According to Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan, What We Can Know is a work of science fiction “without the science.” The setting certainly evokes science fiction: a post-apocalyptic 2119 Britain that’s been reduced to an archipelago by the lethal combo of climate change and global war. But as far as the book’s style and themes, fans of McEwan’s literary fiction won’t find themselves in unfamiliar territory.
The protagonist, professor Tom Metcalfe, has spent the better part of his career speculating on the contents (and even existence) of a 21st-century poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” written by renowned poet Francis Blundy for his wife. A corona, in this usage, is a poem consisting of 15 sonnets, the final one of which is made up of the first lines of each of the previous 14—a sort of uber-villanelle. Hard to execute at all, let alone well.
It turns out that in the 22nd century, the humanities languish as the Rodney Dangerfield of academia, and Tom is alternately frustrated by his students’ intellectual disconnect and charged by his own ambition to ferret out the mystery behind this legendary unpublished poem. During the first half of the book, we see Vivien and Francis’ relationship through Tom’s eyes as he pores over archival material with allusions to dirty deeds too dangerous to disclose, although marital infidelities seemingly abound among the poet’s social circle. Still, the poem’s big reveal remains tantalizingly out of reach, even though Tom declares that “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.”
In the latter half of the book, Vivien takes over the narrative, filling in all—well, most of—the blanks that eluded Tom during the early stages of his research. McEwan wraps the whole bundle neatly in a twist worthy of O. Henry or Rod Serling, capably numbering himself among such masters, whatever genre you might place him in.