Living at the End of Time: On Ian McEwan’s ‘What We Can Know’

  

The enigmatic title of Ian McEwan’s latest novel might more accurately be phrased as a question: What can we know? How are we to understand the world we inhabit, except by extrapolating the venality and compromises of the present? And what better medium for such an inquiry than fiction?

 

While reading What We Can Know, I could not shake the memory of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.  Each work is an intellectual high-wire act, in which one generation of scholars attempts to reconstruct the lives of an earlier one from fragmentary evidence—documents, marginalia, artifacts that have outlived their creators. Where Stoppard’s characters look back two centuries, McEwan’s scholars inhabit the early twenty-second century and look back at us. Both works are haunted by the same ghostly reciprocity: one generation watching another, unknowingly observed in return.

 

McEwan’s novel is not science fiction in any sensational sense. It feels instead like a plausible extension of the world we already know—a future shaped by environmental neglect and geopolitical recklessness, their consequences long deferred and then catastrophically realized. Europe has splintered into archipelagos; America has devolved into a feudal landscape ruled by warlords; and what remains of human knowledge is preserved in remote libraries and through the aptly named “Nigerian Internet Network.” The novel operates as a layered cautionary tale, not least in its treatment of privacy. We, clinging to the illusion that encryption and passwords protect us, are gently mocked by a future narrator who knows better:

 

“I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, just whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard on the screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.”

 

By the mid-2030s, the term “the Derangement” comes into common usage, a litany of climate catastrophe—its effects so often rehearsed that they weary activists and skeptics alike. The phrase carries an added implication: a collective cognitive failure, our bias toward short-term comfort over long-term survival. Humanity itself is deranged. More quietly still, belief in progress collapses, along with belief in a future.

 

By the mid-twenty-first century, the world confronts what the novel chillingly calls “the fatal concept of limited nuclear war.” A poorly engineered Russian missile, aimed at the southern United States, detonates prematurely in the mid-Atlantic, triggering tsunamis that devastate Europe, West Africa, and the eastern seaboard of North America. Suspicion that the blast may have been deliberate pushes the world to the brink of retaliation before a fragile peace is hastily imposed.

 

If this sounds fantastical, it does not read that way. McEwan writes with such assurance and precision that the imagined future feels less like prophecy than consequence. He is very much at the height of his powers, able to compress centuries into a sentence, as when he observes that “the mighty past wears hard against the present, like oceans, wind, and rain on limestone cliffs.”

 

Yet all of this is prologue. The heart of the novel lies with two future scholars, Professors Thomas Metcalfe and Rose Church, among the dwindling number of literary historians in a world that now overwhelmingly favors the sciences over the humanities. Their shared obsession is a legendary 2014 poem by Francis Blundy, one of the great poets of the early twenty-first century: Corona for Vivian, written for his wife, Vivian. Blundy is likened to T. S. Eliot—“both poets had a Vivian in their lives…and a comfortable kind of English existence that masked turmoil and carelessness with the lives of others.” Only one copy of the poem is known to exist, handwritten on parchment for Vivian’s birthday.

 

The lives of Thomas and Rose in the twenty-second century are subtly braided with those of Francis and Vivian a century earlier. Thomas becomes so absorbed in Vivian’s story that he might be said to fall in love with her. Reflecting on his research into what came to be known as the “Second Immortal Dinner,” where the poem was first read in 2014, echoing the famous 1817 gathering attended by Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb, Thomas observes:

 

“If I look up from my papers… I can’t believe that I’m in a dream, and that my waking reality is within the pages of my hands… I could’ve been there. I am there. I know all that they do—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful… Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love.”

 

The emotional and sexual vitality of Francis and Vivian’s world stands in stark contrast to the diminished lives of Thomas and Rose. If McEwan is passing judgment, it may be here: seize the day. The novel is at once a mystery as well as of murder, infidelity, and secrecy, and a meditation on love in its many forms. It is a work of suspense, but also of tenderness, beautifully composed and deeply felt.

 

The twenty-first-century sections teem with characters and subplots; the twenty-second is spare, almost austere, survival having displaced social abundance. Yet even amid catastrophe, life continues, if with reduced expectations. Outrage follows outrage; democracy erodes; and still people cook, teach, love, and endure. McEwan’s structure reinforces this vision: a first part that moves restlessly across time, followed by a second composed almost entirely of Vivian’s journal.

 

Until then, Vivian has existed largely in outline—as Francis’s devoted wife. Her journal transforms her into something richer and more autonomous. She recounts her intellectual formation, her first marriage to Percy, and her long-standing love affair with Francis’s brother-in-law, Harry—also Francis’s publisher. The journal is exquisitely written and becomes, through Thomas’s dogged persistence, recovered from a time capsule.

