From a Google Image Search – LA Times
Ian McEwan’s new book What We Can Know is a non-dystopian view of how human indifference might change world geography, it’s a celebration of nature, the humanities and poetry, and it’s a mystery. Any story that begins in the Bodleian Library generally offers us a kind of magic. I guess we can blame that on Deborah Harkness and on the academic glamor of Oxford University.
It takes a while to place everything in the correct historical time and to adjust to bouncing back and forth across a century. Tom Metcalfe is living in 2119, but he is a historian whose interest lies in the period from 1990 to 2030. He is trying to find a poem that was written by a writer named Francis Blundy for his wife Vivien. Blundy read it aloud on her fifty-fourth birthday at what came to be called “the Second Immortal Dinner.” Then he gave Vivien the poem, and no one ever saw it again. There are secondhand reports of what was said in the poem, but the poem itself vanished.
The poem was written in a very lengthy and difficult form called a corona. Blundy’s corona consisted of 14 Petrarchan sonnets and a fifteenth which had to repeat the first line of each of the 14 and that had to make sense. A Petrarchan sonnet had 8 lines that rhyme ABBAABBA and 6 lines that rhyme CDECDE. The literary world held its breath, but after almost a century the poem was still missing. Tom has taken on the task of finding the “Corona”. As he searches, we get glimpses of what neglecting to deal with climate issues has done to the planet. There are allusions to Nigeria, although they are rather vague. Tom seems to live in what is left of England, now a series of archipelagos and islands. The Bodleian library has been moved to higher ground making it problematic to travel there.
Apparently, the humanities academics have always been a rather randy bunch, with all kinds of sexual adventures and affairs causing ruffled emotions that are often hidden under polite exteriors (and sometimes not). Vivien was apparently a charming and beautiful woman who had a few adventures before she married Percy Green and a few while she was married to him. She loved her husband very much but only enjoyed his company for a few years as he developed early onset Alzheimer’s. He had been a craftsman making classical-quality violins. Alzheimer’s disease worsens over time and requires extended and intense caregiving. Percy’s Alzheimers was already advanced by the time Vivien met Francis Blundy, although she had already ended an affair with his editor, Harry.
Tom, in an off again, on again relationship with Rose is somewhat in love with Vivien although she has been gone from his world for a hundred years. He loves the property she lived in with Francis, after Percy died and they married. The property was known as The Barn and Vivien had her own office in the dairy building nearby. Everything had been carefully renovated, and since the “Derangement” (wars, and flooding) had not happened yet much of nature was still intact. Tom gets a valuable clue from a colleague about the possible place where the Corona might be buried. What he finds out says more about human nature than it does about poetry. It’s a book to love and ponder about, but it does not mince words about the human condition.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 