A book recommendation: Ian McEwan’s “What We Can Know”

I decided when I read the NYT review of Ian McEwan’s latest (and 18th) novel, What We Can Know, that I had to read the book.  (Click the screenshots to read the review if you have NYT access, or find the review archived here.)  I quote some of the encomiums from the review:

Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is brash and busy — it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.

McEwan has put his thumb on the scale. This is melodramatic, storm-tossed stuff. There is murder, a near kidnapping, a child hideously dead of neglect, multiple revenge plots, buried treasure and literary arson. Writers treat other writers’ manuscripts and reputations the way Sherman treated Georgia. No one is a moral paragon.

. . . I’m hesitant to call “What We Can Know” a masterpiece. But at its best it’s gorgeous and awful, the way the lurid sunsets must have seemed after Krakatau, while also being funny and alive. It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.

I had to get it via interlibrary loan, and since it’s new it took some time. But I did get it, and read the 300-page book in a week. And yes, it’s excellent.

I’m a fan of McEwan, and especially like his novels Atonement (made into a terrific movie) and the Booker-winning Amsterdam. This one also does not disappoint. The NYT gives a plot summary, but I’ll just say that it’s a novel about a poem, and the action takes place over two years more than a century apart: 2014 and  2119. A well-known British poet named Francis laboriously pens a “corona” poem for his wife Vivien on her 53rd birthday. It would be hard to write a normal corona, much less one that, like this one, is said to be a masterpiece. Here’s what the form comprises according to Wikipedia:

A crown of sonnets or sonnet corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or concerned with a single theme. Each of the sonnets explores one aspect of the theme, and is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line. The first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, thereby bringing the sequence to a close.

Imagine how hard that would be to write, as the first lines have to form a stand-alone sonnet, and rhyme properly, when put in sequence at the end! To see an example, go here, though the corona has only 12 rather than 14 included sonnets.  At any rate, Francis’s poem gets a national reputation although Francis won’t let it be reproduced or published; it is read aloud on Vivien’s birthday to a dozen guests and then given to her, handwritten on vellum. But only Vivien sees it in print.

Over a hundred years later, with the world devastated by nuclear exchanges, global warming, and skirmishes, a scholar named Thomas Metcalfe, specializing in poetry of the early 2000s, decides to track down the corona to see why it was so renowned despite being unpublished (a nostalgia for the past pervades the 22nd century). As he searches for the work, the story flips back and forth between the 21st and 22nd centuries, giving us two casts of characters, both of which engage in adultery and, in the earlier century, crime.  These intrigues determine the fate of the poem, but I won’t give away the ending. The novel starts a bit slowly, but builds momentum to a roller-coaster finish.  And yes, it’s the best novel of McEwan’s I’ve read since Atonement.

This one I recommend highly.  I keep hoping that McEwan, like Kazuo Ishiguro, will win a Nobel Prize, for he’s pretty close to that caliber. (I tend to lump the authors together for some reason.) But do read it if you like good fiction, and dystopian fiction even more. Two thumbs up!

By the way, it makes constant references to things going on in 2014: cellphones, social media, and people prominent today. I was surprised to find on p. 282 (near the end) a reference to Steve Pinker.  In the earlier century, the pompous poet Francis and his wife invite a couple over to dinner, and the man, named Chris, who is relatively uneducated, uses the word “hopefully” in a sentence, meaning “I hope”.  That was (and is to me) a faux pas, and Francis rebukes the speaker at the dinner table, saying that he doesn’t want to hear that word in his house again. (What a twit!)  But at a later dinner, Chris, rebuked again for the same word, takes Francis apart, showing how he used the word properly and, in addition, a bloke named Pinker said it was okay (I presume this is in Pinker’s book A Sense of Style).  Here’s the passage on p. 282. Chris is speaking and explaining how he discovered that it’s okay to say “hopefully”:

“I don’t know a thing. First time Francis jumped down my throat, I look on Harriet’s shelves. She poined me towards Burchfield’s Fowler and a bloke called Pinker. Seems like some ignorant snob years back picked on hopefully, and a mob of so-called educated speakers got intimidated and joined in and scared each other into never using the word and crapping on anyone who did. Pathetic!”

Below is the book with a link to the publisher. Read it. And, of course, my reviews hopefully will prompt readers to tender their own recommendations. If you have such a book, please name it and tell us why you liked it in the comments below.