 

It also gives McEwan license to write some of his most piercing passages. After Vivian and Francis’s relationship becomes public, Francis publishes Feasting, a poetry collection that includes a love cycle devoted to her. Against all expectations, it becomes a bestseller and is later adapted into a film. Vivian finds herself transformed—first exposed, then abstracted, finally erased into symbol. McEwan captures this with surgical precision:

 

“I felt sliced open and pinned wide for public inspection, like a dissected frog….I did not complain, and later, I was glad I hadn’t, for this was a vanishing process. It was me when I saw the proof, then me and not me when I saw my first finished copy, until finally, diluted and disseminated in multiple thousands of printed versions of myself, I faded into the typeface, and it was no longer me at all.  What remained was not even a woman, but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination.“

 

To avoid spoilers, I will end this impression (“review” feels too exhaustive) abruptly. Whether that time capsule also contains the full text of Corona for Vivian is best left to the reader. For me, the novel’s deepest truth lies in Thomas’s reflection near the end:

 

“Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this is what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending—or, Vivian, Rose, and I—teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk [a literary superstar of the 2030s], and the rest…. We can’t care. We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less…. Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.”

 

To give Vivian’s journal, The Confessions of Vivian Blundy, its final measure of verisimilitude, McEwan appends a brief note as the end of the novel, one I reproduce below. It is not a spoiler. It simply closes Confessions the way history so often does: with a record, not an explanation.

 

'Arcadia' – Stoppard’s Intellectual Repartee Reigns at Dramaworks

Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia is a play of ideas.  Although the love of learning is a central theme, it explores the dangers of deducing history from tidbits of clues.   Matters of the heart and sexual desire are laid bare, as well as the connectedness of all who have come before and those who will follow, questioning the very fate of the human species.  Conflicting views of free will vs. determinism, chaos vs. predictability are among a dizzying array of concepts explored, and yet the play is basically a farce, laugh out loud at times.  The language is elegant, poetic, and profound, even Shakespearian.

Arcadia is a challenging play to produce and equally challenging to watch, Stoppard asking the best from both sides of the 4^th wall.  If you are willing to let the ideas just flow and not get caught up in the myriad cerebral details, Dramaworks delivers the goods in a remarkable production.

The action takes place in the Coverly’s country home in Derbyshire England, Sidley Park, alternating from scene to scene between the early 19^th and the late 20^th centuries.  One is an age of change as Classical is giving way to Romanticism, only years after the American and French Revolutions.  This part of the play is juxtaposed to the beat of today’s scientific and exploratory pulse.  The 20^th century characters are trying to unravel what happened there nearly 200 years before from remnants of documents and some preconceived assumptions. 

Caitlin Cohn and Ryan Zachary Ward

In 1809 a brilliant 13 year old mathematics and science student, Thomasina Coverly, is being tutored by a gifted young man, Septimus Hodge.  She spurns his preference for Euclidean geometry, seeing instead – way before her time – a more complicated mathematical representation of nature itself.  She also craves a more thorough knowledge of “carnal embrace” as she is cognizant of a number of sexual dalliances happening on the estate.  Both roles are played by actors making their PBD debuts.  Caitlin Cohn is the playful and mercurial young genius Thomasina, who hangs onto every word her tutor utters.  Although Cohn is only in her early 20’s, she is an experienced actor of exceptional talent, craftily mesmerizing the audience. 

Ryan Zachary Ward’s Septimus is an attentive teacher and scholar who never is at a loss for words.  His performance is always riveting, whether he is toying with an adversary or discussing a tryst, and particularly when he delivers a consoling monologue which encapsulates the play’s philosophical foundation, saying to Thomasina “…your lesson book…will be lost when you are old.  We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.  The procession is very long and life is very short.  We die on the march.  But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it….Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” 

Caitlin Cohn and Margery Lowe

The estate’s matriarch is Thomasina’s mother, Lady Croom, whose libido as well as her nobility must be indulged.  She is considering her landscape architect’s recommendation to abandon the garden’s classical motif in favor of the increasingly popular romantic, gothic design.  The always dependable PBD veteran, Margery Lowe, plays Lady Croom with an imperiousness befitting the role.

Septimus and Thomasina have three academic counterparts in the 20^th century, each tackling a scholarly endeavor.  There is the caustic Hannah Jarvis, a published author, currently researching the transformation of the estate’s garden, as well as attempting to unravel the mystery of the “hermit of Sidley Park.”  She is in a battle of wits with Bernard Nightingale, a don who has arrived to score what he thinks will be a major scholarly scoop, that the romantic and mystical poet, Lord Byron, was in a duel at the estate and killed a minor poet of the time, Ezra Chater, currently a guest of Lady Croom. We never see Byron on stage although he is an important part of the play.

