In our fiercely tribal and divisive culture, when consensus is illusory and we can\u2019t seem to agree on even the most fundamental facts, the notion of shared history as a societal precept has left the building. But if we are indeed living in a post-truth era, Ian McEwan is here to tell us that things will only get worse.<\/p>\n
In his bracing new time bender of a novel, the great British novelist posits that the past is irretrievably past, particularly in matters of the human heart, and any attempt by historians or biographers to wrench it into the present is folly \u2014 or in the case of this novel\u2019s protagonist Thomas Metcalfe, intellectual vanity.<\/p>\n
Metcalfe is an associate humanities professor and a researcher living in England in the 22nd century (2119, to be exact) who has taken it upon himself to unlock the mystery of a poem called \u201cA Corona for Vivien,\u201d written in 2014 by a deceased literary eminence named Francis Blundy, a poet whose genius, we learn, once rivaled that of Seamus Heaney. The poem was composed for his wife Vivien\u2019s birthday dinner in October 2014, an evening that has taken on mythic proportions in certain academic circles in the intervening years. It even has a name: The Second Immortal Dinner, in which Blundy for the first time read his corona, a poem composed as a sequence of sonnets, that had been lost long ago.<\/p>\n
In Metcalfe\u2019s hothouse literary universe, Blundy\u2019s poem is important because it is a revenant. In the intervening years, interpretive speculation about it has run rampant. Some have called it a warning about climate change. Others say Blundy was paid a six-figure sum by an energy company to suppress the poem. Only fragments of it exist, certain fugitive lines that appear in correspondence between Vivien, Blundy and Blundy\u2019s editor, Harold T. Kitchener. Metcalfe has taken it upon himself to find the long-lost document, allegedly written by Blundy on a vellum scroll and buried by Vivien somewhere on Blundy\u2019s property.<\/p>\n
Metcalfe\u2019s task is greatly complicated by the fact that he lives in a future world where much of the planet has been either immolated or else submerged underwater by a nuclear cataclysm that McEwan calls \u201cThe Inundation.\u201d There has also been a mass migration \u2014 \u201cThe Derangement\u201d \u2014 in which millions, deprived of resources and land, have been driven from England into Africa. Entire cities have been lost, \u201cthe land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they did not drain, but persisted like glacial lakes.\u201d Whatever repositories of learning that weren\u2019t destroyed now exist on higher ground in the mountains, where the \u201cknowledge base and collective memory were largely preserved.\u201d<\/p>\n
The built environment has eroded, but fortunately for Metcalfe, the digital world of the past is intact. Biographers from 2000 onward, McEwan writes, are \u201cheirs to more than a century of what the Blundy era airily called \u2018the cloud\u2019 ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines.\u201d Here in the cloud are the many hundreds of emails and texts from Blundy, his wife and their circle, allowing Metcalfe the satisfaction of knowing he can piece together the events of the epochal dinner party down to granular details: cutlery used, foods prepared, toasts proffered.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ian McEwan\u2019s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.<\/p>\n
(Annalena McAfee)<\/p>\n
What Metcalfe knows of the Blundys\u2019 life together can be gleaned from the 12 extant volumes of Vivien\u2019s journals. From the journals Metcalfe has surmised that Vivien, herself a brilliant literary scholar and teacher, had willfully lived out her marriage under Blundy\u2019s shadow, the dutiful handmaiden to a literary eminence. \u201cShe enjoyed producing a well-turned meal,\u201d Metcalfe posits. \u201cShe was once a don, a candidate for a professorship. Abandoning it was a liberation. She always felt herself to be in control. But it had surprised her how \u2026 she had emptied herself of ambition, salary, status and achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the pile-up of particulars, Metcalfe knows he must find the lost poem, that it is the keystone without which the story crumbles into insignificance. If he fails in this task Metcalfe, already feeling like an \u201cintruder on the intentions and achievements\u201d of Blundy, loses his mojo: his mission aborted, his career stalled.<\/p>\n
But just when it seems as if Metcalfe, after a long and arduous journey across land and water, has discovered something significant, McEwan drops the curtain on that story, and rewinds the narrative 107 years, back to Vivien Blundy and her story. At first, the basic contours conform to Metcalfe\u2019s version of events: Vivien did forsake her academic ambitions for Blundy, who did write a poem for her that he read aloud on her birthday, and so on.<\/p>\n
But Metcalfe, as it turns out, has the details right and the motives all wrong, never more so than when McEwan reveals the fact of a murder, conceived in such a way that no snooping academic could ever unearth it. Emails are composed yet remain unsent. Digital correspondence is deleted into the ether, sneaky evasions that are beyond the biographer\u2019s grasp. Metcalfe\u2019s thesis is driven by a romanticized notion of Blundy\u2019s life, but as McEwan slowly and carefully reveals, his poem, ostensibly a \u201crepository of dreams,\u201d more closely resembles a passive-aggressive act. As for Vivien, the narrative she has proffered in her journals is far from the whole story. She is resentful of Blundy, thwarted in her career, simmering with resentment. Despite his scholarly assiduity, Metcalfe is moving down an errant path that will never square the facts with lived experience.<\/p>\n
Of course, facts are important, but they don\u2019t necessarily reveal anything; it is the biographer\u2019s folly to ascribe deeper meaning to them, to extrapolate truth from a disparate series of events. Metcalfe\u2019s pursuit of revelation in a single lost poem is magical thinking, a relentless grasping for a chimera. McEwan\u2019s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.<\/p>\n
Weingarten is the author of \u201cThirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review What We Can KnowBy Ian McEwanKnopf: 320 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[30884,30882,30877,489,156,8231,30881,30880,30883,19720,3754,111,139,8476,69,4517,30878,427,30879,379],"class_list":{"0":"post-32575","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-achievement","9":"tag-biographer","10":"tag-blundy","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-event","14":"tag-fundamental-fact","15":"tag-ian-mcewan","16":"tag-journal","17":"tag-land","18":"tag-metcalfe","19":"tag-new-zealand","20":"tag-newzealand","21":"tag-novel","22":"tag-nz","23":"tag-past","24":"tag-poem","25":"tag-story","26":"tag-vivien","27":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}