Ian McEwan's 2024 novel 'What We Can Know' is an impressive achievement. A historian in the year 2119 is researching the work of the early 21st century poet Francis Blundy and, in particular, his legendary missing poem from 2014, 'A Corona for Vivien'. To frame this scholarly literary detective story, McEwan has constructed a detailed history of the next 100 years, complete with climate disasters, nuclear war and more. But what he is really exploring is the unreliability of historical written sources, control of one's own narrative and the making of myths. It's an incredibly clever novel which I think I enjoyed all the more because I hadn't heard anything about it before reading and had no idea where it was going.
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