The year is 2119, probably 100 years beyond when the novel was being written. The narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, an academic historian, is looking back to the period from 1990 to 2030 when a much-admired poet, Francis Blundy, is known to have written a long poem addressed to his wife Vivien to celebrate her birthday. She had a previous husband, Percy, a violin maker who is said to have died of early-onset dementia, and the new marriage has gradually deprived her of her role as a promising academic, consigning her to domesticity and the service of her new husband. Metcalfe’s research has caused him to conclude that Blundy was “vain, opinionated, mean-spirited, self-important, careless of others, ungenerous …” but nonetheless “a great poet”.
Blundy reads his birthday gift to assembled North Oxford literary folk, many of whom, I’m sure, bear close resemblance to McEwan’s actual neighbours when he lived there in the 1990s. (In fact, the poet James Fenton is mentioned in passing, as is Craig Raine and his journal Areté.)
The poem is presented to Vivien in a fancy vellum scroll, but no record is known to have survived of what she thought of it or did with it, and no drafts or manuscripts have been preserved. It was never published and myths have grown up around it – for example, that it may have forecast climate disaster and oil companies paid to have it suppressed. But, in fact, Metcalfe’s research has revealed Blundy had been an emphatic climate-change denier.
Meanwhile, the world has changed indeed. Most of the bad things predicted in Blundy’s time have happened – chiefly what has come to be known as “the Inundation” – but also wars (including nuclear exchanges) and economic crises and collapses. The human population has considerably dwindled and skin colour has evened to an almost universal brown. (Metcalfe thinks his forebears were Scottish and Pakistani.) There are hints that Nigeria is now the dominant world power but these are not developed. Our present is looked back on with nostalgia as a time when “there were more flowers, trees, insects, birds and mammals in the wild, the air was purer and less radioactive”, and you could travel from Oxford “in any direction for hours on dry land”.
The blindness, folly, greed and neglect of our seemingly golden time is blamed for the bad things that have happened since. America has broken up into warring factions, and in Britain, life goes on in what appears to be an archipelago of familiar locations connected largely by ferry. Universities have survived, where semiliterate and rebellious students, whose attention span does not stretch to the reading of whole books, study the past, including that period when Francis Blundy was so admired.
Tom Metcalfe feels he “finds himself in the wrong century”, and has made the quest for Blundy’s great but missing birthday gift his chief research project. He is joined in this by his colleague and wife Rose, and part one ends with an exciting sequence in which, following a secret map reference, they track down and dig up a steel box in which Vivien Blundy has buried her treasures. What it contains, however, is not the Blundy poem they were hoping for but the finest example of her first husband’s craft as a violin-maker and her own secret memoir.
Part two opens on a railway station platform with a characteristic McEwan incident, brilliantly managed, creating anxiety, ensuring attention. We might be in a new novel but have moved only back to our own time – and to Vivien before her marriage to Blundy. Her marriage to violin-maker Percy is cosy, loving, seeming sometimes almost idyllic. But he is a practical man not a reader, and the intellectual and literary part of her life is unsatisfied until it is filled by a secret affair with Harry Kitchener, a top Oxford academic who, like Vivien, is married.
When Percy’s dementia makes its appearance, we are taken through (with McEwan’s meticulousness in such matters) the horrors of Vivien’s daily dealing with the man she loves deeply but whose brain and body are gradually falling apart. She is too preoccupied for Harry, who soon acquires a new, younger mistress. Now, Vivien is alone, unhappy, beset by guilt and regrets, with nothing to claim for herself in the context of Oxford than that she has published one small book, a study of the relatively insignificant 19th-century nature poet John Clare, who spent his last days in an insane asylum believing he was Shakespeare.
It is out of these mists that Francis Blundy, unencumbered of several past wives and mistresses, comes to claim her and fill her life. He gives a reading in the Sheldonian Theatre chaired by Harry, and she has the satisfaction of accepting, while Harry looks on, the great poet’s invitation to dine with him alone. At that dinner, she unloads on him a lot of her past life and her worst secret shame, which involves the death of a child.
Francis is less shallow than Harry, less the smooth operator, more mysterious, occasionally violent, more interesting. They soon have plans for a life together in a beautiful piece of semi-rural land in North Oxford. But their affair, like the one with Harry, is obstructed by her necessary absorption in the needs of Percy, whose demands take no account of the time of day or night and are gradually driving her out of her mind. Her extended leave from her college is running out, after which she will have no income.
Sleepless, distraught, she can’t face putting Percy into a care home for which, in any case, she has no money. Francis tells her that if they are to achieve their dream they must remove the obstacle whose life is a torment even to himself, and they must do it together. She is horrified and rejects the idea, but purposeful and efficient Francis comes to her house late at night wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and black leather gloves, and with a cloth bag over his shoulder. In due course the coroner rules the death an accident. Vivien grieves and is consoled by many friends, and she and Blundy marry.
More than a decade has elapsed when Francis gathers their friends to hear him read the birthday poem addressed to Vivien, who has recounted all these matters, in the memoir the Metcalfes find deposited in the steel box. The intervening period, the hoped-for dream-life, has not been happy. Both she and Francis have been tormented by guilt and somewhat estranged inside their shared necessary silence. And the “great” poem? Only Vivien has read it, and we learn it was a beautifully written series of bucolic sonnets telling a mythical story that, though possibly impenetrable to anyone else, she can read as an account of their love for one another and for the natural world, and the murder of a green, fiddle-playing giant who stands in the way of their happiness. When the guests have gone, Francis asks her what she thinks of it. She tells him his pretence at loving nature is “a lie, a travesty” and his poem is “a beautiful fake”. He retires to bed and she sits alone. Her thoughts about the future are complex but she would rather her truthful account of “what happened” survive than his lovely “fake”.
All McEwen’s fiction skills are engaged in this cleverly engineered novel, but a lot of it stretches credulity, and there’s a predominant dark tone not unfamiliar in his oeuvre. In many ways, it’s remarkably similar to AS Byatt’s Booker Prize winner Possession (two academics reaching back into the past for literary truths and secrets) but I don’t think it will be seen as one of his best.
