What We Can Know

For a writer of historical fiction, a researcher, a historiographer, this book concerns things that obsess me. The wonderful Ian McEwan, in What We Can Know addresses all these questions that I confront every day : Is it true? Is the source reliable? Who recorded this and what was their motive? What did they miss? What’s been misinterpreted? What aren’t they saying? What happened to the records? Can I assume that…?

Here’s a book written in triple time. We have the life of the researcher in the future, the story he interprets from the historical records, and what actually happened in the past. And all of these things still beg the same questions: Is it biased? Whose point of view? How can I verify that? What’s being held back?

God, I love all this stuff.

The part I find really clunky, surprisingly so for the insanely talented McEwan, is the vast chunks of exposition detailing the apocalypse, or in McEwan-speak, the Inundation and the Derangement. I think he packed this in because he was enjoying sending us to our doom and punishing our inaction, but these interventions disrupt the story. We could have worked it out. He spells out, to his ‘Literature in English 1990 to 2030’ students (and us):

“We spoke of the newly created inland seas, enlarged over time by increased rainfall. The land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they did not drain, but persisted like glacial lakes. Scores of vanished cities. (We showed old pictures of Glasgow, New York and Lagos.) The globalised economy and its distribution networks broken. Markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times. Those science and technology institutes, seed- and databanks, museums, libraries and universities not destroyed took to the hills and mountains. The knowledge base and collective memory were largely preserved, along with the internet, mostly maintained later by Nigeria, whose rise we also covered. Heavy industry and fossil-fuel use collapsed.”

The 90-30s – these halcyon years in which we live – are humanities’ glory days. And here was I thinking they are still ahead of us. The plot of the book is set then (2014), focused around a birthday party for a woman, Vivian, with whom our future historian has fallen in love (and don’t we all fall in love with our historical characters?), and he pursues her history. Vivian’s husband, Frances Blundy, for whom she’s given up an academic literary career so she can pander to him, is arguably, the best poet since Shakespeare and he has written her a poem. Our historian, Tom, lives in 2119. He’s looking for the poem.

Interestingly, in McEwan’s world, history mostly survives as digital records. Every email, text, receipt, hotel booking etc has survived in Nigeria’s vast data banks. “We know everything that passed between Francis and his agent, publishers and translators, accountant, doctor and solicitor. Even his and Vivien’s browsing habits are now obtainable. Messages sent by end-to- end encryption have been laid bare.” Is McEwan teasing us here – is this history as reliable as an African Prince with an investment proposal? In my vision of the future, our digital records disappear in a sun flare and we, the 90-30s become a forgotten generation, our paperless lives leaving scant record of our literature and letters and quotidian lives. Tom, however, has all the full digital back-stories of all the participants at Vivian’s birthday party. The poem, however, is hand-written on paper. It is a gift from a man to his wife: he reads it aloud and hands her the only copy. It’s an extraordinary poem, everyone says so. Surely someone, sometime, made a copy?

Tom’s present, in the 22nd Century, is a bleak vision of the future. Humanity is still around, albeit shakily. I never really engaged with this part of the story, with Tom and his wife’s strained lives in post-apocalyptic Britain. It seemed a bit sketchy. That the language hadn’t changed (taking that particular burden off the author) is explained away by the internet, which has such accumulated weight that it holds our utterances steady. They ride wooden e-bikes while divers search sunken cities for metal to repurpose. Travel is unreliable and dangerous. There’s nothing particularly imaginative here, the future just a device on which to perch to look back on us as history. This isn’t sci-fi.

I did laugh at the comeuppance McEwan give USA: “I’ve often dreamed of making an Atlantic crossing, if I ever had the funds. From what I’d heard, as soon as these passengers landed in America they would need to pay for the protection of a local warlord. The politics were complicated. Various armies and their offshoots were fighting to inherit the spirit and legitimacy of a glorious imperial past.”

It was the story of Vivian and her life that gripped me, first as interpreted by Tom in his historical investigations for her poem, and secondly as she tells it herself, all flesh and blood.

What We Can Know is the title of the novel, and also an explanation of the limit of Tom’s work. Historians can gather everything recorded about a person, an event, a time, but that is all they get, and it’s precious little. So much of life is fleeting, uncaptured. It is simply not possible to go back in time and know.

Tom thinks he knows Vivian.

Hello part two, where Vivian tells her story.

All We Can Know is a magnificent, cautionary tale of what we think we know of history.