On 20 May 2119 I took a the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at the small quay near Maentwrog-under-Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library.
The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter -- it's in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself.
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately. (Publisher)
Review: Back in 2014, Francis Blundy, a renowned poet and thinker-of-day, wrote a poem as a birthday gift for his wife -- A Corona for Vivien. He read the poem, made up of 15 interlocking Petrarchan sonnets. aloud to his wife and the other people assembled for the birthday dinner. Afterwards a lot of made of the poem and the dinner party but no one ever saw the poem or had a chance to read it with their own eyes. It simply disappeared. The poem, in its absence, took on great meaning because it was thought to have said something profound about climate change.
A century later, after the cataclysmic nuclear wars and rising sea levels have changed life on Earth as we know it, a professor of literature specializing in the years 1990-2030, Tom Metcalfe, makes a difficult trip, via bike, ferry, and funicular to the Bodleian library to learn everything he could learn about the poet and his most famous, missing poem. Mining the Internet for everything there was to know about the Blundy, he says, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, the corona is still missing and Metcalfe would like nothing better than being the person who finds it and reveals it to the world.
In part two, Vivien takes over the story, and we learn about what really happened with the Blundys and she reveals a secret of huge and serious proportions.
What We Can Know is a complex, sometimes confusing, but very rewarding novel. It had a lot to say about what our future may look like. There were also some really interesting insights into academia, particularly about the humanities and literature. The book, the story, the plot were all rich.
My rating: 4.25
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