Suppose you wanted to write a novel about the activities of a man and chronicles of his life, obviously it requires a powerful narration and a lot of details. Faced with such narrative limitations you might be tempted to invent a wider canvas of things, places, events, books and things. The good news is that Ian McEwan has presented a beautiful novel on these concepts.
Ian McEwan's novel 'Saturday'1 revolves around a day in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne and his family. It is a Saturday (15 February, 2003), the day on which a huge march is taking place in London to protest against the proposed war in Iraq.
Perowne is a man of profound competence and one who never stops counting the blessings of loving marriage and a pair of beautiful and talented children. Perowne's daughter, Daisy is about to have her first book of poetry published, and is coming home for the first time in six months. His son Theo has abandoned school and entered in the field of music as a musician. He is still living with his parents, and both the children get along very well with their father. Perowne's Family life is very happy, and his wife Rosalind is a lawyer working for a newspaper.
A family gathering is taking place in the evening and Rosalind's father, John Grammaticus, too is expected to join the coming happy party. Grammaticus is a strong personality and still maintains a rift with Daisy, his grand daughter.
Perowne isn't much of a reader, but Daisy has been trying to educate him, making up reading lists for him. He still doesn't quite get it, but for the most part he's willing to try. But some of the books she suggests - the "irksome confections" of the magical realist school - are too much for him to take: And in the opinion of author, the actual, not the magical, should be the challenge. The reading list provided by Daisy persuades Perowne that the supernatural is a recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible.
On the fateful day, Perowne wakes up early in the morning, and is elert and empty-headed while standing naked in the balcony, he mentally reviews his recent readings as suggested by her daughter. He thinks about his beloved wife and the ways of modern professional life which are keeping each partner busy.
He stands absorbed in his professional life, reviews cases of major patients and thinks about the information which people provide to him regarding the problems they face. While looking out the window, Perowne sees what he first believes to be a comet but then recognises as an aeroplane that is on fire heading for Heathrow, what looks like an impending catastrophe he is helpless to do anything about.
During his loneliness at the time, he thinks about his own professional life and that of his wife. He loves his wife, and the good moments spent together vibrate in his memory. Focus of his thoughts suddenly turns towards children. He reviews the birth process which suggests, it is not necessary the children should be parent's copy, he knows that what really determines the sort of person who is coming to live with you is which sperm finds which clog, and how the cards in two packs are chosen, how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination.
In Perowne's subconscious a desire was there, one of his children be a blues musician, and now he is proud of his son Theo, a guitarist who plays in an open-eyed trance. He knows that music speaks unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he's denied himself on an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs.
With these thoughts on his mind he came down to the kitchen where he meets Theo. He informs him about the erratic plane landing, and during their coffee drinking session they exchange views on the ongoing international politics, including the religious fundamentalism of the middle east, about which Perowne thinks these types of cultures only (fuel) hatred. In his opinion such people are in the persuit of utopia.
Theo leaves for his work, and Perowne comes back to his bedroom. He is now free from thoughts, from memory, from the passing seconds and from the state of the world.
Perowne will not be joining the antiwar march. Though he reluctantly shares the national paranoia, his intelligence can contain both poles of the debate about Iraq, aggression and appeasement, and at the edges of his thoughts about the day ahead, he drifts between them.
There are, other necessities too, competing for his attention: a regular game of squash with the anaesthetist colleague who has assisted him in the week's cool battles with tumour and trauma; a visit to his mother, who, because of Alzheimer's, no longer recognises him; and the return of his daughter, Daisy, from Paris to celebrate her first volume of poetry. It is a day typically replete with purpose.
He thinks of Darwin's work and summarises it by saying that endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see in a common hedgerow, including exalted beings like ourselves, arose from physical laws, from war of nature, famine and death. He then thinks of William James and Henry James particularly of his novel The Golden Bowl.
Having read Anna Karenia and Madame Bovary, the great masterpieces, he condemns the attitude of nineteenth century society towards adultery. He however, agrees with Daisy that genius was in details which were apt and convincing. The readings done on the advice of Daisy did convince him about the existence of flaws in the contemporary fiction which he found too sprawling and a mixture of hit and miss to inspire uncomplicated wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity of the impossible dazzling achieved. He believes that compared to fiction music possesses more purity.
