What We Can Know

"שאיפתי ברומן הזה הייתה לאפשר לעבר, להווה ולעתיד לשוחח ביניהם, מעבר למחסומי הזמן", אמר הסופר הבריטי המוערך איאן מקיואן (Ian McEwan) על ספרו ה-18, What We Can Know (כאן בכריכה קשה), שעלילתו מתרחשת כמעט מאה שנים בעתיד, בשנת 2119, לאחר שיותר ממחצית מאוכלוסיית העולם הוכחדה, והים הטביע את לונדון וערים ענקיות אחרות. 

2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come, people will speculate about the message of this poem, the only copy of  which goes missing, leading to an enduring mystery.

2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the planet has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the waterlogged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, “A Corona for Vivien.” When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s location, a story is revealed of entangled loves, long-kept secrets, and a brutal crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece: a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, and a literary detective story that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.