Review “What we can know”: In the future of Ian Macan, the past is out of reach

In our tribal culture and intense division, when consensus is imaginary and we cannot agree on even the most basic facts, the idea of ​​joint history as a social principle has left the building. But if we already live in the post -truth era, Ian McCan is here to tell us that things will get worse.

During his new reign, Binda from a novel, the great British novelist assumes that the past has ended in an equal way, especially in the issues of the human heart, and any attempt by historians or biography to earn it to the present time is foolishness – or in the case of the hero of this novel Thomas Mettalfi, and intellectual anger.

Metcalfe is an associate professor of humanities and a researcher who lives in England in the 22nd century (2119, precisely), who took upon itself to cancel the lock of the mystery of a poem called “Corona to Vivian”, which he wrote in 2014 by a deceased literary tolerance called Francis Blondi, which is an adjective, we learn, at all, a competitor for Seamus. The poem was composed of his wife’s birthday dinner in October 2014, an evening that captured legendary dimensions in some academic circles in the decisive years. It even contains the name: Khaled Thani’s dinner, where he read Blondi for the first time Horona, a poem consisting of a series of Sonatat, which was lost long ago.

In the literary universe in Metcalfe, the Blundy poem is important because it is a technique. In the decisive years, explanatory speculation has been turned around. Some have given it a warning about climate change. Others say that Blondi has paid a six -digit amount by Taqah to suppress the poem. There are only fragments of it, some fleeing lines that appear in the correspondence between Vivian, Baldi and Blaondi, Harold T. Ketchner. Metcalfe has taken it upon itself to find the lost document for a long time, claiming that it was written by Blundy to pass a film and bury Vivien somewhere on Blundy property.

The mission of Metcalfe is largely complicated by the fact that it lives in a future world where a lot of the planet has been removed or immersed underwater by a nuclear disaster that MCEWAN calls “immersion”. There was also a mass migration – “jamming” – where millions, deprived of resources and lands, were transferred from England to Africa. The entire cities lost, “The earth under it is compressed and lower, so it did not describe, but it continued like the ice lakes.” Whatever the learning warehouses that are not destroyed are now on a higher land in the mountains, where “the base of knowledge and collective memory is largely preserved.”

The built environment has eroded, but fortunately for Motalf, the digital world in the past is sound. MCEWAN writes, from a biography of 2000 on a rookie, “heirs of more than a century of what is called the Blundy era in general” The Cloud “expanding like the giant summer Cumulus, although it simply consists of data storage machines.” Here in the cloud, there are hundreds of Blundy emails, his wife and circle, allowing Metcalfe to be satisfied to know that he can collect the events of the dimensional dinner to the granular details: the used table tools, prepared foods are prepared.

What Metcalfe knows about Blundys’s life together can be obtained from the 12 volumes of Vivien magazines. From the magazines, Metcalfe stored that Vivian, a wonderful researcher and literary teacher, who deliberately lived her marriage under the shadow of Blundy, the amazing maid to literary tolerance. “I enjoyed the production of a meal that has turned well,” Metcal is assumed. “She was one day without, a candidate for a professor. Abandoning it was editor. I always felt in control. But she surprised her how … she emptied herself from ambition, salary, situation and achievement.”

Despite the formation of details, Metcalfe knows that he must find the lost poem, and that it is the main stone that collapses the story without importance. If he fails in this Metcalfe task, where he already felt that he was “infiltrated on the intentions and accomplishments” Blundy “, Mujo loses: his mission was thwarted, and his career stopped.

But when it seems as if Metcalfe, after a long and arduous journey across the ground and water, he discovered something important, MCEWAN drops the curtain on that story, returns to the narration of 107 years, to Vivien Blundy and her story. Initially, the basic features correspond to the Metcal version of the events: Vivian abandoned her academic ambitions to Blondi, who wrote a poem to her who read loudly on her birthday, and so on.

But Metcalfe, as it turned out, has the correct details and wrong motives, never more when MCEWAN reveals the fact of a murder, it was conceived in a way that no academic could not discover at all. Email messages are composed yet. Digital correspondence is deleted in ether, which are leakage outside the understanding of the CV. Metcal’s thesis is driven by a romantic concept of Blondi’s life, but as MCEWAN is carefully and carefully, his poem, outwardly, is “warehouse of dreams”, is very similar to a negative. As for Vivian, the narration she presented in her magazines is far from the entire story. She is upset with Blondi, thwarted in her career, and ends with discontent. Despite its scientific argument, Metcalfe moves in a wrong path that will not win the facts with live experience.

Of course, facts We are Important, but they do not necessarily reveal anything; The foolishness of the CV is to attribute a deeper meaning for them, to extrapolate the truth from a different series of events. Metcalf’s endeavor to revelation in one lost poem is magic thinking, and he holds unnecessarily to Chemera. MCEWAN is an organized and provocative novel elegantly a strong argument about the lack of raw data, or even the most amazing art, which can tell us about humans and their opposition reliable.

Weingarten is the author of “Thresty: William Mulholland, California Water, and Chinatown Real.