What can we truely know about past lives?

 "On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry . . . " So begins Part 1 of What We Can Know by Ian McEwan. 

The narrator telling us his story is Thomas Metcalfe, a literary scholar in what remains of the British isles, now an archipelago of small islands after the ice caps have melted the the seas have drowned coastal cities. Metcalfe is specialist in early 21st century literature with a consuming interest in Francis Blundy, a major British poet, right up there with Eliot, Larkin, and Heaney.

What We Can Know is an unusually rich and interesting novel. McEwan has evoked a plausible future history, one in which local nuclear wars have polluted the atmosphere, humanity has had to create new food sources, local warlords fight for limited resources, the world's population is less than half what it was in 2019, and life expectancy is barely 62 years.

Still, scholarship exists. All the world's email, text, and electronic chatter has been deciphered, exists and, under the right conditions, is available to researchers. Metcalfe has been searching for years for an extraordinary poem, "A Crown for Vivian," that Blundy wrote for his wife's birthday. Metcalfe knows when Blundy wrote it, knows who attended the party when he read it, knows that Blundy destroyed all his notes and drafts giving Vivian the one hand-written vellum copy, knows the guests' reactions to the masterpiece from a magazine account written by one of the dinner's guests. What he doesn't know is poem's content or its location. It will be a major scholarly coup if he can find and publish it. 

Part 1 is Metcalfe's account of his research, It includes a fascinating discussion of the biographer's art and challenges —even with access to a subject's entire electronic history, his papers, and an ocean of material from and about the people around him. It is also the story of Metcalfe's own romantic history. It's a rich and engaging story. In fact, with a few tweaks at the end, Part 1 could stand alone as an interesting piece of academic science fiction. But then there's Part 2.

Part 2 is narrated by Vivian, Blundy's now-widowed wife. The action takes place in early 21st century and ends around 2020. We learn much more about Vivian's first husband than Metcalfe told us and about her long-running affair with Blundy's brother-in-law. We learn many things Metcalfe did not know, could not know. Indeed, the novel  could have been titled What Can We Know? 

Because the only honest answer is "Not much," that title is somewhat off-putting, so forge it. I would hate to discourage anyone from reading this brilliant, imaginative novel..