Saturday (review)

Fans of McEwan enjoy a special moment of insider humor in an otherwise straight-faced novel when neurosurgeon Henry Perowne declares that he can't stand this thing his daughter, herself a soon-to-be-published poet, terms "magic realism." He mentions midgets banging tin drums and men with angels' wings, and he goes on to complain of the absurdity of a hero peering through the window of a pub to witness his own parents as a young couple deciding whether to abort him. The reference is to McEwan's own novel The Child in Time (1987). Critical readers of McEwan, however, would never mistake him for a magic realist. His widely acclaimed novels Amsterdam and Atonement are grounded in a more typical mode of realism, as is Saturday.

Scientist Henry Perowne is a bit of a departure for McEwan. He's a contented man, a moral man without religion. He's not well read, and he's only nosing around the classics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the benefit of his daughter, so that they have common ground over which to squabble, albeit good-naturedly.

Yet in significant ways—I say this without giving away key features of the ending—it's a novel about the power of poetic verse. Perowne is looking for the means to stay connected to his grownup daughter and son, a blues guitarist. When the revelation of literature's true power occurs at the novel's climax, Perowne himself doesn't quite grasp what's happened, but he has other things on his mind—specifically, an emergency brain surgery. The neurosurgical details are authoritative and intriguing. McEwan's gift is the ability to take us into the consciousness of a character without slowing the pace.

Of course, his gifts as a novelist are manifold. There's an Aristotelian unity of time and place, as the entire novel takes place on Saturday, February 15, 2003, a day of protest in London over the impending invasion of Iraq. Perowne is politically ambivalent. The novel itself is largely apolitical, although there's a great (and true) episode involving Perowne meeting Tony Blair, who mistakes the neurosurgeon for a well-known painter. The author has simply substituted Perowne for himself, as McEwan revealed during the publicity tour for the book. The episode with Blair is insignificant in terms of plot, but it's a fun diversion. The fact of the Iraq war is also insignificant, except that an atmosphere of anxiety serves as a backdrop to the main action and comments on what occurs in the foreground. Perowne has a run-in with a London thug and seems to save himself from harm through his medical expertise. The specter of Baxter the thug chases him throughout the novel.

Baxter and Perowne inevitably meet a second time, though the anticipated scenes remain interesting and fresh. The literary discourse between Perowne and his daughter arises at this unexpected moment, with the curmudgeonly grandfather (the patriarch poet whose work has been anthologized in English school texts) playing a role. In addition to Perowne's father-in-law, his wife, daughter and son meet him at home for a small family reunion at the end of the day.

It's the family reunion that's most important to Perowne. He is—or desires to be—a family man, always wanting to place family before career. His final act of professionalism shouldn't come o? as shocking but does. His professional instinct to care for a patient becomes something that the reader might consider to be an incredible, if not implausible, act of charity and forgiveness.