Reviews for What we can know : a novel
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel. McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor who, on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers. A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly
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In the deeply intelligent and endlessly supple latest from McEwan (Lessons), a pair of scholars look back on the present day from a future Britain radically transformed by climate change. By 2119, England has become an archipelago. At the Bodlein Library, which has been moved to higher ground, Thomas Metcalfe fixates on the lore behind an unpublished but legendary poem by the renowned Francis Blundy, a series of sonnets said to have been written for his wife, Vivien, but which was only ever seen and heard by those who attended a dinner party with the couple in 2014. In the years since, the mystery of the poem sparked public fascination with its purported depiction of enduring love. Thomas, self-appointed “biographer of the reputation of an unread poem,” pores over vast electronic archives and bonds with Rose Church, a historian and colleague of his at the University of the South Downs, over their shared interest in the period and their anguish that the climate disaster was allowed to happen (both attract ire from students for their “anger and nostalgia”). The pair marry, but they hit a rough patch caused by Thomas’s all-consuming devotion to his work. Meanwhile, an archivist leads Thomas to a revelation from Vivian’s diary that overhauls everything he thought he knew about the poem and the dinner. The novel keenly brings to life a post–climate change world and conveys the struggle of humanities scholars to prove the value of their work. McEwan is in top form. (Sept.)
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
The author of Atonement and, most recently, Lessons (2022), McEwan offers up a heady, intellectual tale that takes a searing look at how history is created—and distorted. In 2119, after the world has been ravaged by the man-made disasters of nuclear war and climate change, English professor Tom Metcalfe pursues a lost poem that renowned early twenty-first century poet Francis Blundy wrote for his wife. “A Corona for Vivien,” recited out loud at her fifty-fourth birthday dinner (known as a literary event in the annals of history), is believed to be a polemic about climate change as much as an ode to marital love. Tom and his wife, Rose, whose own relationship is rocky, contemplate a trip to the land where the Blundys lived in hopes of finding the alleged sole copy of the poem, not realizing that the truth about it, and the people whose lives they’ve been so fascinated by, might be quite different than what has come to be, more or less, historical fact. Dealing with themes as weighty as the inexorable forward progress of humankind, and the relevance of the past in a world where the present is both “loud and ruthless,” McEwan proves once again he is both a master of his craft and a gimlet-eyed observer of the human condition.HiGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: McEwan fans love his family sagas, and the dystopian near-future element is sure to draw curious readers.
Library Journal
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This dystopian novel sees a humanities professor obsessively searching for the written version of a poem delivered at a dinner party 100 years earlier and since lost to authorial lore. With this powerful homage to a lost era—the current era—as seen through the lens of an academic in 2119, writing after the lowlands of the UWK have been submerged by rising seas, McEwan has achieved something spectacular and much needed, as he raises question about the climate crisis—future and present. Readers will also find in it meditations on the value of the humanities, the work of poets and biographers, the difference between knowledge of and poetical apotheosizing of nature, and a beautiful recognition of what it means to search for human bonds in words and on pages, when those pages are also lost, fragmented, and intelligible only when viewed through the same prismatic humanness that engendered them. VERDICT McEwan (Lessons) has crafted a story at once nostalgic and foreboding that will appeal to readers of A. S. Byatt's Possession with its archival romance elements while offering a futuristic dystopian world that feels as inevitable as Margaret Atwood's "MaddAddam" trilogy.—Emily Bowles
