what we read: Turns Out We Can't Really Know Anything

Title: What We Can Know

Author: Ian McEwan

First, a brief summary from the publisher:

"2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.

"2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.

"When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

"What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost."

Insights and Opinions

(A caveat: The writer of this post had not read the book, so writing a description of the discussion is a bit like watching people through a window, trying to read their lips, and then stitching things together as well as possible. Reminds me of trying to write a paper about something I didn't know anything about, relying on Cliff's Notes and hunches).

+ As voracious readers, our group is not new to McEwan's work, so the discussion opened with the inevitable comparison to his other novels. Chris opened by admitting this one was "torture" for her until the last fifty pages. Lois countered: "It is a bit of a slog. I love his books, but I always wait about 50 pages to get past the slog part. I love his writing, but he's always slow at getting you into the story." Linda had ust finished Amsterdam and loved Atonement, finding similarities between What We Can Know and Atonement. "It is a bit like Atonement in that the story being told turns out not to be true." Steve found it slow going at first, but did take satisfaction at Blundy being taken down a peg for his grammatical choices. "I kept vacillating between feeling humbled to be in McEwan's company and being put off by it. But I did get into the characters and the mystery."

+ Shirley pointed out McEwan's unconventional use of grammar, his sometimes run-on sentences, and unusual use of capitalization. Steve feels McEwan has a foot in old, formal English, and that the diction is in perfect keeping with the type of language he uses to compare the two centuries.

+ At the core of the book is the lost corona poem, so the group needed to spend some time talking about if any of us had ever heard of that poem format (no) or read one (no, but Margy listened to one and promised to send a link later.) "I'd never heard of a corona. I'd never heard of this poet. It was really long. Not being able to read and having to listen to it instead put me into the minds of the people at the dinner party. You can't really focus. It's really long and you drift in and out. This was just one of the things about this book that captured my imagination." Chris pointed out that each person at the dinner had consumed a bottle and a half of wine. "I mean, what corona?"

+ To Margy, looking at the lost art form of corona poetry brought up the question: what is the importance of any art when the seas have inundated the land? What is the role of art in the future? What followed was a thoughtful discussion that was less about the book than it was about the future of the humanities and the importance thereof in preparing people to engage in creative problem-solving.

+ One of Linda's colleagues referred to this novel as a wonderful academic satire. Of course he was bribed by an oil company not to publish a poem. "I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if a poem could be worth a million dollars? The critics I read claim this book is over-stuffed and could have been four novels. It cheered me to think of parts of it as academic satire." She continued: "Some parts of it are quite wonderful, such as thoughts about memory as a sponge soaking up material over time and then leaking it all over things later."

+ Steve found it particularly satisfying that it wasn't the corona poem that would tell the story of Vivien's life, but Vivien's own, subsequent telling of her story. And that she decides to lie in her journal so if anyone found the journal later, they would believe her telling was the truth.

+ Per Margy: "So, you come to the end, and what can we know? We can't really know anything. You can't trust the people, you can't trust the documents, and you can't believe the archives because they can be sabotaged." Wonderful and horrifying at the same time.

+ While reading, Linda realized she was spending a lot of time with people she didn't like. "But then getting into Vivien's portion and what we can know and what people in the future will think of or know of us provided much to think about."

+ Chris saw Vivien not as a feminist, but as a self-interested character with no interest in women's rights. Her interest was selfish, in telling her story in her way. Lois pointed out that, for many feminists, it does come down to self-interest.

What We Will Read Next

For April, we will focus on poetry. Here are the rules:

Shirley will choose for us one Shakespeare sonnet and let us all know ahead of time so we can read it.
For the meeting, each of us will bring a favorite poem to read aloud as well as hard copies of this favored poem.
Chris will host.