The Sources of Our Lives

Nov 27, 2025

Ian McEwan invents a future one hundred years hence to serve as a backdrop to the literary mystery at the heart of his new novel, What We Can Know. In 2119, Tom Metcalfe, a literary scholar at the University of the South Downs specializes in the poetry of a 21st-century poet, Francis Blundy. Tom is trying to solve a long-standing mystery previous scholars have given up on. What happened to the one copy of the cycle of 15 linked poems — known as a corona — Blundy composed in 2014? Blundy recited the corona only once. He gave a birthday dinner for his wife at home with a small group of guests at the end of which he read it to those present. The poem disappeared that night never to be seen again.

The guests present at the dinner later claimed in their diaries, letters, and emails that the corona was Blundy’s masterpiece. Not, mind you, that they listened to their host’s reading with rapt attention. Wine, fatigue, brooding marital discord, envy, boredom, and mundane preoccupations will have that effect after a good meal. We know their attention wandered, because the narrator tells us so. Who is the narrator here? Tom, the scholar? Or an omniscient narrator who ducks in and out of the minds of the people present? If it’s Tom who is writing, then we know his girlfriend and eventual wife would not have approved. Tom tells us that Rose distrusts historians who make things up in their scholarship. This difference is a source of tension between them. However, because he’s read all the accounts the dinner guests wrote down after the event, Tom thinks he can intuit what the participants felt and thought.

I know all that they know — and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures and the dates of their deaths.

Rose doesn’t buy this. How does he know the guests are telling the truth to themselves or their interlocutors? Tom mounts a vigorous defense of imbuing as much verisimilitude into his biography of Blundy as he can extract from his sources and then imagining and constructing what he doesn’t have.

The dead hand of academic neutrality would cause these characters to wither. I tell her that my duty is to vitality, to convey the experience of lived and felt life, to what it was to live in a certain time, however remote.

It’s a slippery slope when your subject becomes a character as well as a historical figure. Practically every historian I know has confronted this dilemma. In an effort to bring our subject or subjects to life through caricaturization, we have to ask ourselves how far we can we transgress the border where the evidence stops?1 Can Tom reasonably claim to “know all that they know”? How many and what kind of liberties can we take when recreating a subject’s umwelt.2 In my experience, as long as both reader and historian remember that all written histories are interpretations of evidence, with or without embellishments. Embellishment takes a delicate hand. As both Tom (and McEwan) acknowledge, once the reader becomes uneasy, the historian’s credibility begins to leach away.

There is another issue that historians in the 22nd century will have to confront, one that we are only recently coming to grips with. What happens when the scholar has too much material at her disposal? That is the reality McEwan suggests awaits historians in the future. Most of us click “Send,” or hit “Return” more times each day than we can remember. The emails, texts, social media posts, the lists of followers and following, the ads that algorithms have “curated” ads for us, the questions we pose to our AI apps, the online DNA tests we’ve had done — these are our involuntary legacy to posterity. And posterity is sure to take possession of them. Our encryptions will be meaningless to future coders. Everything we have ever typed, dictated or scanned into a machine is likely, eventually, to be recovered. And, when it is, it will be a mess.

For the time being, the documents that currently structure our lives will remain categorizable in libraries or archives. Private papers containing correspondences, public documents such as deeds, marriage, birth, and death records, bank records, wills, diaries, and so forth will be comprehended collectively, however many documents survive. When emails, posts, and texts — by means of which we conduct more and more of our trivial and non-trivial business — are factored into a body of evidence, well, you can imagine an archival scholar would feel discouraged if not defeated by all that material’s unruly addition to the body of evidence. Future family genealogists, historians, lawyers, biographers and anyone interrogating the past will have to come up with new criteria and methodologies to discern patterns of meaning over time amidst all the crap. At the personal level, secrets will come out, just as they have begun to via services like 23andMe. McEwan has Tom observe when searching the poet’s archive, “we have robbed the past of its privacy.”

Reading What We Can Know during the week when the Department of Justice released a portion of the Epstein files felt karmic. What goes around comes around. Like many people, I was, in the first place, appalled by the sleazy innuendo in the emails between the men Jeffrey Epstein corresponded with and himself. Secondarily, the moronic, typo-ridden, juvenile, barely intelligible messages these men exchanged made me hyper-alert to the casualness of my own missives. For about a week, I rigorously punctuated every text I sent and capitalized letters appropriately. If we all type emails, texts, and posts as thoughtlessly as the ones Epstein’s friends sent, our descendants will understandably add “intellectual decline” and “laziness” to the charges they will undoubtedly press against us. It’s bad enough they will hold us responsible for environmental armaggedon.

The expedition Tom and Rose undertake to find Blundy’s corona crosses a sodden English landscape inundated by rising seas, events referred to as The Inundation and the Derangement, a half-century of limited nuclear warfare and widespread climate and demographic catastrophe. Estuaries have flooded the British Isles, leaving only scattered outcroppings of land rising above the water. The currently inland Wiltshire town of Marlborough in our century has become a port city in McEwan’s 22nd century, thanks to the River Severn swamping much of England’s West Country. Goodbye, Somerset, southern Wales, and Gloucestershire. People, too, have changed. As a result of widespread racial intermixing, everyone’s complexion is a shade of tan. Britain has dissolved into political entities resembling the medieval kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex. Across the Atlantic, rival warlords dominate North America. Only the foolhardy travel there. Nigeria has replaced the US as the economic, technological, and cultural powerhouse. It now supports the internet that the world depends on.3

McEwan’s vision of environmental catastrophe imparts a heroic tinge to Tom’s and Rose’s efforts to recover the corona. Very few 21st-century British literary scholars need machetes, tent, and shovels to hack their way through an almost impenetrable undergrowth in search of an old archival gem. Tom the scholar is a Quixotic hero on a quest to find the lost text. Or, as McEwan seems to ask us to consider, is Tom tilting at windmills?

1 A relatively new — at least to me — area in history-writing called has emerged. It’s called “critical fabulation,” a method of writing best articulated by the cultural historian Saidiya Hartman. Professor Hartman’s faculty page on the Columbia University’s website is here.

2 One of my favorite German terms, meaning the world as an organism experiences or perceives it. I have very few others.

3 Rory Stewart, co-host of the podcast The Rest Is Politics, has cited more than once a statistic that by 2050 one in every ten children born will be Nigerian.