants. Though Metcalfe knows of the poem’s existence by way of the numerous first-hand accounts from the notable people at the dinner, the poem itself remained unpublished, its only existing manuscript written in Blundy’s own hand on a scroll of vellum, presented to Vivien as a gift.
Blundy’s celebrity was such that his unpublished poem was known even to the everyday reading public; in fact, it becomes the poet’s crowning achievement. In the ensuing years, its legend only grows, and Metcalfe searches in vain for a manuscript of it, poring through both digital and physical troves, experiencing a series of setbacks in his career and personal life on account of his insistence on keeping up the search. One day, he has a breakthrough. He finds what appears to be GPS coordinates in one of Vivien’s journals that indicate a spot on the grounds of Blundy’s house in the English countryside. He sets out to find the treasure with his estranged wife, Rose, a fellow scholar of the 21st century. They have to hire an expensive ferry to cart them across the treacherous waters of the English coastline to get to Blundy’s old property, now an abandoned military outpost. After many trials, they find a hermetically sealed wooden box.
But far from this discovery being the crowning moment in a career devoted to scholarly study, what they discover within the box overturns every one of Metcalfe’s scholarly theories, sometimes in a rather brutal fashion. The text within the box constitutes the second section of McEwan’s novel, a narrative provided by Vivien about her relationship with Blundy and several others at the Second Immortal Dinner. Here, Vivien appears not as a doting wife devoted to her husband’s art, as Metcalfe had styled her in the first section of the novel, but a character entirely her own. The surprises one meets from Vivien’s narrative are by turns shocking and hilarious and very much a product of our own era rather than Metcalfe’s retrospective vision. The clear disparity between Metcalfe’s construction of our world and the documentary evidence within Vivien’s story both dismantles the scholar’s rose-tinted nostalgia and articulates its utility. The truth, in some cases, is decidedly un-romantic, too cruel to be the subject of a soap opera, much less a great poem.
If McEwan’s novel has a flaw it resides in the glee with which he dismantles the pretensions and myths of our age. The inherent skepticism of McEwan’s exercise is all the time questioned by the clear function of the apologetic for the 21st century we find in the first section of the novel. McEwan’s insistence that we know really very little about one another, and what we do know can be shocking and grotesque, is at cross purposes with the beauty of his retrospective vision of our world, as couched in Metcalfe’s idealism. The novel is somewhat ambivalent in that sense, which somewhat blunts its overall effect. However, the sheer scope of McEwan’s exercise is considerable and, like the world it describes, a beautiful mess.
