What We Can Know

Be happy, be academically successful, do the right thing—in McEwan’s tale of the mystery surrounding a lost poem, you can only have two. The poem, and those surrounding it, have two lives here. The second part of the book takes place in 2014 at the time of the poem’s creation and involves narcissistic poet Francis Blundy; his wife, Vivien; and their circle. The first part of the book is set in 2119, when humanity has been beset by global warming and nuclear wars. The diminished world is fixated on the (perceived) better past, part of that obsession being Blundy’s poem, which has a place in the culture as the pinnacle of romance and dedication. McEwan spins the reader in circles, showing us the same events first from afar and then from different points of view in the same time period. This creates a sense that what we can know is in fact very little, and maybe that’s for the best. As usual in McEwan’s books, especially his ultra-tense On Chesil Beach, the characters move in such agonizing situations that the book must be set aside at times—but the language, especially concerning characters’ self-regard, whips the reader back in (“…it was no longer me at all. What remained was not even a woman but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination”). A must for McEwan fans; and librarians, take note: the creation and maintenance of an archive has a role here.