A century from now an archivist, Tom Metcalfe, will search for physical evidence of a poem written in 2014. The poet, Francis Blundy, had written a 15-sonnet corona for his wife, Vivien, to celebrate her birthday. After reading it to assembled dinner guests, Blundy handed the sole copy to Vivien. It was never seen again. Its disappearance has given the corona mythical status. According to legend, and several online conspiracies, it speaks of enduring love and is a beacon for preserving the natural world. Metcalfe’s research suggests the latter was anathema to Blundy.
The narrative in What We Can Know is Janus-like: both looking forward and, from there, looking back to now. The 22nd century is defined by a ravaged climate. The UK was flooded and is now dotted islands in an archipelago. The future is tech-heavy but lacking in basics. Communities are isolated and travel is difficult and risky. Data from the present day should be an archivist’s dream but it’s polluted with quotidian minutiae: it has extraordinary breadth and precious little depth. (How vacuous we seem.) Writing from the future gives the appearance of critical distance and allows McEwan to view the stupidity inherent in the 2020s with impunity.
In Part I, Tom teams with his colleague and wife, Rose, to dissect the Blundys’ lives and hopefully trace the poem’s hiding place. Part II is Vivien’s narrative, where Tom’s research is upended. Important, intensely private parts of her life weren’t documented, so secret relationships, a tragic history, and love and loss are revealed. This second narrative is instructive. As much as we can’t possibly know the future, we also cannot fully know the past.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ian McEwan’s works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998.
His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film.
In 2006, Ian McEwan won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader’s Digest Author of the Year.
Solar won The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2010 and Sweet Tooth won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year award in 2012. Ian McEwan was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2014 he was awarded the Bodleian Medal.
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