What We Can Know, Ian McEwan. Albert A. Knopf (ISBN: 9780593804728) 2025.

Summary: A researcher in 2119 seeks a lost poem read at a famous dinner in 2014, reconstructing the circumstances of the dinner.

In 2014, famous poet Francis Blundy hosted a dinner in honor of his wife’s birthday. During the dinner, he read a poem written for Vivien in the form of a corona. A corona is a “crown of sonnets” consisting of fifteen sonnets, often addressed to one person. The last line of each sonnet is repeated in the first line of the next. Finally, the fifteenth sonnet consists of the last lines of the first fourteen, and makes sense! Blundy wrote it out on vellum and, after the reading, presented it to Vivian, After the dinner, its whereabouts became unknown. The dinner became known as the Second Immortals Dinner. The first was in 1817, with Wordsworth, Keats, and Charles Lamb among the guests of painter Ben Haydon.

In the 2030’s, cataclysmic events occurred. Climate change resulted in wars over resources, including the limited use of nuclear weapons. One of these, intended for the United States landed in the mid-Atlantic, creating a giant tsunami inundating the low lying areas of the Americas and Europe and western Africa. Paradoxically, these bombs resulted in a cooling of the planet. The period was called the Derangement and by the following century, the Earth’s population was down to four billion.

McEwan envisions a world in 2119 that suffered both the loss of much and retained the vestiges of advanced civilization. Regions of the United States are at war. Nigeria controls the internet. But there are still universities in what is left of the United Kingdom. Among the researchers, Thomas Metcalfe studies the years prior to the Derangement. His interest has focused in on the dinner and the lost poem. Instead of the coup of discovery, all he can know are the circumstances surrounding the dinner. Particularly, this included the lives and loves of the guests.

He knows of the tragic first marriage of Vivien Blundy to Percy. This big bear of a man built beautiful musical instruments, including working on a replica of a Guarnieri violin. That is, until early onset Alzheimer’s struck. He knows of the dalliances with Blundy’s brother-in-law Harry, and the meeting pf Francis and Vivien. All this took place prior to Percy’s death from a fall. Vivien subsequently married Francis, setting up in her own studio near the main building called the Barn.

But Metcalfe’s career and life seem stalled. He’s in an off again/on again relationship with Rose, a fellow lecturer on the period. They even teach classes together. Research trips to the Blundy archives turn up lots of trivia about the Blundy’s but nothing on the poem. That is, until an archivist passes along a slip of paper. On it are scratched numbers that Thomas figures out are map coordinates.

When students, no longer interested in how writers dealt with or avoided the impending Derangement, walk out of Thomas and Rose’s class, they conclude it’s time to seek out the coordinates. It turns out they are on the site of the home where Vivien lived after Francis’ death. Could this be the poem’s hiding place? Thomas and Rose embark on a boat trip to an isolated island, hike through overgrowth, find the site and dig up a sealed container.

This is all in the first part of the novel. The second part tells us what they found, and will answer the question of what happened to the poem. It reveals how much they did not know. McEwan leaves the impact of discovery to our imagination.

McEwan foregrounds the quest for a lost poem and what a scholar can know of its past, and that of its author. But part of the work he and Rose do is study the literature leading up to the Derangement. The unspoken question is why so many knew and did so much yet failed to do what was needed. McEwan also creates a situation in which civilization doesn’t end in a cataclysm but withers by degree. It is telling that Rose and Thomas’s students take no interest in what they can know of the past but think they can create a future on a blank slate. They take no interest in knowing the folly of forebears who refused to face and act on what they knew.

It leaves one wondering what historians a century from now, if such still exist, will write about our time. And I can’t help wondering if they will write about what we knew and failed to act upon. Will they wonder about our grand projects and petty squabbles while our own Derangement loomed? I wonder.