What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is set in a dystopian near future. It is 2119, and the ravages of unchecked climate change and societal collapse, followed by a nuclear conflagration, have created a barely recognisable world. Low-lying regions have been submerged, leaving only scattered pockets of habitable land. In this altered world order, some vestiges of technology and modernity remain, notably the internet and AI, but much has been lost. North America has been effectively cut off, consumed by tribal wars. Conversely, Nigeria is a new economic and technological power. The UK has become an archipelago of scattered islands. Much has changed, but some things never do: even in this imagined twenty-second-century scenario, university lecturers in the arts still struggle to hold their students’ attention and justify the relevance of their subjects.
Such is the case of Tom Metcalfe, a frustrated scholar at the University of South Downs, whose research focuses on literature produced in the years just before the collapse – what later generations, with hindsight, call the “Derangement.” When not navigating university politics or his messy love life, he devotes himself to the life and work of Francis Blundy, a (fictional) contemporary and rival of Seamus Heaney. Metcalfe is particularly obsessed with A Corona for Vivien, an unpublished poem Blundy wrote and recited as a birthday gift for his wife Vivien during an intimate dinner with friends. The Corona has acquired legendary status: by all accounts of the few who witnessed it, the poem was Blundy’s masterpiece, a paean, elegy, and cry of protest against environmental degradation. Yet, although the poem’s fame has endured, the work itself has been lost. Metcalfe has made its recovery his life’s project. Years of painstaking research, combined with an unlikely tip from a young relative of a fellow scholar, lead him to an unexpected discovery that forms the basis of the novel’s second half.
What We Can Know is, in part, a novel with an environmentalist message. But to consider it only through that lens would be reductive. More fundamentally, it is a philosophical work. Its title sets out its central conceit: the tension between truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, and the ways in which narratives – and memory itself – are shaped, consciously and unconsciously, by both subject and object.
McEwan is never boring, and he always
manages to package his philosophical musings in a gripping story. In a knowing
postmodern flourish, he seems to consciously borrow elements from every genre
he can think of: dystopian, sci-fi, campus, romance, crime, thriller, adventure
fiction. At one point, there is even an unlikely treasure hunt, prompting
Metcalfe to compare his quest to Treasure Island. This is, in other
words, an assured work from a seasoned writer who can afford to engage in
playful meta-games with his readers.
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