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EssaysIan McEwan, Saturday. Toronto: Knopf, 2005.Saturday is Ian McEwan's tenth novel. It follows his superb Atonement (2001), which should have been awarded the Booker Prize, except it had just gone to his quite good previous novel Amsterdam (1998). McEwan is an extraordinarily capable writer, perhaps the most accomplished British novelist working today. He writes mainstream literary fiction that addresses contemporary issues with uncommon intelligence and humanity. Early on, it seemed unlikely that this is the kind of author he would become. His first four books are elegant, deliciously yucky little studies of power, evil, and sexual perversity, which achieve a kind of apotheosis in the long story "Psychopolis" (1978), a spacey black comedy about an Englishman adrift in L.A. At the time, McEwan saw "Psychopolis" as the direction he was headed as a writer. It hasn't turned out that way. Saturday traces twenty-four hours in the life of a wealthy London neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne. We're with Henry from the moment early Saturday morning he stands at his bedroom window on a Fitzrovia square and watches a burning plane come in low over London for Heathrow, to the moment twenty-four hours later he turns away from the same window to fit himself once more to the "beloved form" of his sleeping wife. It's a big day for Henry, and we're with him all the way. His daughter and father-in-law, both poets, are joining him and his wife and son for dinner, a fish stew, which Henry will cook. But first, on the way to play squash that morning with his anaesthetist, he'll have a fender-bender with consequences. Henry is the kind of man who is happiest at work, in the operating theatre, where he has full control and knows exactly what he's doing. On his days off, life intrudes, as it certainly does on this one. And then there's the grey fact of being a citizen of a world metropolis post-9-11, with every plane in the sky now looking either "predatory or doomed." Henry's thoughts on these matters could be our own; McEwan has always had a telepathic knowledge of where his reader's thoughts have been lately. Saturday is a novel written for these times. It's not just the post-9-11 themes, it's the doctor's awareness of brain chemistry and of the mechanics of neurological dysfunction and the moral perspectives such awareness affords. To what degree are human beings chemical automata just conscious enough to imagine their actions are their own? It's the great contemporary question but one that traditional literary fiction, with free will its stock-in-trade, is poorly equipped to handle. The villain of Saturday is a man named Baxter, who in the aftermath of that fender-bender displays the emotional lability and predilection to violence that can characterize early Huntington's Disease. The question is, to what extent does Baxter's inexcusable behaviour deserve mercy on account of his medical condition? It's Dr. Perowne who must make that call. Since we're mostly with Henry, who is straight and sane, a man of science after all, Saturday doesn't have the general air of menace and perversity of McEwan's early work. Only when Baxter is on the scene do we experience the old yuckiness and terror. But McEwan is excellent at all kinds of quieter things to do with Henry's life both inner and outer, as when he performs his operations, while we watch. I can't guarantee that McEwan's medical accounts are accurate to the last detail, but I would bet on it. His language has an assured, quiet lucidity that is a perfect match for the surgeon's skill. In the end, Saturday, while a superior entertainment, is of medium quality for a McEwan novel. His recurrent weakness—which in Atonement he turns into a strength by making it part of the logic of a highly satisfying surprise ending—is a tendency to artifice when it comes to working through his ideas dramatically. Sometimes his novels are like an elegant person who is just a little too thin: their skeleton is visible in a way that suggests the one in charge is perhaps a little too much in charge. The epigraph for Saturday is a long one, from Saul Bellow's Herzog. What's striking is how full-blooded Bellow's prose is compared to McEwan's. But that wouldn't be news to McEwan. He's a writer who has always known exactly what he's doing. The National Post, Winter 2005 |
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