What We Can Know | Thornfield Hall

I lolled on the couch, one leg thrown over the back, sipping a Cappuchino precariously in the supine position. I was reading Northanger Abbey in honor of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birthday. Alas, this satire of Gothic novels is my least favorite of her books.

To tell the truth, I am exhausted. Perhaps I should recoup by escaping into Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries or Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances. It’s not clear why, but my reading last month did me in.

The books I read in October were splendid. I devoured Kiran Desai’s Booker-shortlisted novel, two novels by Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a biography of Muriel Spark, George MacDonald’s Lilith, and the latest novel by Ian McEwan.

But if I want to analyze my fatigue closely, it grew out of reading two new books last month instead of one. Reading the classics keeps me together; new books can tear me apart.

Desai’s beautifully-written family saga, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel about two Indian lovers who have lived in the U.S. and their quirky families in India, is a joyous experience. However, it took me a week to read 670 pages.

On the other hand, Ian McEwan’s new masterpiece, What We Can Know, is deeply political. Of these two remarkable novels, McEwan’s haunts me.

In What We Can Know, he brilliantly explores the problems of a world teetering on the edge of destruction. Divided into two parts and two centuries, this novel, rather like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, centers on a scholar’s search for a missing poem. McEwan takes us from a 22nd-century England wrecked by climate change and nuclear bombs to the 21st century, where a famous poet, Francis Blundy, his unhappy wife, and brilliant friends live in relative luxury. In addition to the missing poem, there is a “novel,” or is it a journal? – the writer isn’t sure herself – within a novel. But the scholar’s reconstruction of their lives is not quite accurate.

McEwan also exposes the problems of internet research. Future scholars, like Thomas, an expert on Francis Blundy, have access to all email, sent and unsent, and every keystroke made online. The entire history is available on a server in Nigeria. But what they can know proves to be superficial, as if the scholars are on a parallel railroad track that never quite conjoins with that traveled by the poet.

It seem I’m not burned-out on Jane per se. It is the politics and the AI and fear of climate change that are doing me in.

At times like this, it’s better to listen to music perhaps, or take a nap.

And, yes, there’s always Miss Marple.

“Even if Vivien never read her birthday present, never even untied the scroll, everything I’ve learned about her suggests that she did not destroy the poem.” – “What We Can Know,” by Ian McEwan

Time is hurling forward, and it’s a toss-up whether climate change or AI will wreck the planet first. In Ian McEwan’s brilliant new novel, What We Can Know, an event called the Inundation has flooded most of the land.

Don’t worry: this is not science fiction. McEwan has written a great literary dystopian novel, with a lost sonnet sequence at its center.

Set in the 21st and 22nd centuries, this intriguing novel is inhabited by scholars and poets. One of the main characters, Thomas Metcalfe, an English literature scholar of the 22nd century, is obsessed with a lost poem by Francis Blundy, deemed one of the best poets of the late 20th and early 21st century by critics, and surpassed only by Seamus Heaney.

Thomas has searched the archives in vain for Francis’s missing Corona, a long, complicated sonnet sequence Francis wrote for his wife Vivien and recited at her birthday party in 2014. There was only one copy, written on vellum, according to a magazine writer who attended the party, but Thomas believes that Vivien, the devoted wife, would surely have made a copy, even if Thomas did not himself.

In academia, careers are made and broken on the resolution of such small points. Francis and his sometime lover, Rose, discuss the corona frequently. Both are professors and experts in 90.30 literature – the literature published between 1990 and 2030 – though their jointly-taught 90/30 seminar is disrupted by a student who accuses them of irrelevance and stages a walk-out.

McEwan, who won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam, is in some ways in A.S. Byatt territory here. This new novel, which goes back and forth in time, is not unlike Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning Possession, another novel about a lost poem, in which she experiments with different forms, including the elaborate, missing poem itself.

McEwan’s new novel unfolds in a mix of genres, including letters, journals, Thomas’s reconstructions of the dinner party, and a novel within a novel. But Thomas also has another source, the internet: he has access to every email, sent and unsent, their texts, phone numbers dialed, bills, and every article written about Francis. What we thought were ephemera are permanent records, not ephemeral at all. But most of it is not very useful.

In 2119, Thomas and Rose live in a post-nuclear holocaust world. Not only did the temperature soar, and later drastically fall, but AI, put in charge of the military, launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike, which led to other countries’ AI military strikes, and, combined with climate change, wiped out half the world population and numerous countries and cities, including London, New York, much of Africa, and the East and West coast in the U.S.

McEwan isn’t quite a doomsday writer: he also realistically describes the lives of entitled people in the early 21st century, who know the climate is changing but feel helpless and do little about it. Francis is a mad climate change denier, but everyone shuts up when he rants because he is so important. Vivien, a writer-turned-housewife-and-gardener, believes in climate change but thinks it won’t accelerate till after her death. She spends a lot of time musing about her beloved late husband, a violin maker. For years she has grieved the tragedy of his death after early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

I was impressed by McEwan’s brilliant analysis of what, God forbid, might happen in the future, and by his quiet prose style, pseudo-scholarly in parts, a fascinating rush of narrative in other parts. The harmony of the elaborate structure keeps us reading and exclaiming with admiration. And we cross our fingers that someone will read this book and stop the madness.