What We Can Know: A Novel

Our narrator is Tom Metcalf a professor living in 2119 who is attempting to teach pre-apocalypse history to students who DGAF about it. He lives in the area of present-day Wales and in his time a set of islands (Maentwrog, Snowdonia now, at 974’ elevation is, in 2119, Maentwrog-under-Sea) Besides sea-level rise, its apparently hard/impossible to get coffee or chocolate, the center of scientific progress in the new world is Nigeria, the USA is now controlled by various warlord factions (but its hard to know because the internet is broken) and Earth’s population is below six billion.

“They did not want to know or think about a hostile sea. It bored them in advance. They lived on and among islands. So what? Fourteen young men and women were slumped around the table. They had grown up with the consequences, heard their grandparents go on about it. The past was peopled by idiots. Big deal. The matter was dead. The kids attended our course because it was compulsory. But they had moved on. What animated them in those days was a twenty-minute two-string bass guitar solo. Or possession of fashionable pale green and purple linen pants, worn low on the hips by both men and women and secured by a large tin buckle.”

Tom’s passion project is to find a poem, A Corona for Vivian, written in 2014 by Francis Blundy then recited one-time-only, at a 10-person dinner party. Blundy, a celebrity poet (think Tennyson or Lord Byron) and somehow the poem has taken on a legendary quality. Blundy was a climate sceptic and conspiracy theorists think the poem was suppressed by oil companies bribing him. Luckily 2014 had email and there are massive archive “paper” trails through which Tom can delve to find clues. That is the crux of the story: lives of Blundy, wife Vivian, family and friends as discovered through their saved correspondences and diaries.

Which all sounds pretty anodyne doesn’t it? And does anybody care about poetry?

“Chris nodded and said, "Yeah." Poetry had a lowering effect on him. Classical music too. Their cultural weight and solemnity and self-importance oppressed him. He suspected that people were subtly bullied into faking appreciation in order not to appear uneducated fools. Long ago he had proposed this to Harriet. She was so dismissive and irritated that he never mentioned it again. Among the craftsmen and women, marquee erectors and roadies he worked with, string quartets and sonnet sequences never came up.”

But there is a great deal to know about the lives of Vivian and Francis. Vivian comes to Blundy after a previous marriage to Percy who died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. That and on Tom’s end, research is not as easy as it could be because what was once available from your laptop now requires effort, boat-rides, time to go look at and read. Also, short of discovering the mythical poem, Metcalf intends to publish his Blundy research as “almost history”: facts interpolated with speculation: this is considered forbidden to a “historian.”

But, most importantly, somewhere in all that there is a very critical twist that I did not at all see coming. All of the above is my way of saying: YES! Read this book: come for the exemplary prose, stay for the mystery.