“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan

I haven't read all of Ian McEwan's books, and he has written quite a few of them (like, enough that I may not get around to reading them all), but a new one is kind of an event. So when I heard about What We Can Know, I pre-ordered it without really knowing anything about the story. When the book arrived, I spent a moment reflecting on the cover (is that a mirror pictured? I wondered if the title could have been continued with "about ourselves." But as I read, I decided that didn't apply). 

I'm not quite sure whether going in blind was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe if I'd known a bit about where the plot was heading, I would have been quicker at finding my bearings. As it was, I was continually distracted by how weirdly like a David Mitchell book this seemed to be. Even weirder, I wasn't really enjoying it (which I don't think has ever happened to me before with David Mitchell. Or with Ian McEwan. Except maybe with Saturday). 

The majority of the Mitchell-ness came from the timeline (although the characters and the setting fit right in as well). The narrator, Tom, is an academic and a university professor whose area of expertise is the famous poet Frances Blundy. It's said that in 2014, Blundy wrote a poem as a gift for his wife's Vivien's birthday. He recited it at her dinner party, gave her the only copy, and then no one ever saw or read it again. In 2119, the mysterious poem still eludes the world, and it is Tom's holy grail.

Yeah, that's right, I said 2119 (which seems to me like a very David Mitchell plot point). And the world is no longer the world as we know it (there's Mitchell again). It was uncomfortably different: not different enough to be a fantasy, but different enough to be depressing. But somewhere around the time that Tom and his quasi-estranged wife Rose were digging holes, I started to get into it. 

There are two different timelines (one for Tom and Rose, one for Blundy and Vivien), thus two different groups of characters. And I think what I will remember most about this book was the way one of the main characters goes through the sad and depressing ordeal of watching her husband disappear into early-onset dementia. It's a particular kind of loss, when the body is still present but the person you loved no longer exists. (New fear unlocked, by the way.) But before his disappearance, she had this to say about him: "What's so lovely is that basically, in a quiet way, he's simply glad he exists. Whatever the difficulty, the baseline isn't disturbed. Then that line becomes mine too." A worthy aspiration if ever there was one. And I also want to remember this gem, as one of the characters explained why she kept a journal: "...most of life is oblivion. To rescue fragments of the past would be to claim a bigger existence."

Do you want to know what I decided about the title in the end? I'll try to explain it without any spoilers. Basically, Tom knows all that it's possible to know about Frances Blundy (which is a lot, given his life in the Information Age; a multitude of his papers have been preserved, along with myriad emails and text messages). Despite that, there were multiple layers to Blundy's story that Tom could never have uncovered from Blundy alone, despite his deep scholarship.