"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.)

"Chesil Beach" by Ian McEwan (Einaudi, 2007)

A newly married couple, Edward (historian, Chiltern) and Florence (musician, Oxford), are about to sleep together for the first time, in an era when youth was a condition of slight embarrassment for which marriage was the first stage of therapy. They're both 22. Edward has performance anxiety. Florence's worries are more to do with disgust at the physical act, at being "penetrated" (even by his tongue in her mouth), though she doesn't fear giving birth.

They're honeymooning in a hotel, finishing their evening meal. It's about 1962. They hear downstairs old people at the bar still in the shadow of the war. They hear a distant radio. The couple think it's time to move on; after all, the States have Kennedy. The UK's losing what influence it had. The empire's shrinking. The couple's conversation is awkward, with many silences - Edward's keen to go to bed, Florence is dreading it, hoping she won't be sick, but neither dare say what's going through their minds. He thinks about politics to distract himself from getting too excited.

We wind back to their first meeting, which only happened because of a succession of chance events. They'd both studied in London but never knowingly met. We learn that Florence has a younger sister, that her mother isn't physically expressive emotionally. Florence has sometimes gone on holidays just with her father. Edward was raised in respectable but poorer surroundings. His mother's a bit strange and arty. He has younger twin sisters. She wants to set up a string quartet. He doesn't get classical music, preferring Chuck Berry. He plans to write a series of books on forgotten historic figures.

Back at the action, there's progress. Each movement's recorded, as if in slo-mo. She admits to being a bit afraid - an understatement, but they're her first ever words on the subject. He replies that he is too. She has a physical sensation caused by Edward which might be the first sign of pleasure. He has a messy premature ejaculation. In horror she runs to the beach.

We then read about Edward's stays with Florence's parents - his tennis games with her father (a businessman), his political/history debates with her mother (a lecturer), his caution about winning or losing. He experiences many things there for the first time, not least stereo, and cheese that isn't cheddar. He tries to delay her visit to his parents' dirty cottage. She turns up unannounced and enjoys herself.

In the hotel he thinks that she's tricked him into marriage feeling no physical attraction for him. He finds her far along the shore. She doesn't have a vocabulary to describe what happened, let alone an explanation. He's angry. They argue about money. She admits her difficulties, says she knows of a couple of homosexuals who live together. She suggests that she and Edward could make up their own rules about how to live together. He says she's broken her marriage vows and that's she's frigid. She packs and sets off to her parents before he's returned to the hotel. They divorce. He becomes a rock music journalist, lives for 3 years in Paris with a french wife, doesn't really do anything with his life. He reads in 1968 a review of her successful string quartet group. Had they met a few years later they'd have been able to talk about things more openly. The book's carefully located in time so that the gulf between intellectual and emotional openness is at its greatest. An image that's mentioned at least twice is whether the storms really do sort the pebbles on the shore (whether strong emotion gives order to randomness).

It's about 130 pages long.

Other reviews

• Tim Adams (McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing. ... McEwan's brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in a life and invest them with indelible significance)
• Goodreads