Saturday is a very brainy book. Not just in the sense of being highly
intelligent but also in its frequent prisings apart of the human skull to
inspect what lies within. For its neurosurgeon-hero, Henry Perowne, the
interior of the cranium is familiar territory. Routinely, he scrutinises its
hemispheres, lobes and fissures as he excises tumours, extracts blood clots,
clears blockages. Years of operating on this soft mass of nerve tissue, "mere
wet stuff", haven't numbed his awe at the marvels it can perform.
Aesthetic appreciation persists, too. As he cuts away the tentorium, where
the membrane sheathing the brain gathers and parts, he sees it as "a
pale delicate structure of beauty, like the little whirl of a veiled dancer".
But chiefly it is the challenging practicalities of his job — obstacles
overcome by skill and stamina — that give him satisfaction.
What Perowne does to other people's brains — to relieve pain, reverse damage,
save lives — is enthrallingly on view in virtuoso scenes of surgery
(up-to-the-minute counterparts to the 1940s hospital sequences in McEwan's
last book, Atonement). But it is what goes on inside Perowne's own head that
constitutes most of the novel. As a momentous day unfolds, its impact on an
admirably rational and sophisticated consciousness is caught with gripping
immediacy.
Things begin when Perowne wakes before dawn in his handsome central London
house. Looking out of the window as his wife, a newspaper lawyer, sleeps, he
is horrified by the sight of a plane with a flaming wing roaring down
towards Heathrow. Shock beginnings — the snatching of a small girl in The
Child in Time (1987), a fatal fall from a helium balloon in Enduring Love
(1997) — are a McEwan speciality. But here the high-adrenaline alarm that
surges through Perowne proves premature. News bulletins throughout the day
establish that this isn't a terrorist attack of the kind fearfully
anticipated since 9/11, but a harmless accident. The buzz of menace the
incident initially transmits, though, sounds a keynote.
Danger is uppermost in Perowne's mind — and many other people's. For this is
the day, February 15, 2003, of the mass demonstration against the impending
war in Iraq. Apprehension of approaching catastrophe builds as balefully as
it did in Atonement (2001). But in other ways the book seems designed to
differ as much as possible from its acclaimed predecessor. Instead of a
narrative extending over seven decades and widespread locations, events are
confined to 24 hours or so in London. The central figure isn't a teenage
girl with a hyper-literary sensibility but a man in his late forties
unresponsive to literature and of a studiedly scientific cast of mind. In
this, he resembles the protagonist of Enduring Love. And it's that novel's
blueprint — an unnerving collision of the sane and the disturbed, jeopardy
coming from an impaired young man with a knife — that McEwan reactivates
here.
En route to his weekly squash game, Perowne's silver Mercedes S500 is involved
in a scrape with a red BMW erratically driven by three men who have just
emerged from a lap-dancing club. With his genius for the jumpy — scary
stand-offs such as the heart-pounding encounter between a young woman and
feral mastiffs in Black Dogs (1992) — McEwan shows Perowne cornered by the
trio in an eerily empty side street between two thoroughfares down which the
anti-war protestors are loudly streaming. Punched by the ringleader, Baxter,
he suddenly perceives from his assailant's facial tics, hand tremors and
lurches of mood that the man is ill with Huntington's Disease. Distracting
and disconcerting Baxter by his knowledge of this, he manages to regain his
car and freedom.
Not for nothing, though, has Perowne earlier been heard humming "We'll
meet again". As his day proceeds, there are recurrent glimpses of a red
BMW. Just before a family dinner to celebrate the publication of a volume of
poetry by his daughter Daisy, Baxter, half-amok with humiliation, vengefully
breaks into the elegant living-room with its fine rugs on the cherrywood
floor and Howard Hodgkin abstract resplendently gleaming alongside the
Bridget Riley prints.
Wrecked idylls — a Mediterranean holiday that ends in mutilation and murder
(The Comfort of Strangers, 1981), a blighted honeymoon (Black Dogs), a
shattered country-house party (Atonement) — are prominent features in
McEwan's imaginative landscape. Saturday exposes to potential devastation a
markedly valuable and civilised mode of life. Fulfilled by his demanding
work, which the novel rivetingly observes, Perowne is also culturally keen
(in his operating theatre, the strains of Bach's Goldberg Variations mingle
with the smell of singed bone). He is appreciative too of the cornucopia of
amenities, commodities and electronic wizardries the early-21st century
affords, from the high-tech equipment that enables him to achieve what would
once have been regarded as miracles in brain surgery to sleek compact gizmos
that can store huge libraries of music. Ingenious machines, he reflects with
wry relish, are now an indispensable component of his and his wife's
chock-a-block professional lives: "Once a week, usually on a Sunday
evening, they line up their personal organisers side by side, like little
mating creatures, so that their appointments can be transferred into each
other's diary along an infrared ray." As a couple, the Perownes
themselves are on the same wavelength, sexually, emotionally and
intellectually. Contentment is Perowne's default position, and this isn't
altered by the wholesale gloom about the state of the world which he finds
automatically and widely adopted around him.
Having treated an Iraqi professor mauled by Saddam's torturers, he is
ambivalent about the war and sceptical about what he considers strident
over-simplifications in some of the rhetoric against it. Not that this makes
him pro-government. A cameo of his accidental meeting, at a Tate Modern
reception, with Tony Blair, who mistakes him for the painter of two pictures
hanging in Downing Street ("Cherie and I adore them . . . Honestly.
They're in the dining room"), acidly registers adroit speciousness and
face-saving cover-up.
Guardedly optimistic, liberal, questioning and self-questioning, Perowne's
mentality is that of someone making the most of what the novel calls "the
brief privilege of consciousness". Around it, McEwan places reminders
of its vulnerability: the damaged brains in the operating theatre, the
warped mind-sets of religious fundamentalists, Perowne's mother,
increasingly blanked-out by Alzheimer's, Baxter ruined mentally, physically
and emotionally by a defective gene.
Sanity shadowed by unreason is the theme of another novel about a day in
London: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Saturday shares other concerns with
it, too: preparations for a party, the allure of the city, intimations of
ageing and mortality, medical matters and the reverberations of war. These
affinities don't seem accidental. With his masterpiece Atonement, which also
incorporated parallels and homages to classic novelists, McEwan decisively
staked his claim to be part of the great fictional tradition. Where the
literary careers of some of his contemporaries now look like gaudy wreckage,
he has triumphantly developed into a writer of outstanding subtlety and
substance. Saturday has its inert elements (Perowne's talented, decorative
offspring — poetic elfin-faced Daisy and gentle velvet-eyed blues musician
Theo — are depthless, and his wife isn't much more fully realised). But,
written with superb exactness, complex, suspenseful, reflective and humane,
this novel about an expert on the human brain by an expert on the human mind
reinforces his status as the supreme novelist of his generation.
Saturday by Ian McEwan Cape £17.99 pp279 Available
at the Sunday Times Books First price of £14.39 plus £2.25 p&p
on 0870 165 8585
READ ON...
websites:
www.ianmcewan.com
McEwan's official site