Peter Simon Hilton and Vanessa Morosco

Peter Simon Hilton who plays Nightingale and Vanessa Morosco as Hannah are also making their PBD debuts.  They are husband and wife who have played opposite one another in many other productions, and they reveal that edge of familiarity, delivering Stoppard’s barbed dialogue to perfection.  Their acerbic and competitive sparring is delectable and their performances outstanding.

The 20^th century estate is still in the Coverly family.  Valentine Coverly, generations removed from Thomasina, is the mathematical sleuth, frequently asked by Hannah to interpret the shreds of evidence from the past.  He too is involved in research, centering on the estate’s grouse population revealed in the records kept in the family Game books, “his true inheritance…two hundred years of real data on a plate.”  He views this data as fodder for chaos theory, another dominant theme of the play, life moving from order to disorder.  Hannah asks to what end?  “I publish,” he says and Hannah amusingly replies, “Of course.  Sorry, Jolly good.”  Valentine is played by Britt Michael Gordon (his PBD debut as well) with a breathless enthusiasm as well as a deepening frustration explaining the complexity of the mathematical concepts, all the while hoping to seduce Hannah. 

Dispassionate Hannah, while rejecting the romantic advances of both Valentine and Bernard, focuses on the garden of that era, calling it "the Gothic novel expressed in landscape.  Everything but vampires."    As to the hermit, she says "He's my peg for the breakdown of the Romantic imagination... the whole Romantic sham….It's what happened to the Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and fake beauty... The decline from thinking to feeling, you see."

Morosco emphatically delivers a key takeaway for the audience as Hannah says to Valentine, “It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point.  It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

Among the farcical hilarity of the 19^th century sexual dalliances are those of Charity Chater who we never see on stage.  Veteran PBD actor Cliff Burgess plays the undistinguished poet, her dandy husband, Ezra, to perfection as he hopelessly and hilariously tries to defend his wife’s “honor,” challenging Septimus Hodge to a duel, demanding “satisfaction.”  This leads to an irresistibly quotable retort by Septimus, delivered by Ryan Zachary Ward with precise comic timing: “Mrs. Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction.  I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.” 

Captain Brice, Lady Croom’s brother, is yet another paramour of Mrs. Chater who finally sweeps her off her feet and takes her, as well as her husband to the West Indies.  Brice is haughtily played with righteous indignation by Gary Cadwallader, who is also PBD’s Director of Education and Community Engagement.

Finally, the two halves of the play come together, with both the 19^th century and the 20^th century casts on stage at the same time, talking over one another, sometimes turning pages of books in tandem, but never interacting.  One thinks of Valentine’s statement earlier in the play, “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is,” as two couples, one from each century, waltz on stage.  After such an intellectual exercise, these are the tender, loving moments the audience has longed for.  Stoppard saves the best for last.

Veteran PBD director, J. Barry Lewis, had a vision which prevails throughout the play and can be appreciated by his deft handling of his talented cast.  As he said, “Symbolism is significant in the work but if it eclipses the reality that would be a failure.  It must be about human nature and the unpredictability of love. How do we filter out the noise that encroaches on our lives to find the truth?”

Arcadia Scenic Design by Anne Mundell

Lewis has been aided by an outstanding team of collaborators.  The scenic design is by Ann Mundell, her PBD debut.  Her ethereal set is a marvel to admire, representing both the classical and romantic elements.  There are French glass doors to the garden and two solid doors on each side, perfect for slamming, fast entering and exiting, as in a traditional British farce.  The monochromatic set has led veteran Brian O'Keefe’s costume designs to showcase his creativity and skill, as he said, “to develop costumes which do not disappear into the set on the one hand, but not have them be so bold that they stand out too much.” They are of course period appropriate, easily taken for granted as they so perfectly match the characters’ personalities.

Donald Edmund Thomas’ lighting design shows no distinction between the two time periods, further reinforcing connectivity.  Sound design by Steve Shapiro has incorporated the requisite barking dog, gun shots from the outdoors, and as piano music figures prominently in the play, some classical piano during the 19^th century scenes, transitioning to more modern, yet still a classical feel for the 20^th century.  He even dramatically clues us into the first such change by a very conspicuous roar, presumably a jet plane.

It is a large cast.  Stoppard knows how to draw distinctive, passionate characters and everyone is spot on.  In addition to those already mentioned are Dan Leonard as Jellaby, the 19^th century butler who facilitates gossip, James Andreassi as Richard Noakes (PBD debut), the dashing landscape architect who is always trying to placate Lady Croom’s whims, Arielle Fishman, a flirtatious Chloë Coverly (PBD debut), Valentine’s sister who thinks sex might impact chaos theory, and Casey Butler playing two roles, Augustus, Thomasina’s bratty older brother as well as Valentine and Chloë’s mute brother, Gus.

Widely acclaimed as one of the greatest intellectual plays of the 20^th century, Arcadia is brought vividly to life by Dramaworks, characters dancing at the end “…till there’s no time left.  That’s what time means.”