Book review: Lost poetry and longing for the past in near future ruined by war and climate

Ian McEwan uses the term 'The Derangement' to describe how a generation saw that climate disaster was coming and did nothing about it

Ian McEwan won the 1998 Booker Prize with his seventh novel, 'Amsterdam'. File picture: David Levenson/Getty

• What We Can Know 
• Ian McEwan 
• Jonathan Cape, €17.99

In his 18th novel, and his 77th year, Ian McEwan reaches out beyond our time to imagine the conditions of human life a century hence. His predictions are not comforting.

By the year 2119, a series of wars and climate catastrophes has devastated the human population and transformed the world order. 

Its major cities submerged, Britain has become a tenuous archipelago, with dwindled population centres clinging to the higher ground. 

At a university on the South Downs, literature professor Tom Metcalfe has become obsessed with a long dead writer called Francis Blundy, and a poem he wrote for his wife in 2014.

A Corona for Vivien was read aloud at an exclusive dinner party that year, but never published, and only one copy existed. 

In its absence, a legend has grown around it, inspired by its reputed brilliance and prophetic ecological themes.

As he researches for a book about that famous dinner party, Tom falls in love with Vivien Blundy, who’s been dead these 90 years, and becomes convinced she kept the poem, and hid it for posterity.

Tom’s partner, Rose, a history professor, is more sceptical, and accuses him of filling the gaps in his story with wishful fiction.

They eventually fall out over the project, but mend fences and set out by boat across the Cotswolds to the island hill where the Blundys once lived, and where that legendary poem may still be hidden.

Tom’s obsession does him no favours: “I have one foot in the past,” he says, “perhaps two. I live there, in 2014, or 2025, not here.” 

And he feels he knows these historical figures intimately. “I could have been there. I am there. I know all they know — and more, for I know some of their secrets, and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.”

But in the second half of What We Can Know, courtesy of a long manuscript written by Vivien, we find out how little he understood the Blundys, and that elusive poem. Francis Blundy emerges as an odious solipsist, a great poet, but not a modest one.

“Concede the fact,” he brags about his Corona. “My 15 are superior to John Donne’s humble seven.”

Vivien’s first husband, Percy, falls victim to early onset Alzheimer’s, and there are some unstinting descriptions of the inwards collapse of a mind. 

And as for the group of select friends who gathered for that so-called “Second Immortal Dinner”, they turn out to be a pretty sorry bunch. 

In later life, Vivien will end up living in rural Scotland with Blundy’s sister Jane, where both devise ingenious revenge on the unpleasant men they married.

From his vantage point in an imagined future, meanwhile, Ian McEwan considers our present with a jaundiced eye. 

He uses the term “The Derangement” to describe how a generation saw that climate disaster was coming and did nothing about it.

Social media played its part in a precipitous collapse in democracy as resources waned, and in a wiser future, AI has been nationalised. 

Some advice, too, from Tom Metcalfe: “I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago. If you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.”

Not all the writing is polished, and some smaller characters, such as Jane Blundy, are ill served by the narrative’s formal structure. 

But more often than not, in this original and energetically inventive novel, Mr McEwan gets it spectacularly right. 

“She had read too much,” he says of a minor character, and minor writer, Mary Sheldrake. “Everything was like something else.”