What We Can Know

 Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Vintage)

It is 2119, it is post-Derangement and post-Inundation; sea levels have risen to make Britain an archipelago with no Thames, no Oxford, its settlements on what had been higher ground, the tops of village churches sticking up out of the water in places; Nigeria is a world power. While there is no racism, there are bandits abroad but people look back on the freedoms, cultural diversity and richness of life a hundred years before as something worth having. The Derangement was how the governments then (which means in our recent decades) knew all about climate change but did nothing about it. The Inundation is the vast migration of people from other countries that has effectively washed away any racist concern about what colour the population are, possibly it is mentioned because the majority are a light brown colour.

While Ian McEwan is a brilliant writer for most of his time, his novels usually seemed flawed in one way or another. Thus I'm on the lookout to find fault because Science Fiction is often wrong even if the 1960's dream of a 'walkie-talkie' has manifested itself in the mobile phone that so many people can't now bear to not look at for more than a few minutes. So, while I'm not surprised that Humanities, Eng Lit and poetry are sidelined to very minor roles in universities, I'm surprised that there are universities at all.

Francis Blundy was the great poet of the period in which he was only rivalled by Seamus Heaney. There was an even more magnificent novelist called Mabel Fisk in a later generation who produced work that puts her on the same level of eminence as Shakespeare. She isn't very important to the story but it is as interesting as it is unlikely that any artist in our fragmented culture will ever be regarded as comparable to Bach, the Beatles, Shakespeare or Rembrandt. Which makes one wonder if McEwan- immensely clever as he is- is not having a little joke with us.

But Blundy wrote a lost masterpiece, A Corona for Vivien, again thought to be impossibly beyond anything writeable in the early C21st. It might not be coincidental that the Vivien Blundy he writes it for has the same name as T.S. Eliot's first wife. After a longer first section of research into that poem, the second goes back to the early C21st where we are told what the poem was really about, by Vivien herself. 

It's not as pretty as the legendary poem is thought to have made it sound. If McEwan was once nicknamed Ian Macabre on account of the horror in his early fiction, he modulated into the more sophisticated distaste of bourgeois sleaze in some later work. Some major poets benefitted, if that's the word, from prolific philandering and Blundy's one of them. Vivien is one of those impressed enough to reciprocate.

It is also a recurring theme in McEwan that we find everything overturned, like in Atonement and Sweet Tooth and so we do here, too. That things are often not what they seem is a fair point. What We Can Know is an involving read, especially of interest to anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry and it's reassuring to see that McEwan has as sound a grasp, as a novelist, of poetry as the recent Sebastian Faulks memoir has. But endings are notoriously hard to do.

Of course we don't get to read the miraculous poem, or any of the work of Mabel Fisk, because that would mean McEwan having to write it. As so often, he is very good but he ultimately fails us. It entirely worked in On Chesil Beach because that was the point. And it remains the point. Beneath the brilliant poem that didn't get left to posterity was something much darker. It's quite possibly a brilliant book. Vivien is surely the opposite of the 'unreliable narrator' unless her account is untrustworthy. Having enjoyed reading it so much, I wish I hadn't been left with the suspicion that Ian McEwan might have performed another of his elaborate tricks.