Saturday
By Ian McEwan
Knopf Canada, 279 pages, $34
As Ian McEwan's new novel opens, a London neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne wakes in the dark, aware of a strange euphoria, and rises, careful not to disturb his wife, Rosalind. Fifty pages and an hour or so later, he is back in bed, making love with her, then falling away to sleep again before the dawn of a February Saturday, 2003. It's one of the best passages of quiet fiction I've ever read.
Following Perowne's thoughts, we learn of his "too literate" daughter, Daisy, a young poet who sends him novels he often fails to love or understand; his son Theo, a talented blues guitarist and "sincerely godless" young adult, well adapted to the new world disorder; and Rosalind, a newspaper lawyer.
McEwan is setting the table, of course, but such is his skill that we don't notice him, other than a deft hand here or there, doing its work, as when Perowne ponders his own considerable skill, the recent surgeries set before us one by one. There are harbingers -- a fire in the sky that for a moment might as easily be a comet as a burning airplane -- and the memory of one life-altering day past when he first met Rosalind. She had been a law student, suddenly losing much of her sight one afternoon, and only hours later facing an emergency brain surgery to save her vision. As Perowne, an intern, rolled her toward the operation, she had him stop near a fire extinguisher for possibly "her last experience of the colour red." He fell in love with her then and through the surgery, his heart exposed for us in the remembrance as her face is literally pulled back and then, the tumour removed, restored.
It's unlikely a novel could sustain such fixing intensity, and readers of McEwan have been here before, in The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs and, especially, Enduring Love, with its unsurpassable first act. As with many of the best novelists, McEwan's failures are oddly the measure of his successes. What frustrates us is that the abundance of wonders in a great opening seems to promise a transit free of disappointments. As long as one is capable of them, we think, miracles mustn't be especially hard to perform.
In Saturday, McEwan has yet another act to follow. His previous book, Atonement, was one of those rare novels that risk a little audacity and find the kind of market success usually accorded more conventional stories. (Then again, we wonder how McEwan feels that his most popular novel was the one he wrote not in his own narrative voice, but in Elizabeth Bowen's.)
As if in counter to Atonement's sweep of time and character, Saturday transpires over a single day in Perowne's life. A fictional day can contain multitudes (see Ulysses), but McEwan has always had great respect for the through-line of a story -- he has stated that he wants to write novels of ideas and action -- and in telling us of Perowne's day, he proves again that there may be no novelist in English better able to sustain the classical virtues of balance and clarity.
Perowne, a "habitual observer of his own moods," sees himself in his contradictions. At one point, he catches himself voicing a pro-invasion argument with Daisy, though he has argued against the Iraq war with his American friend and colleague Jay Strauss. He experiences vague, unattributable feelings of shame and guilt. Though he's a loving father and husband, he feels that his work has made him "incapable of pity."
Because Perowne can't help but view the world as a materialist, his every anxiety, his motions and emotions, have particular gravity. As his passing thoughts pause over a miscoded gene, a few rogue cells or anti-war protesters gathering to march through the city, everyone's sheer vulnerability to chance, menace and misadventure creates a feeling of impending disaster.
Against this we have Perowne's Saturday, with its mix of local dramas and splendid ordinariness, disposed in episodes: a minor traffic accident and near-mugging by thugs replayed as a contentious squash game with Strauss; a visit to his mother, lost to him in the late stages of Alzheimer's; a few minutes at Theo's rehearsal; his memory of the unlikely evening when he met Tony Blair, who upon realizing he'd confused Perowne with an artist, evinced a brief instant "of fleeting self-doubt."
It's the depth and quality of doubt in Perowne himself that may be McEwan's greatest achievement here. His mind is of a kind underrepresented in fiction, which does, after all, tend to be written by people with waking access to the non-rational. But the rational impulse is as human as the religious one, or as the embrace of any great mysteries, and here, even more than in Enduring Love, McEwan imagines his way deep into the pristine vulnerabilities of an empirical mind willing to admit ambivalence. Through Perowne, we recognize the ways in which large-scale history impinges on the daily lives of those not damaged or displaced by it, the effect, psychological or even physiological, of being exposed to disturbing news images and stories, the knowledge of hard truths, the constant urge to square anger with guilt, outrage with complicity, or one set of doubts with an opposing one. At its lucid best, Saturday revives W. H. Auden's definition of great art as "clear thinking about mixed feelings."
The day advances toward dinner, planned as a reconciliation between Daisy, whose first book of poems is about to go to press, and her grandfather, an aging, embittered poet named John Grammaticus. Three years earlier, well into a decline in his reputation, a drunk and "disinhibited" Grammaticus responded to young Daisy's first success, an award-winning poem, by pronouncing it clumsy and unoriginal. The foremost question now is whether they'll end their estrangement.
Or is it? As the family members arrive at the house, one by one, McEwan finds ever more truly moving family moments, small exchanges, postures, tensions exerted and released. We might hope we're building towards some brilliant domestic climax. But from the time Perowne left the house we've been waiting for the reappearance of the thugs whose car he skidded into -- Perowne saved himself a beating by noticing that their leader, named Baxter, presents the early symptoms of Huntington's disease and engaging him with questions that disarm the assault through an inadvertent humiliation.
Because McEwan puts weight on this point of conventional suspense, I won't tell you what happens, but there is an action climax, and though the scene is well-directed, the characters to whom we've felt so close are suddenly distanced as mere actors, playing out events. We might feel we've been robbed of our investment, and that the greater shock here isn't for the Perowne family, but for us when we realize McEwan hasn't trusted that the charged moments of everyday drama will be enough to carry us to the last pages.
In McEwan's fiction, the action climax typically originates not so much in emotion, or in dramatic convention, as in an idea. Here the idea is that in a time when ever more lives are changed by the intrusion into the body of tools, we find ourselves more conscious of them. This is true whether the tools are for surgery, terror or war. In the parallel politics of history and story, of the public and the personal, it is a world of soft targets to the end.
And so a wonderful domestic novel becomes, briefly, a good action one about the risks of living in a Western world capital, the home of a talented London family, or the body itself.
But the true wonder of Saturday is not what it's about, but what it is. Biomedical science continues to solve the mysteries of our bodily existence, but what returns us to the truths of our being? Ever more beset by narratives, some of them killing, some pernicious or just insufficiently imagined, we've never been so in need of the saving kind. Saturday makes the case that, these days, if the best novels didn't exist, neither, essentially, would we. It's a truth even Henry Perowne comes to understand.
Michael Helm's latest novel is In the Place of Last Things, short-listed for the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize and a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book.