Books in Conversation

Book Club

I suspect many readers have had the experience of reading a book which inspires the desire to write a book. In my case, it was The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco, for reasons too prosaic to mention. I also suspect many writers write directly or indirectly in response to books they have read. Someone, who might have been George Steiner but I cannot remember, said that most books are responses to other books, that books in a sense converse with one another. I have on occasion read a book from which I can identify the book or books to which it is a response. For example, I am mostly certain that The Name of the Rose is a response to a Sherlock Holmes book and a very fat history of medieval monasticism, just as I am fairly certain every word Alex Michaelides pens is in reply to And Then There Were None, and Susan Sontag’s writings are a long conversation with Andre Gide. Sometimes, no guessing is required, as in What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, which I just read for my book club.

What We Can Know was selected by the club at my suggestion, based exclusively on the Amazon description, which seemed intriguing, and the New York Times review, which was fairly positive. I enjoyed the novel, assuming enjoyment does not signify happiness. It is not a happy book—environmental disasters and nuclear strikes have eliminated almost half of the world’s population and the remainder live on islands—but it is enjoyable. McEwan’s prose is beautiful, not in the poetic sense of many of his countrymen, but in its cleverness. He has a knack for getting a character from Point A to Point B in an interesting, occasionally ingenious, and to be repetitive, clever manner. None of the characters are particularly likable, except for Francis Blundy whom we are supposed to dislike because he is a climate change denier, which equals villain in McEwan’s world, but I loved him because he was such an over the top “famous poet” I could not resist. McEwan has a way of writing not nice, selfish, petty people such that they are interesting and fully human, to the extent that the reader feels like she “knows someone just like that” about all of the characters (except, again, Francis Blundy, because people like that are, for better or worse, rare). My favorite part of the book is the ostensible plot, which is a literary mystery. In 2014, Francis Blundy, a “famous poet,” writes a poem for his wife’s birthday, entitled “A Corona for Vivien,” which he reads at a dinner party. No copies are made, the poem is never read in public again, and it is never published. Just over a century later, scholar Thomas Metcalfe searches for the lost poem in a changed world.

McEwan is explicit about the book What We Can Know uses as its interlocutor. The epigraph is a quote from the British biographer Richard Holmes’ book about the friendship between Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage. The quote, about the role of the biographer, gives the novel its title. Thomas, who narrates the first half of the book, reminisces about his start in literary biography, when he was an early twenties graduate student searching for a dissertation topic. He happens upon a book by Richard Holmes titled Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, written in the distant year of 1985. McEwan devotes about two pages to summarizing a section of Holmes’ book, about a twelve-day journey Holmes took through France following Robert Louis Stevenson’s journey of a century earlier as explicated in Stevenson’s journals. I happened to have read and loved Footsteps, so my delight at its mention may be assumed. Imagine my delight, then, as I continued to read and discovered that the entire novel is written in conversation with Holmes’ wonderful book.

Footsteps considers how Holmes became a biographer through the stories of several of his literary detective jobs, searching for Robert Louis Stevenson, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gerard de Nerval, largely in France and Italy. The book is really a seminar in the craft of biography, and also travel writing, imaginative thinking, and literary sleuthing, the last being the focus of What We Can Know. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Holmes was searching for subjects who lived in the eighteenth century. Their historical records consisted largely of their published writings, journals, and letters, as well as those of their circles, the family, friends, and others who knew them and, crucially, wrote to and/or about them. McEwan set his sleuth in the future, 2119 to be exact, in a world that has suffered sufficient catastrophes to make it very different from our present-day environs. The historical records he considers are very different—emails, online articles, and the personal journals that have survived the aforementioned catastrophes. Many of the old-fashioned things, specifically books and letters, are out of reach because they either don’t exist or they are in places that, due to the aforementioned catastrophes, are unreachable. Except, it turns out, one isn’t. Thanks to some tantalizing information contained in the journals of Blundy’s wife, Vivien, Thomas is convinced that the elusive poem does exist, buried in a remote but ultimately reachable location. He sets out with his own wife on a journey much like Holmes’, to follow the trail of Vivien Blundy who, Thomas believes, buried the only copy of the poem near the Blundy home.

McEwan’s conversation with Holmes ends on what I read as an ironic note. Thomas does find the buried box Vivien’s journal suggests, but it does not contain the poem. Rather, it contains a prose document which tells the “real” story of the poem and the people involved with it. It turns out that a handwritten document over a century old contains the “real” story. Sound familiar? What We Can Know is high concept, written in literary fashion, yet it somehow ends with a plot twist worthy of a modern thriller, like Gone Girl or Where the Crawdads Sing. In the word of a fellow book club member, “Wow.” It struck me, during my book club’s discussion of What We Can Know, that any reader is in conversation as he reads—with himself, with other readers, with the author, with the book, and with other books. And while the reader is conversing, so are the books, with each other and with us. It’s a wonderful conversation, going on all around us, every time we open a book.