What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
Vintage Publishing
Of all the world’s great living novelists, Ian McEwan probably has the greatest range and breadth of subject matter. There is no McEwan “genre”. Just when literary buffs think they have him pinned down and categorised, he breaks out into entirely unexpected directions.
From the epic tragedy of Atonement to the disturbing one-night Saturday to the inventive modern-Hamlet-in-the-womb Nutshell, with many byways in between, Thomas Metcalfe — whose name we find out only on page 100 — is a scholar of English literature whose historical area of speciality is the period between 1990 and 2030, a time known in this fictional future as “The Derangement”.
A century from now, Tom’s native country (known in our present as Great Britain) is a “sleepy overlooked archipelago-republic”. Tom lives on a comparatively large island 38 miles long. Libraries and universities are situated in hard-to-reach mountainous parts. Getting anywhere in an age deprived of oil and steel involves arduous effort, often on a bicycle with a wooden frame. On a playful note, profiteers with bureaucratic connections are about to succeed in legalising cigarettes.
As for the rest of the world, Nigeria is the superpower du jour; the global currency is the naira and “everything that ever flowed through the internet is now held centrally in New Lagos”. North America is only for the brave. Those who land on that continent after a perilous Atlantic crossing “need to pay for the protection of a local warlord”.
While on an uncomfortable sea voyage from one small remaining piece of formerly British land to another, Tom is told by a fellow traveller that “things were worse [in America] than people imagined. The Nigerian empire had its own reasons to keep on cutting the Atlantic seabed cables … large armies were fighting each other … each faction claimed to be the legitimate inheritor of the spirit of the once great nation … all fighters claimed to be true patriots.”
In keeping with McEwan’s genre-defying mastery, this novel might be set in an imagined future but it cannot be described as sci-fi. In Russian-doll manner it unravels time and reveals characters through the sometimes warped perceptions of other characters and yet it is not what any critic might call postmodern. It is defiantly realist, containing elements of mystery, history, philosophy, romance and Treasure Island-style adventure. Beneath it all, however, runs a sense of loss. Tom writes: “A million historical movies, novels and serious histories expressed our yearning to keep the past with us. Kind or cruel, it haunted us, and its ghosts, unlike most, were real.”
Though the world has changed markedly in physical geography and international culture — almost everyone is “the same pale brown colour” — some things remain constant and McEwan is at pains to keep the novel’s internal logic sound. Tom: “What’s remarkable in our time is how minimally English has changed, despite the upheavals of wars, pandemics, nuclear exchanges, the catastrophic Inundation [floods resulting from AI-misfired nuclear weapons] and the Derangement [the unchecked effects of climate change] driving scores of millions northwards out of Africa into Europe. There is, as Adam Smith might have said, a great deal of ruin in a planet.”
The story, which opens in 2119, centres on Tom’s search for “A Corona for Vivien” — a series of sonnets culminating in a final sonnet comprised of the first lines of those preceding it. This poem, written as a tribute to his wife by the fictional celebrated 21st-century poet Francis Blundy, was never saved in electronic format and only one hard copy, written in ink on vellum by the pretentious poet, was known to have existed. Blundy read it out loud at a dinner party in October 2014, handed it to Vivien, and it was never seen again.
Tom’s obsession with Vivien begins to overshadow his quest for Blundy’s missing masterpiece. He writes: “My subject, my fixation, has settled on me a peculiar form of discontent … a malady of yearning.”
McEwan’s title could equally have been What We Cannot Know. The lost poem exists only in the flawed memories of those who heard it read on that night in 2014. Its absence is the driving force of the plot. Tom’s paramour Rose reminds him that his job is to describe the dreams and anxieties of the age for which the elusive Corona is both repository and mirror, not to describe the poem itself.
The words of long-dead characters, dredged from shadowy cloud archives, give a shifting and unreliable shape to something that cannot be known. In a sense the Corona is the hole in the tale around which everything else revolves, like the outcast Caddy described only by others in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or the unknowable event that may or may not have occurred in the Marabar Caves in EM Forster’s A Passage to India.
Like the mythical Holy Grail, the Corona “was more beautiful for not being known”. Tom reflects: “Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry.”
McEwan does with the character of Tom exactly what Tom attempts to do with the ghost of his beloved Vivien, which is: “to embrace what is ‘beyond my reach in time”. As Tom tells Rose, “my duty is to vitality, to convey the experience of lived and felt life, to what it was to live in a certain time, however remote”. Both the novelist and his protagonist demonstrate how the mundane details of quotidian life tell us more about the truth and heroism of humanity than any amount of creative endeavour, scientific analysis or cerebral achievement ever could.
What We Can Know is many things: a knightly quest, a detective story, a prediction, a warning, a satire, a search for meaning, a lyric poem. Above all it is a reminder that the past — and by definition of quantum time, also the future — is ever-present.