Later in the day, he finds out that the plane landed safely. According to his Saturday routine he walks out to go to club to play squash, he observes behaviour of the people who are leaving to join the march. Everywhere he turns, the mass of marchers is a presence - peaceful, yet their enormous size and potential threatening. The plane and the marchers - like the danger in Iraq, both Saddam Hussein's criminal rule and the violent solution that is being considered - are all kept at a distance: the world is close, but does not really intrude. Indeed, Saturday is an intimate novel, and the author rarely brings several people together at the same time - and, not surprisingly, when the scene does get crowded, things get very ugly.
Perowne is not convinced with the cause of Iraq war being propagated by the great powers as he thinks history will not be impressed with such causes as opinions are a role of dice.
With regard to conflict he believes that the world has not changed and it will take a while to settle the ongoing differences. He is moving towards his destination deeply immersed in his thoughts when he is encircled by a small bunch of thugs who want to rob him, and their leader namely, Bexter challenges him.
Neurosurgeon and sharp-eyed diagnostician Perowne realises that there's something wrong with Bexter. The man has Huntington's Disease, a cruel, debilitating ailment. Bexter knows (and knows what awaits him), and when he realises Perowne knows he back off (and has his mates back off too). It's enough to allow Perowne to escape - though the memory of what happened, and how he acted, haunts him for most of the rest of the day. Needless to say, Perowne does not manage to escape Bexter entirely, and it comes to another confrontation.
Perowne thinks, Bexter's disease makes him dangerous: "a man who believes he has no future and is therefore free of consequences". The disease also manifests itself in mood swings and unpredictable behaviour. Perowne is curious about the case, from a medical point of view, and can't help but try to regard and analyse it as he would with any patient in his office. He also sincerely wants to help, though it is difficult to balance that with Bexter's threatening actions.
But the conversation between Perowne and Bexter becomes boring for the other thugs, and after losing interest they walk away and do not come back even on the call of Bexter, that is how Perowne saves himself from violence. Having a first hand experience of violence, he thinks that holding the unruly, the thug, in check is the famous common power to keep all men in awe a governing body, an arm of state, freely granted a manoply on the legitimate use of violence. But drug dealers and pimps, among others who live beyond the law, are not inclined to dial nine-nine-nine for leviathan; they settle their quarrels in their own way.
On his return journey he continued to ponder over different issues of politics, of literature, of music and of the characteristics of the city of London. He describes in detail the hall marks of the city, why they are known, and what are the attributes of such places. He thinks of Kafka's novel 'Mataphoris'. He considers it as ill disposed of tale. Theo is still sleeping, but he remembers to attend his performance in the afternoon.
He moves out again to visit his mother, he is quite familiar with the environment where she is living. The visit is part of his weekly routine. Although due to her illness (Alzheimer), she does not recognises him, still an unknown attraction is visible. He spends sometimes there.
Later in the day he attends the performance of Theo. The occasion is well attended. He comes across the Prime Minister, who recognises him and appreciates his professional work. It was a bit surprise for him. While he was driving he had noticed a red BMW which was following him. It looked quite odd.
He comes home and continues pondering over moral and political issues confronted by the world. He is bothered by the attitude of different warring groups and the unrest around the world. While he is thinking about these serious matters, Daisy arrives. He exclaims; "So let me have a look at you."
He wonders that for the first time he is meeting her daughter after six months, the longest she's ever been away from her family. And while holding her, his mind recalls the growth of Daisy in all these years. They exchange the usual niceties of home coming and he explains to her activities of the day, he has been playing squash, visiting his mother, cooking the dinner, all these sort of things.
For a short while they discuss the war issue and condemn the same. At that moment Perowne's father in law Grammaticus arrives. They continue to discuss many different things from each one's perspective. At this moment, Perowne thinks about his wife, and starts missing her and longs for her to arrive home.
Theo is home and embraces his sister. Seconds later, they enter the sitting room hand in hand, and present a tableau of their respective obsessions and careers, precious gifts. Daisy holds a copy of her bound proof, her brother grips his guitar in its case by the neck. Of all the family, Theo is by far the most relaxed with Grammaticus. They have their music in common, and there's no competition: Theo plays, his grandfather listens and tends his blues archive - now being transferred to hard disk with the boy's help.
While the family was enjoying these happy moments, an odd event happens. The thugs with whom Perowne had an encounter in the morning do enter their home by hijacking Rosaland. The whole family suddenly stand hijacked by Bexter and other thugs and they are ready for a deadly violence.
