"What we can know" by Ian McEwan

An audio book.

The narrator Tom is interested in a poem that Francis Blundy read (then gave) to his wife Vivian on her (54th?) birthday in 2014 - a sonnet sequence (corona) called "String", perhaps written after Francis had heard about quantum loop gravity. There was only one copy (on vellum) and it never became public. That was 108 years ago - a high-point for life-expectancy, etc. The world's population's down to 4 billion now. Britain is an archipelago. Francis was a climate change denier. Vivian had sacrificed her academic career for Francis - previously she's been married to Percy for whom she gave up her career when his early onset alzheimers got bad. Harry (Vivian's brother-in-law, husband of Rachel), another guest, was a poetry editor who didn't after all want to be Francis's biographer.

Tom lectures a course called "90-30". After those years (1990-2030) there was limited nuclear war and global flooding. The internet was preserved by Nigeria. Quantum computing broke all the old passwords, so old files are available for research. A Shakespeare-level writer, Fisk, starts writing. The narrator has decided to base his next book around that birthday party, where the poem (which might be as era-defining as Eliot's The Wasteland) provoked various reactions from the guests. He's looking through the physical and online archives, making educated guesses about missing facts and opinions, hoping to recreate the masterpiece. The poem had become a symbol of the power of love, mentioned by protest groups. He thinks of himself as writing about the ghost/shadow of a poem. He uses AI (rationed to the humanities, unlimited for scientists) to get ideas.

He and his wife Rose propose a new course about history. The students aren't interested. Rose has an affair and they break up. Tom learns how to cope, partly by reading about Vivian's problems. Then he gets a tip-off (a map reference) about where the poem might be. He bumps into Rose, who's dumped her lover. They go on an expedition, a treasure hunt. They find a buried package - a violin and a prose print-out

The rest of the book is Vivian's first-person narrative. After university she got pregnant, had the baby, but the baby died when 6 months old - her neglect on a drunken night. Her parents died - "So my father was not dead. He lived in my mind, walking my neuronal battlements in solemn march, like king Hamlet's ghost, not demanding revenge but projecting into my social world a misogynist's ... contempt". She married Percy who became senile. She was having an affair with Harry. Unknown to her Harry was having other affairs. After he split with her, he went to watch him interview Blundy, making sure he saw her leave with the famous poet. She starts sleeping with Blundy while Rachel looks after Percy. Blundy offers to kill Percy. He does. They marry. Then she has affairs with Chris and Harry again. Blundy apologises for spending up to 14 hours/day in his study. That's why he writes her the poem. She tells him that the poem shows how he misunderstands the natural world. Also she thinks there are too many clues about how Percy died. She writes an account - a confession about Percy's death - for posterity and (I think) destroys the poem. At the end of the book we discover that Tom and Rose publish the confession.

The description of the expedition drags. When Blundy shows Vivian his house for the first time, it drags.

Other reviews

• Kevin Power (The book is composed of two islands of prose, linked only by the tenuous bridge of a brief note at the end. And it is about being islanded, in time, in space, in life.)
• John P. Loonam (while food and wine, transportation and geopolitics have been utterly changed, the university system and the world of scholarly criticism have survived with minimal adjustments.)
• Tom LeClair (the futuristic first half resembles a David Lodge novel about literary academics with an antiquarian bent. ... The second half of What We Can Know resembles, to keep comparisons British, just about any book by the ever-complaining Rachel Cusk.)