Review: Vivien Horler

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

Central to this brilliant novel is a dinner party and a poem no one but the poet’s wife has read.

This sounds rather genteel, but What We Can Know is a great deal more than that – it’s the tale of a literary quest complete with buried treasure, a love story, a terrible crime, a harrowing description of caring for a partner with dementia, and a meditation on the difficulties presented by historical biography.

It’s also a fascinating exploration of what our world could become, with about two-thirds of the narrative set in 2119, a bit over a century hence. There has been the Inundation, the flooding much of the world, leaving the republic of Britain an archipelago of islands. There have been limited nuclear wars, and the major superpower appears to be Nigeria. GPS no longer exists, as satellites reach obsolescence and crash and burn, and it’s not clear how long the internet will survive. About half the world’s population has died.

Among the survivors is Professor Tom Metcalfe, a humanities lecturer at the University of the South Downs, and his partner Professor Rose Gibbon, also an academic.

Tom’s area of special interest is the literature of the period 1990 to 2030, a period regarded by many as the pinnacle of civilisation, before “the Derangement”. Tom is obsessed with a poem written by the celebrated British poet Francis Blundy, read aloud once and never published.

The poem is entitled A Corona for Vivien, and Francis reads it aloud at a dinner party at his home in rural Gloucestershire in 2014 as a 54^th birthday gift for his wife Vivien.

A corona, we’re told, is a collection of sonnets, with the last line of each becoming the first line of the next, and the final sonnet composed of all the first lines in the series. It is a major work of literary art.

As proof of how special his gift is, Francis tells Vivien and his dinner guests that he has destroyed all his notes and copies and only one survives, written out on vellum and presented to Vivien.

Despite never have been published, the poem develops an extraordinary literary reputation. Much of the poem is about the glories of nature, something close to Vivien’s heart, and it develops a reputation of being a polemic against fossil fuels and climate change.

Tom has studied the Blundys, his poetry, and their marriage for years. He believes the poem exists somewhere, and is determined to find it. He reads Francis’s work, he reads Vivien’s journals, all kept with Francis’s papers in the Bodleian Snowdonia Library (everything has had to be moved to high ground).

He idolises the period, and unwisely confesses one day to Rose he is in love with Vivien. He longs to walk where she walked, admire the flowers and fields she admired, and of course find and read the corona.

He knows about Vivien’s loving first marriage to Percy, a luthier in Oxford, which becomes a sad affair as he descends into dementia. He knows Vivien has met Francis and the couple are in love.

He has access to the minutia of their lives as, by 2119, all personal messages, once end-to-end encrypted, are available for reading, and of course he has access to their papers. But he cannot know everything.

The last third of the book is an account of her life by Vivien, based on the journals she kept for years. But this account is not on the internet or with the Blundy papers, and Tom has no idea it exists.

Which brings us to the central problem of historical biography, where the biographer has no chance of interviewing his or her subject, or any people they knew.

After immersing himself in the vast amount of material available, Tom believes that where source material does not exist, “surely it was permissible to make educated guesses about the subjective states and lines of thought of people who had died a hundred years ago. Perhaps it was not…Unprofessional to make things up, arid not to.”

Tom muses: “When faced with the essential but undisclosed inner life, invent within the confines of the probable.”

But Rose disagrees – it is not Tom’s business to invent, she insists.

And of course when we get to the last third of the novel, and find out what really happened to Frances, Vivien, their friends – and the corona – not included in any of the papers or journals, we discover a different cast to the truth.

I found this all so absorbing that once I had finished the book I went straight back to the beginning, rereading it in the light of what I now knew.

This is a great book by a master writer. I loved it.

• What We Can Know was one of Exclusive Books’ top reads for December.