‘What We Can Know’ evaluate: In Ian McEwan’s future, the previous is elusive

In our fiercely tribal and divisive tradition, when consensus is illusory and we are able to’t appear to agree on even probably the most elementary details, the notion of shared historical past as a societal principle has left the constructing. But when we’re certainly dwelling in a post-truth period, Ian McEwan is right here to inform us that issues will solely worsen.

In his bracing new time bender of a novel, the nice British novelist posits that the previous is irretrievably previous, significantly in issues of the human coronary heart, and any try by historians or biographers to wrench it into the current is folly — or within the case of this novel’s protagonist Thomas Metcalfe, mental vainness.

Metcalfe is an affiliate humanities professor and a researcher dwelling in England within the twenty second century (2119, to be actual) who has taken it upon himself to unlock the thriller of a poem referred to as “A Corona for Vivien,” written in 2014 by a deceased literary eminence named Francis Blundy, a poet whose genius, we study, as soon as rivaled that of Seamus Heaney. The poem was composed for his spouse Vivien’s birthday dinner in October 2014, a night that has taken on mythic proportions in sure educational circles within the intervening years. It even has a reputation: The Second Immortal Dinner, during which Blundy for the primary time learn his corona, a poem composed as a sequence of sonnets, that had been misplaced way back.

In Metcalfe’s hothouse literary universe, Blundy’s poem is essential as a result of it’s a revenant. Within the intervening years, interpretive hypothesis about it has run rampant. Some have referred to as it a warning about local weather change. Others say Blundy was paid a six-figure sum by an vitality firm to suppress the poem. Solely fragments of it exist, sure fugitive traces that seem in correspondence between Vivien, Blundy and Blundy’s editor, Harold T. Kitchener. Metcalfe has taken it upon himself to search out the long-lost doc, allegedly written by Blundy on a vellum scroll and buried by Vivien someplace on Blundy’s property.

Metcalfe’s job is enormously difficult by the truth that he lives in a future world the place a lot of the planet has been both immolated or else submerged underwater by a nuclear cataclysm that McEwan calls “The Inundation.” There has additionally been a mass migration — “The Derangement” — during which hundreds of thousands, disadvantaged of sources and land, have been pushed from England into Africa. Complete cities have been misplaced, “the land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they didn’t drain, however persevered like glacial lakes.” No matter repositories of studying that weren’t destroyed now exist on larger floor within the mountains, the place the “information base and collective reminiscence have been largely preserved.”

The constructed setting has eroded, however luckily for Metcalfe, the digital world of the previous is undamaged. Biographers from 2000 onward, McEwan writes, are “heirs to greater than a century of what the Blundy period airily referred to as ‘the cloud’ ever increasing like an enormous summer season cumulus, although, in fact, it merely consisted of data-storage machines.” Right here within the cloud are the numerous a whole bunch of emails and texts from Blundy, his spouse and their circle, permitting Metcalfe the satisfaction of realizing he can piece collectively the occasions of the epochal banquet right down to granular particulars: cutlery used, meals ready, toasts proffered.

What Metcalfe is aware of of the Blundys’ life collectively might be gleaned from the 12 extant volumes of Vivien’s journals. From the journals Metcalfe has surmised that Vivien, herself a superb literary scholar and instructor, had willfully lived out her marriage beneath Blundy’s shadow, the dutiful handmaiden to a literary eminence. “She loved producing a well-turned meal,” Metcalfe posits. “She was as soon as a don, a candidate for a professorship. Abandoning it was a liberation. She all the time felt herself to be in management. But it surely had stunned her how … she had emptied herself of ambition, wage, standing and achievement.”

Regardless of the pile-up of particulars, Metcalfe is aware of he should discover the misplaced poem, that it’s the keystone with out which the story crumbles into insignificance. If he fails on this job Metcalfe, already feeling like an “intruder on the intentions and achievements” of Blundy, loses his mojo: his mission aborted, his profession stalled.

However simply when it appears as if Metcalfe, after a protracted and arduous journey throughout land and water, has found one thing vital, McEwan drops the curtain on that story, and rewinds the narrative 107 years, again to Vivien Blundy and her story. At first, the essential contours conform to Metcalfe’s model of occasions: Vivien did forsake her educational ambitions for Blundy, who did write a poem for her that he learn aloud on her birthday, and so forth.

However Metcalfe, because it seems, has the small print proper and the motives all flawed, by no means extra so than when McEwan reveals the very fact of a homicide, conceived in such a means that no snooping educational may ever unearth it. Emails are composed but stay unsent. Digital correspondence is deleted into the ether, sneaky evasions which can be past the biographer’s grasp. Metcalfe’s thesis is pushed by a romanticized notion of Blundy’s life, however as McEwan slowly and punctiliously reveals, his poem, ostensibly a “repository of goals,” extra carefully resembles a passive-aggressive act. As for Vivien, the narrative she has proffered in her journals is way from the entire story. She is resentful of Blundy, thwarted in her profession, simmering with resentment. Regardless of his scholarly assiduity, Metcalfe is shifting down an errant path that may by no means sq. the details with lived expertise.

After all, details are essential, however they don’t essentially reveal something; it’s the biographer’s folly to ascribe deeper that means to them, to extrapolate reality from a disparate collection of occasions. Metcalfe’s pursuit of revelation in a single misplaced poem is magical pondering, a relentless greedy for a chimera. McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a robust argument for the way little uncooked information, and even probably the most chic artwork, can inform us about people and their opposite natures.

Weingarten is the creator of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Actual Chinatown.”