Dear Reader,
Just barely out of arm’s reach at the table is an Ian McEwan novel. I had to push it away or I will devour it for breakfast. Yesterday, when I went to the library to pick up another book that I was mildly pleased to find they had on their shelves, allowing me to skip the long Libby line, I passed the “New Books” shelves and saw McEwan’s name.
I’ve read several of his books and I very much like his style. But Reader. READER!
I made the mistake of sitting down with it when I only had ten minutes to take a quick peek. I didn’t even look at the other book (not even telling you its name because who cares now) because I thought it might be too tempting and I might not want to stop reading. Ha!
McEwan’s book, What We Can Know, had me at the description. And then I thought, okay, you talk a big thing, but can you deliver, Sir?
Within three pages, I was asking my invisible staff to cancel all my calls. When I heard the groceries arrive, I groaned and wondered just how long frozen peas could sit on the counter before they’d be ruined.
This book!
I read a few more pages later in the afternoon, hoping it might loosen its hold enough that I would be able to at least cook dinner, which I kept renegotiating in my mind, wishing a chopped protein bar perhaps on a fancy saucer would be as acceptable to all concerned as it always is to absorbed-in-a-task Word Raccoon.
Thinking quickly, I realized I had everything for burritos. Problem solved.
I feel like McEwan came to my house and touched every one of my books and sat down and said, “Let me write one just for you.”
In it, poet Francis Blundy writes “A Corona for Vivien,” his wife. He sees it as his (forgive the pun) “crowning” achievement. He prints it ceremoniously on vellum, ties a ribbon around it, burns all other copies of it as well as his notes to make it a singular gift, and reads it at her birthday party.
The poem, that only “existing” copy, goes mysteriously missing for over 100 years.
No one except the guests and the poet and his wife know the poem’s contents.
In 2119, after the world has shifted greatly following a nuclear catastrophe, scholar Thomas Metcalfe seeks to find the lost poem.
In a world where researchers have access to every email, every text message, video, etc. that persons of note have received or created, not a trace of the missing poem or how it has gone missing (so far as I have read), has been found.
This novel feels tailor-made for me on every front. Poetry? Absolutely. Learning about a maybe-new-to-me-form of poetry? Double check. Post-apocalyptic living? I used to tell my dolls stories about life after a nuclear attack. (That’s what happens when your father interviews to be a fallout shelter manager in his youth and tells you stories.) Check.
His writing is absorbing, and I find myself revisiting my “white space” thinking regarding my own efforts. He writes about food in such vivid terms that he makes me want to find an immediate source for a brace of quail. (Never made quail, probably never will, but I want a brace now. Do you know what a brace is? I don’t. I want to look but I have a picture in my mind and I don’t want it ruined by the truth.)
Told from viewpoints from these alternating timelines (sort of), there is a debate between two scholars in 2119 regarding how much supposition is permissible in academia, and this tangles deliciously with the book’s plot. Or I suspect that’s what’s happening. I’m only 77 pages in and I tell you, it is all I can do to get Word Raccoon to put it aside while I obediently (maybe) follow the calendar’s tasks for the day and slot in a welcome but unexpected dinner invitation from my son.
Something about this novel tells me it’s going to be important to my own writing. I have that tingling feeling that says “Pay attention,” that excitement in my chest, the way I can’t sit still.
I am grateful for these sparks. And while I may be stingy with details in my own fiction, I hoard them in real life. Maybe I need to revisit the idea of distributing them better in my novels and poetry, though.
Now how am I supposed to make it through the day knowing this book must remain shut for the next few hours?
Sadly, I have practice. The reader’s lament.
dremadrudge.com 