Bexter suddenly observes Daisy, and all the thugs become interested in her. Bexter orders that she should pull down her clothes and the orders are made at the tipof knife. She ultimately sings one of her poems which forces Bexter to change his mind to go ahead with their plan to outrage her. Ironically (if not entirely surprising), it is art - poetry, a tool that Perowne doesn't have at his disposal - that prevents the situation from getting out of hand at the most critical point. (It is this, surely, that drives Perowne to head back to work that Saturday night, the need to reassert his own life-and-death power, the operating theatre the only place he knows he is in control.)
In a sudden encounter Bexter is overtaken by father and son and he gets a fall in which he receives a brain injury, all other thugs ran away. But unclothing of Daisy reveals the fact that she is pregnant. Perowne has to operate Bexter and Drummacutis is bandaged too for the nose injury.
During the night, Perowne discusses Daisy's pregnancy with Rosalind, she tells him, they love each other, he is an Italian boy studying Archeology, Daisy has decided to keep the baby, at this hour we've to support her. Perowne agrees and says, 'I'll support her'.
Ian McEwan is a modern author and in his work he is full of irony and playfulness where these characteristics are apparent. In 'Saturday' he has chosen many subjects, wars and conspiracy theories are prominent subjects among them in which history of the mankind has been depicted ironically and humorously. He has used pastiche technique, by combining the elements of other genres and style of literature to create a new narrative voice. In his novel he has also used the technique of intertextuality, by acknowledging the previous literary works in his story. Temporal distortion is very much present as the author jumps back and forward in time, and the element of paronia too is very much there as the thought process is heavily influenced by anxiety and fears.
The novel ends with the hard-won virtues of forgiveness, familiar love and decency. The highly textured but low-pitched prose, with its accretion of detail and its insistent use of the present tense, allows the submerged uncertainty of life after 9/11 to emerge not as an occasion for rhetorical or stylistic fireworks but as one of the many total strains, albeit an intense one, pervading man's daily experience. The novel explores the question of 'to what extent' it is possible to insulate yourself against world's concerns. The author in fact distills all that is good, decent and honourable about English society today.
The novel amply demonstrates how good fiction, by dramatising unwieldy and fraught ideas in a deeply personal narrative, can fashion the world into gobbets sometimes more digestible than factual reportage. The novel itself is not about politics; It is a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics.
McEwan is writing close to the news and to the facts: fiction has to take its place within a context of reality. Both are given equal weight, but there can be no doubt that this hyper-real novel is absolutely convincing on its own terms. The reader is able to coexist with the writer, in an identical time frame and with the same preoccupations.
In this novel, though, threats are never quite implemented. Perhaps this is a sign of artistic maturity, a response to the political situation, or both. McEwan finds in Henry Perowne an ideal alter ego. Exact and erudite, he is a man who leaves nothing in his life unexamined. He palpates experience, looking for vital signs. In the novel's memorable setpieces, Perowne buys shellfish for a stew with the comic weight of mortality on his back. He plays squash in the constant knowledge of his brief span on earth, as if each titanic rally might be his last. And, most notably, with painstaking love and duty, he tries to engage his mother in the life in which she has lost all bearings.
In giving us a protagonist so steadfastly hostile to the charms of his own art, McEwan signals a return to some of the questions about the purpose and value of literature that he posed in 'Atonement.' Here, though, the contemporary setting lends the questions a new moral urgency. 'The times are strange enough. Why make things up?' Perowne asks. Which is to say, in a world that can present us with the phantasmagorical spectacle of 9/11, what has fiction to offer? Like Adorno, famously announcing that 'after Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric,' or the many writers who, in the wake of 9/11, expressed anxiety about the relevance of their work, Perowne suspects that making up stories - fretting about mots justes while buildings burn - is not just an unnecessary occupation but a frivolous one.
The paradox, of course, is that even as Perowne denies the fundamental usefulness of fiction, his daylong preoccupations supply the matter for the reading of the novel. He is right by observing, literature cannot give absolute answers, or furnish watertight explanations. McEwan proposes, literature can capture the moral tangle of personal life and historical context that is our lived experience. Ian McEwan is, of course, not known for his magic midget drummers or similar flights of fancy; it's not magical but clinical realism he offers, and in Saturday, built entirely around neurosurgeon Perowne.
(The writer is an Advocate and is currently working as an Associate with M/s Azim ud Din Law Associates Karachi.)