"What We Can Know"| Reviewed by Bill Winkler

In May, 2119, Thomas Metcalfe begins his search for a long-lost poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by renowned British poet Francis Blundy.

A corona is a poetic format, sonnets strung together in a chain, the last line of a sonnet repeated as the first line of the next. The corona most typically addresses one subject, that subject usually being a person whose life the poet wishes to celebrate.

“Vivien” was written as a gift to the poet’s wife. He read it to her and a handful of dinner guests at a gathering for her birthday in 2014. The details of the gathering, its guests and their activities, have been unearthed by generations of scholars searching through archived letters, emails, and personal journals. The poem itself has yet to be found.

After reading the work Blundy rewrapped it in its vellum parchment, retied it with two bows and handed it to Vivien. Its whereabouts after that have been lost to the ages.

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” is written in two parts. The first takes place in the early 22^nd century. Much of England has been reduced to an archipelago of islands created during the Inundation, a catastrophic rise in sea levels resulting from global warming and a series of regional nuclear wars. Valuable documents were rushed to higher ground by dedicated archivists. The greater source of information is in the form of emails preserved on servers in Nigeria, now the hub of the internet. These emails had been encrypted, but rapidly advancing technology allowed them to become available for researchers.

After painstaking digging through arcane data, Metcalfe uncovers clues that he believes will lead him to the poem’s location. What he finds at that location serves as the second part of the novel.

That second half, set in the second decade of the 21^st century, reveals the true details of the dinner party, the events leading up to it, and the years following. To spell out any of those details would do the reader a disservice. McEwan, through shrewd foreshadowing and sly revelation of details, leads the reader through a narrative casting the characters discovered by Metcalfe and his fellows in a completely different light, illustrating that what we can know may be vastly at odds with what there is to be known.

“What We Can Know” is like a holiday fruitcake, rich and dense. To get the full impact of the book, the reader needs to read until the very last word.

Buy the book.