What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

 Monday, Feb. 17, 2025--San Antonio

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan was just recently released and has been called his best book in years.  I consider his novel Atonement to be one of the best I have ever read.  I have also read 3 other novels by him.  His books often involve retrospection, secrets, and consequences.  This one is no different.  It's actually two stories set 100 years apart.  One is the story of a British poet considered to be one of the greatest ever and set in today's time--the 2020s.  One of the puzzles of life is that he wrote a poem for his wife's birthday gift that follows a very detailed and difficult-to-write pattern, read it at a dinner party with their closest friends in attendance, and destroyed all the evidence of the poem except for the copy he gave as a gift to his wife that evening which was written out on vellum for her to keep.  Over the years, he and his wife die and the story of that birthday evening and the poem have grown in importance due to his celebrity as a poet and the interest of scholars and lovers of poems wanting to read the great poem and know what has happened to the single copy of it.  The other story takes place in the 2130s.  The discussions of the party and the poem continue to exist because the poet is still considered one of the greatest to have ever lived.  A professor has been researching the donated papers, the emails, the personal journals, the journalism articles, etc., with the hope of finding the missing poem and writing and publishing a book about the poet that, hopefully, would include the poem.  But in 2130, the world is a very different place.  It is hard to do research because of what has happened historically during the years.  There have been multiple wars between China and the USA, global warming has led to seas rising, and one big cataclysmic event occurred that compounded those problems.  In the world of the advanced time period, the population of the earth has decreased greatly, travel of any kind is difficult and is mainly restricted to nearby locations. People who still exist live on "islands" of land that continued to exist above the new higher water level after the effects of those events.  England is now an archipelago.  London and many other places are now totally under water.  But relationships among people continue to be similar to what they have always been--messy with affairs, disagreements, concerns about income and costs, etc.  I found the first part of the book, as the details were being laid out to describe how important the poet in the 2020s was, how he lived his life, how difficult the pattern was that he used for constructing the lost poem to his wife, etc., to be a bit tedious.  But the story had a bit of a snowball-type of growth.  By the middle of the book, I was very involved.  By the last quarter of the book, I didn't want to put it down.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.