Leave it to Ian McEwan to coin the era that follows climate change which Tom Metcalfe, an academic who narrates the first part of What We Can Know, refers to as the "Degradation." Though rising seas and nuclear war have mostly reduced merry olde England to an archipelago replete with marauding tribes, very little about fundamental human nature has changed other than the finger-pointing anger that characterizes a future generation who can't forgive the perpetrators of contemporary environmental inertia: us.
Imagining the future a century hence enables McEwan to flash his sardonic wit--Nigeria, for example, controls the internet--while at the same time nailing mankind's current headlong rush to paradise lost through Tom's historical consciousness.
I prefer teaching the post-2015 period, when social media were beginning to be drawn into the currency of private lives, when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. Fascinating! It was as if credulous medieval masses had burst through into modernity, rushing into the wrong theatre and onto the wrong stage set. In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated.
Rose, Tom's "just the facts, please" colleague in the barely afloat humanities department of a much diminished university, accuses him of romanticizing the past and falling in love with Vivian, the wife of a poet, Francis Blundy, whose supposed masterwork, dedicated to her as a 54th birthday present, has been lost to time after an initial, private reading. Tom has immersed himself in the lives of the couple using a feast of electronic bread crumbs, including e-mail and text messages and journals left behind by Vivian who earlier lost her soulmate, a luthier, to Alzheimer's and entitled arrogance.
My journals are on a shelf above a writing desk in our cottage sitting room, but I’m happier to be free of them and exercising my memory. Working hard at it, as in a mental gym, making the effort and prising open a scene, opens others along the way. It gets easier the more I try. In addition, guilt and remorse are useful aids to memory. I use the journals mostly to remind myself of the sequence of events, on which memory is notoriously weak. The past, jumbled in the mind, survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present. A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.
(Does it ever, as I can affirm after having kept one since the early 80s!)
McEwan links Tom's fascination with the night Francis reads his "Corona to Vivian" to another event a hundred years earlier, the "immortal dinner of 1817" attended by William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and John Keats; thus, the 2014 dinner Tom imagines is at the mid-point between a still pastoral England and the ravaged present. Fortunately, what initially seems like a sci-fi inflected exercise in literary erudition soon evolves into an absorbing, almost Hitchcockian mystery powered by buried treasure, the elusiveness of truth--particularly in an emotional context--and the essential selfishness of human existence. To say much more would give way to spoilers. But as Vivian, very much an underestimated woman of our time, notes:
I delighted in the afternoon sun on my bare arms and felt capable, given life’s brevity, of ruthless insistence on my small share of the world’s pleasures.
