DON ARMADO: Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.
—Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1.2.189-91)
If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets.
—English professor at Stony Brook University
*Please note: this review contains plot spoilers.
Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know (2025) has an enticing, high concept premise: a scholar in the early twenty-second century is trying to track down a remarkable sequence of poems from 2014, before modern civilization was destroyed by “The Derangement,” global warming, world wars, and cataclysmic flooding. What We Can Know, however, doesn’t realize its promise: it is actually quite frustrating and disappointing.
Part 1 is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, a middle-aged academic, who in 2119 is ensconsed on one of the small islands that now comprise the British archipelago. Along with his partner Rose Church, he is seeking the whereabouts of a notorious, unpublished work of poetry. That would be “A Corona for Vivien” by Francis Blundy, written for his wife’s 54th birthday in 2014. He recited it to her and their guests at the dinner party celebration held at their place in the English countryside, The Barn. A century later, despite the devastating upheavals the world has undergone, archival libraries have survived or been resurrected, along with access to the journals, emails, text messages, and other ephemera of earlier times (that is, the tracks left by our contemporaries), so research is possible.
It should be said that the future world-building is uneven at best. The contrasts between our own zesty, maximalist, destructive lifestyles and the more austere, lowkey, responsible existence imagined for the post apocalypse, though, provide some food for thought. Also, several real people are mentioned from modern times, as well as made-up literary figures from the future. For example, a character states that Frank Kermode (1919-2010), a real twentieth-century literary critic, has written effusive praise of Blundy, and the grammarians Fowler and Pinker are cited in passing, while in the future everyone has read the outstanding novels of the imaginary Mabel Fisk.
Part 2 turns out to be Vivien’s brutally candid, secret, hidden diary, discovered by Tom and Rose after they decipher a clue she left behind. It substantially revises received understanding of her life, marriages, and milieu. It also reveals that she destroyed the unique holograph manuscript of the poems composed in her honor.
McEwan is an award-winning British author whose prizes include a Booker, and several of his novels have been made into prestigious films. Some bits of What We Can Know hit the mark: an argument between the pedantic poet and a friendly local handyman over “hopefully” as sentence adverb; or Tom’s mindset during his research quest, swinging around between despair, exhaustion, and exhilaration, for instance.
The thematic issues about literary history signalled by the title also inherently interest me and other littérateurs. How much imagination, supposition, even fabulation goes into fleshing out the past, or indeed the life, of any quirky, inconsistent, human subject? What methodological rules apply? What epistemological cruxes arise? Tom’s attempts to shed light on our era enact such questions in somewhat “meta” ways. They are occasionally ironized by Vivien’s (subjective) recollections that appear later, such as when she confesses in her journal that her favourites in the memoir genre include Samuel Pepys and Alan Clark, who were not “afraid of letting the world know they could be calculating liars, greedy, selfish, vain and disagreeable.” Certainly in that regard, the novel overall is not wholly unsuccessful.
The conceit (or MacGuffin) the novel builds around, though, creates insurmountable problems. Francis Bundy, the leading poet of his age, has produced his masterpiece: a linked series of fifteen Petrarchan sonnets. (A corona series entails using the last line of the previous sonnet as the opening of the next, culminating in a return to the opening line. It is, needless to say, a very demanding, hence uncommon, format. There are a few examples from the Renaissance and more recent times, such as John Fuller’s “Marston Meadows: a Corona for Prue,” which McEwan said partly inspired his novel. John Donne’s justly well-known sequence of seven religious poems, “La Corona,” is mentioned; Lady Mary Wroth’s group of fourteen, “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love,” also from the early seventeenth century, is not.) Blundy himself believes he has triumphed: as he jots in his notebook: “Concede the fact. My fifteen are superior to John Donne’s humble seven”! In the novel, the entire corona is recited by the author at the boozy birthday party hosted by Francis and Vivien and attended by eight guests, but it is not transcribed verbatim. One guest, Harry Kitchener, is Francis’s long-standing editor; his wife is Jane, Francis’s sister. The others present are civilians. They mostly liked the verse, and left somewhat vague recollections. Structurally, McEwan faces the dilemma of either paraphrasing the “Corona for Vivien” in enough detail to reveal its brilliance or actually including an amazing 210 lines of moving verse with strict meter and rhyme scheme. The solution, having Vivien destroy it later that night in a fit of pique, is deeply unsatisfying. It also strains credulity that a vain older poet, highly concerned with this status and fame, would destroy all other copies and refuse publication, even posthumously, and that Vivien would be so spiteful that she too would not even leave a copy for posterity.
Besides that, Tom and Rose, Vivien and Francis, just aren’t all that interesting; the latter two are both fairly unlikeable without being fascinating.
Yet don’t despair, Gentle Reader! Two twentieth-century English masterpieces can salve your wounds: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (1993) and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962).1(Other works of fiction play with the tropes juggled by McEwan as well.) Arcadia is a play with scenes split between the early 1800s and the late 1900s. In the present, scholars are visiting a great country house in Derbyshire, trying to figure out what transpired there earlier; their scenes alternate with ones set in the past when we witness the key events unfold. (The resident aristocrats, members of the Coverly family, appear in both eras.) The drama is very clever, very witty, and ultimately very poignant. Pale Fire the novel consists of a fascinating 999-line poem in heroic couplets, “Pale Fire” by John Shade, along with the extensive, insanely misguided commentary by his acquaintance Charles Kinbote, published after the fictional author’s untimely demise. It’s a wholly original tour de force; one of the most ingenius masterpieces of fiction. (It also contains some winking anti-Lolita easter eggs.)
As always, lege feliciter! Happy reading!
1 The brilliant playwright Sir Tom Stoppard passed away last month at the age of 88.