Knopf
Review by Walter Cummins
What We Can Know is divided into two parts, each covering the same events from information available a century apart. Part One, narrated by a humanities professor, Thomas Metcalf, takes place in the future, the year 2119. He and several other literary scholars are obsessed with discovering a written copy of a poem that enjoys legendary status despite the fact that only a handful of people have heard its one-time reading at a birthday dinner party in 2014. Yet it is considered a masterpiece written for dedication to his wife by the most significant poet of his time, Francis Blundy. That party, the lives of the guests, and the details of the search for the original scroll or its copy are reported as fully as possible with what evidence people could gather one hundred years later. That’s all that these future people have to go on.
Part Two is a personal journal written in our time by the poet’s wife, Vivien Blundy, who was present throughout the events the researchers of Part One know only second-hand and in pieces. No one else can know as much as she does, in good part because she was an actual participant in everything that took place and possesses her own private reactions to events.
Vivien’s telling makes clear that the people of 2119 discovered only the surface, surmising what might have actually happened, most significantly ignorant of the shocking details of an action that was the secret turning point for all that occurred next, including the composition of the poem—“A Corona for Vivien.” Only Vivien and Blundy could know that, and she offers a biographical interpretation of what the poem is really about, one that Bundy denies.
It’s clear that for all of his arduous research and his deep commitment to the study of what is our present–“I live there, in 2014 or 2025, not here”—Thomas Metcalf could never have known that full story of the people and the poem, not until he discovered, read, and later edited for publication Vivien’s journal, The Confessions of Vivien Blundy.
Metcalf and his eventual wife, Rose Church, a professor of history, teach a humanities course on the literature and history of the period from 1990 to 2030 at England’s University of South Downs. For them it was a time of “fascinating invention and bone-headed greed.” In the 2030s people began calling the climate upheavals of the time the Derangement, which led to massive floods and nuclear wars. Blundy, for all his greatness as a poet, was a vehement climate change denier and totally wrong. Does that compromise him?
Metcalf’s contemporaries would have known what the earth had been through, devastating decades of massive flooding that left the earth just a series of islands and destructive warfare that demolished cities and obliterated half of the world’s population. McEwan avoids a long expository history of those events, instead revealing them and their results in paragraphs and sentences dropped in throughout by Metcalf. This example sums up quite a bit of crucial information:
I write here of global tragedies purely in the context of Blundy’s Corona. That period of ‘Climate Opportunity’ and ecological longing lasted no more than thirty years. The long-delayed Third Sino-American War broke out as the inevitable overspill of the Pacific chaos. Though ‘contained’ by improved AI to conventional exchanges, many famous cities were turned to ashes. Worldwide disease, famine, drought, unprecedented mass migrations—no one had time for poetry or any other cultural endeavour. Survival was the only dream.
The aftermath year 2119 is a much calmer time in England, for Metcalf an opportunity for the return to poetry that is “precious for those who care,” essential to those who hope for a better future. By the end of Vivien’s Confessions, the novel’s readers will know what happened to “A Corona for Vivien.” They also will understand why McEwan’s story of a single poem and the people involved in its origins matters so much.
Yet it matters ironically. Metcalf longs for our more coherent reality from his perspective of difficult and often dangerous travel between isolated islands emerging from the ruins as he seeks information. He covets our time’s abundance of food, dinner parties, entertainments, open movement, flora and fauna, poetry readings in Oxford’s now submerged Sheldonian Theatre, and the great poets who read their masterpieces there. The dinner at which Blundy read his Corona is idealized as The Second Immortal Dinner, just as people romanticized the 1817 First Immortal Dinner—an actual one—attended by Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Keats, and others. Implicit questions asked by the novel include whether the great artists we think we know are also great people. Do we really know them? Do we know Francis Bundy? Do we know what’s taking place in the times we live in?
