Ian McEwan’s ‘What We Can Know’

Our time is obsessed with history — not just the past, as thinkers like Simon Reynolds (Retromania) and Mark Fisher (Ghosts of my Life) have shown, but future histories too; as in the popular phrase ‘right side of history’, or the damning title of Omar El Akkad’s book on Gaza, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. We like to historicise ourselves in the present (almost as much as we like to call a new release an ‘instant classic’), and one of our preferred ways of doing this is through fiction, from Neil Ronald Jones to Naomi Alderman’s The Power…

Ian McEwan’s new novel, What We Can Know, belongs to this tradition. It is set a hundred years in the future, in what has become the ‘British archipelagoes’, brought about by nuclear exchanges and climate catastrophes throughout the 21st century. A scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, is researching a (fictional) poet from our era, Francis Blundy, and one poem in particular; the missing ‘Corona for Vivien Blundy’ — an intricate sequence of fifteen sonnets, where the last line of one becomes the first line of the next. This poem, written on vellum and read only once in front of a private audience, was (despite public pressure) never published. Metcalfe, combing through Blundy’s extensive archive (which includes private text messages, browser history etc.), obsesses over the poem — an extension of his true obsession: the early 21st century…