What We Can Know

Vivien Blundy is the second of the novel’s protagonists. Part 2 of the novel represents her manuscript, which Thomas and Rose find at the burial site where the Barn was previously located. Vivien is revealed to have written this manuscript as a memoir of her relationships with Percy Greene and Francis Blundy. Consequently, this memoir fills the gaps of Thomas’s research, allowing him to critically assess the cultural value of “A Corona for Vivien,” which Francis wrote in honor of Vivien’s 54th birthday.

Early in her memoir, Vivien shares her backstory, which is dominated by the impact that her misogynist father had on her life. Vivien identifies two specific outcomes of her father’s treatment of her on her behavior. First, Vivien is attracted to “emotionally insufficient” men, a trait evident in the pattern of the various affairs she engages in, particularly those with Harry Kitchener and Francis. Percy Greene is the outlier among Vivien’s relationships, representing her desire to break away from the influence of her father on her romantic life. Second, Vivien experiences a regular compulsion to create order in her environment. This partly explains the domestic role she occupies at the Barn during her marriage to Francis. Because Francis does none of the housework, Vivien is forced to give up her career in scholarship and maintain the house she shares with her husband. Francis effectively weaponizes Vivien’s compulsion to extend his power over her. Over time, Vivien learns to resist Francis’s control, as suggested by the journal entry she addressed to him, in which she wondered if his gift poem signaled a turning point in their household dynamics.

Vivien’s backstory also frames her as a character who struggles against inaction, connecting to the theme of The Value of Failure. Vivien reveals that she once had a daughter named Diana, who died in infancy due to neglect. Vivien’s experience of drug and alcohol addiction during her early adulthood caused her to “forget” about Diana while she was throwing a house party. The novel frames this as the central event of her adult life before the memoir begins. The first event of the memoir features Vivien encountering an abandoned child named Christopher, who reminds her of Diana. Thoughts of Christopher haunt Vivien throughout the memoir, reminding her of what she lost because of her neglect. She failed to act in order to preserve her daughter’s life, despite the knowledge of Diana’s precarity. This mirrors the novel’s preoccupation with climate change, positioning the Derangement as the result of humanity’s indifference and neglect of the symptoms of global heating.

Vivien’s passivity during Percy’s murder parallels Vivien’s inaction during Diana’s death. Where Vivien fails to attend to Diana’s needs because she is busy indulging herself at the house party, she also fails to intervene when Francis comes to kill Percy because she has come to accept Percy’s death as a requisite for her idyllic life with Francis. While she initially denies her complicity in Percy’s murder, Vivien comes to acknowledge her guilt the longer she is exposed to Francis’s domineering and egotistical character. When Francis gifts her with “A Corona for Vivien,” she learns to resist him, believing that he has used the poem to consolidate his power over both Vivien and the memory of Percy. This motivates her decision to destroy the poem, realizing its potential to immortalize Francis as the great poet of his time in spite of his amoral character, and working toward Dispelling the Myth of the Great Artist. For the remainder of her life, Vivien devotes herself to resisting Francis’s power, which she extends in solidarity to Jane Kitchener when Jane seeks to restore her family’s privacy and well-being in the wake of Harry’s transgressions.

The writing of the memoir represents Vivien’s final victory over her flaw of inaction and marks her as a dynamic character who completes her arc. Realizing that the memoir will implicate her in Percy’s death, she confesses to her role for the sake of speaking the truth. If she had been unable to save Diana and Percy’s lives in the past, her memoir represents the attempt to give them justice and prevent others from making her mistakes in the future.

Francis Blundy is the antagonist of the novel. He is initially presented as the primary subject of Thomas’s study, the author of “A Corona for Vivien,” the lost poem that Thomas is trying to resurface. In Thomas’s time, Francis is considered one of the foremost poets of his era, though his reputation still pales in comparison to a later, more popular writer named Mabel Fisk, who is compared by Thomas to Shakespeare in Part 1, Chapter 11. This allows Francis to occupy a middle ground in terms of reputation. He is famous enough to merit his own area of expertise, yet he remains obscure to the general population of Thomas’s students, who are uninterested in studying the past. During his study of Francis’s life, Thomas also acknowledges that Francis was a climate change denier, underscoring his obscurity as a research subject, since “A Corona for Vivien” is seen as an environmentalist poem. Despite his outspoken values, Francis accidentally becomes an icon of the climate-change movement.

Thomas idolizes Francis as someone who lived boldly and recklessly enough to invent new ideas and modes of expression, a value that Thomas tries to impress on his own students. Despite Thomas’s admiration for Francis, the first part of the novel continuously alludes to the wicked parts of his private character. For instance, it is suggested that Francis has little affection for his wife, Vivien, when he fails to greet her on the morning of her birthday. When he returns to his study after encountering her, his notes fail to mention her at all, let alone acknowledge the event of her birthday. This contradicts the gesture of his gift to Vivien at the Second Immortal Dinner, which includes the reading of “A Corona for Vivien” in front of their party guests. Vivien’s memoir in the second part of the novel reconciles this contradiction by making it clear that Francis has written the poem in honor of himself. The poem includes a depiction of Francis’s murder of Percy in order to sustain his relationship with Vivien. When Vivien confronts him over it, he gaslights her by claiming that it is an attempt to step out of his comfort zone to speak to Vivien’s interests. Francis remains a static character whose ego ultimately becomes his downfall as he destroys all the other drafts and notes of his poem, unwittingly giving Vivien the power to subvert his legacy.

Rose Church is the romantic interest and foil for Thomas. She is Thomas’s colleague at the University of the South Downs with a similar interest in literature in English from 1990 to 2030. This interest extends into the relationship between literature and society, as evidenced by the monograph she writes on the inadequacy of realist fiction to capture the social atmosphere of the 2020s. Rose and Thomas have a prior romantic history, though the novel picks up on the continuation of their relationship, which eventually leads to marriage.

Rose is a foil for Thomas because she exposes his idealism of the past as a major character flaw. When Thomas insists on focusing his research on the rediscovery of Francis Blundy’s lost poem, Rose urges him to give it up in favor of research on available sources. This suggests her belief that humanistic study should be pragmatic rather than purely idealistic. This becomes a major source of conflict between their characters as Thomas’s obsession makes him oblivious to Rose’s emotional needs. Rose becomes unfaithful to Thomas, having an affair with one of their students, an action that reflects her interest in a partner who lives in the present, rather than in the past. Thomas eventually acknowledges that he must re-center his life around his relationship with Rose in order to pursue a life with her, and their relationship introduces additional tension and moral and emotional stakes to Thomas’s fixation, which he must learn to overcome for the sake of his romance.

Rose’s willingness to accompany Thomas on his expedition to the Barn points to her care for him, developing her as understanding and nonjudgmental. Despite the strain in their relationship, Rose understands how important it is for Thomas to follow a brand-new lead in his research. Even though she discouraged his obsession in the past, the expedition actualizes the potential of the poem’s rediscovery. When that expedition results in the discovery of Vivien’s memoir, Rose is the one who assures Thomas that all is not lost in line with her pragmatic beliefs, cementing her role as an agent of change in Thomas’s life.