What We Can Know

(by Ian McEwan)

For much of Part One of What We Can Know, I wondered if maybe I would rather be re-reading Possession by A.S. Byatt instead—my memories of that one are dim but I remember it having a similar set-up, in that both this book and that one are novels whose protagonists are academics who are researching (fictional) poets of the past. But while Possession is about present-day academics and Victorian poets, the academics of What We Can Know live in 2119 and specialize in literature written between 1990 and 2030. I sort of liked the way that McEwan gradually reveals certain aspects of the world in 2119 (among other things, what used to be the landmass containing England, Scotland, and Wales is now an archipelago), but I just did not particularly care about the narrator or his professional life or his personal life or his special research interest, “the ineptly named Second Immortal Dinner and its famous lost poem” of 2014.

But anyway: our narrator, Tom, has been searching for that lost poem, which a poet named Francis Blundy wrote as a birthday gift for his wife, Vivien. Francis read the poem aloud at Vivien’s birthday dinner, and some of the people who were there later made references to it in writing, but the poem itself was never published and the one copy of it that ever existed (Francis Blundy having destroyed his drafts) is not in the Blundy archives. We see Tom doing research in the archives, and we see other aspects of his life in as an academic in a woefully underfunded humanities department, and we see him reconnecting with his ex, Rose, and we see pieces of the coastal landscape in which they live/through which they travel. And we see Tom’s imaginings of that dinner party, the things he’s extrapolated from the primary sources he’s consulted, and we see some of those sources too—emails, text messages, notebooks. I feel like I appreciate all of this more now in retrospect than I did while I was reading it: while I was reading it, a lot of it felt like a slog. (Though there were bits I liked while reading it, like Tom’s observation that however vivid our lives are to us, they will one day be part of the hazy past, as all of us become “shades, ghostly traces” eventually, or this passage about loss that Tom finds in one of Francis Blundy’s notebooks: “Loss is the fabric of existence. All bad things are lost too. All torturers, all diseases. Lost civilisations, lost causes, lost symphonies, computer files, Edens, umbrellas, loves, landscapes, keys, wallets, pens, cats, innocence, sorrows, talent, parents, wits, reading glasses – a ceaseless parade of receding carnival floats.”)

Things really picked up for me though when the plot picks up and Tom’s search for the lost poem takes on a new urgency, and Part Two of the book, where we learn various unexpected things about Francis and Vivien and the rest of their circle, was much more engaging for me, though in a more plot-driven way than a style/character/mood-driven way.