Unfortunately, the first book I read by Ian McEwan was Atonement. Why was that unfortunate? Because it was his best book, and it spoiled me; everything of his I read after that was something of a letdown. While I could be impressed by the technical mastery of having the action all take place in one day (Saturday) or allowing a fetus to serve as first-person narrator (Nutshell), I found the fundamental cynicism of On Chesil Beach and Solar to be troublesome. It was as if McEwan had contrived plots to set up his characters for improbable disasters. So I took a break from him for a while. Then the rave reviews for his latest, What We Can Know, persuaded me that I should give him another chance. I’m glad that I did. With this novel McEwan has written an indictment of our current society’s denial of the obvious dangers we’re creating for ourselves. In many ways it’s an old-fashioned political novel in the spirit of Dickens, Orwell, and Atwood.
Set roughly 100 years from now, What We Can Know initially unfolds through the point of view of Thomas Metcalfe, a British academic, a professor of literature specializing in the period roughly between 1990 and 2030. This device allows McEwan to comment freely on the obtuseness through which we ignore obvious problems of our own immediate past, present day, and prospects for the immediate future. But the primary driver of the plot is Metcalfe’s search for a lost poem by the poet Francis Blundy, described as the rival of Seamus Heaney for the title of greatest poet of his day. People have been searching fruitlessly for this poem ever since the now-legendary dinner party when Blundy presented the one and only copy of the poem to his wife, Vivien, in honor of her birthday. Ever since that night, when Blundy read “A Corona for Vivien” aloud to a small group of guests, no one has seen the poem. Furthermore, Blundy destroyed all notes and drafts of this work, an intricate sonnet sequence, leaving the bedeviling mystery of what became of the original. For the past 100 years scholars have been searching for the one extant copy of the poem to no avail. So why would Metcalfe think that he can track down what has eluded the world for a century? What seems like a pointless search for lost manuscript becomes more practical when a clue to a possible place of concealment materializes.
Okay, you’re thinking, so what, these are very low stakes, there’s nothing original here. The whole lost manuscript plot has been around for ages. Consider Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to cite a couple of literary examples, but there seems to be at least one thriller or mystery per year built upon the search for a lost map or book or letter. So we think that we know where McEwan is going, and we follow for the sake of his trenchant insights into climate change denial and the madness of stockpiling nuclear weapons. But we’re so wrong. The final segment of his novel demands that we reconsider everything that we thought we knew about these characters, and the final pages fully satisfy our urge for resolution and our delight in being surprised. I will say no more to avoid spoilers.
The new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man also has fun with literary tropes, mostly those found in murder mysteries. Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed, did his apprenticeship as a mystery writer by reading extensively novels from the Golden Age of mystery—the 1920’s and 1930’s—with a special concentration on Agatha Christie. In this latest edition of the clever series, Johnson has concocted a variation on the locked-room mystery with lots of nods to his Golden Age predecessors. As he did in the first two movies, he has assembled an all-star cast, headed by the astonishing Josh O’Connor—astonishing because he can play any role, from brooding and morose (see God’s Own Country) to scheming and manipulative (Challengers) to cheerful and charming (The Durrells) to the earnest and principled priest he plays here—and Daniel Craig, reprising his role as Benoit Blanc, the brilliant detective who speaks in an accent derived, apparently, from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana and Deputy Dawg. It’s a long movie, but that simply allows for more plot twists and scenery-chewing from the likes of Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, Daryl McCormack, Andrew Scott, Mila Kunis, Thomas Haden Church, and Jeffrey Wright (Wright has a smallish part, but that just demonstrates the size of Johnson’s budget and the prestige of being in one of these Knives Out movies.)