DM: Rob’s informed me that the review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday that we ran the other day was somewhat incomplete, so we’re republishing it here in full.
A Day in the Life of Mr. Perfect: A Review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday By Robert Howse The protagonist in Ian McEwan’s new novel Saturday has too much going for him to be a plausible hero of contemporary fiction: Henry Perowne is a neurosurgeon of impeccable reputation and high stature; a loving, faithful and sexually adept husband; a model father of two kids who are turning into creative, functional adults; reasonably fit and healthy for early middle-age. That McEwan can hold our interest in this man through a several-hundred page account of his thoughts and actions in a single day says much for his skills as a writer. He has an impeccable eye and ear for the rituals, vocabularies, illusions and insecurities of the educated professional classes in our time. Saturday is set in the winter of 2003 — the lead up to the Iraq war, and McEwan captures beautifully the feeling of that very particular historical moment.
What makes Mr. Perfect at least barely believable and humanly interesting as a character (and not merely a device for McEwan’s own astute social observation), are the lingering self-doubt and even weak shame that shadow his accomplishments and virtues. Reflecting on the abstemiousness of his young adult daughter, instead of simple pride and self-congratulation at raising a kid without a substance abuse problem, we have Henry putting in question his own (very moderate) drinking; when he considers how natural it comes to him to be faithful to his wife, he ends up wondering whether there is something lacking in his masculinity. There is a nobility to Perowne’s combination of high mindedness and self-questioning unaccompanied by decisive transformative action, a nobility that reminded me of Turgenev’s Russian liberals, sometimes too gently noble and self-conscious for their own good, bourgeois intellectual Hamlets.
But Perowne isn’t really an intellectual, and in the sole drama of the novel that puts his decisiveness to the test, he does okay. Henry, rushing to get to his regular squash game on a morning when many side streets in London have been closed off due to anti-war demonstrations, ends up in a minor accident, and a not-so-minor run-in with some thugs. The main thug Baxter, however, turns out to have a debilitating neurological disorder, which Perowne is able to diagnose on the spot and exploit to undermine Baxter’s status with his henchmen, diffusing the confrontation.
Later that day Baxter, recouping his losses, comes around to Perowne’s home during a family get-together and terrorizes them, holding the wife at knifepoint and forcing the daughter to strip naked. But Baxter is once again undone by the superior knowledge of the educated classes; he is first of all charmed by what he presumes to be one of the daughter’s poems, which she reads to him, and then is lured away by Perowne’s false suggestion that in his study he has information that could cure Baxter of his disorder, providing an opportunity for Perowne and his son to physically overpower and disable the thug.
The final twist is emblematic of both the strengths and weaknesses of this novel, its inventiveness but also its over-vindication of the middle-aged professional male: before his Saturday ends, Henry performs brain surgery on Baxter to deal with the consequences of the scuffle in the Perowne home (Baxter ends up getting thrown down the stairs). Despite having had multiple glasses of wine on an empty stomach, then living through his family being held at knifepoint by a deranged thug, not only does Perowne pull off a flawless performance in the OR, but on a patient who is none other than that very thug. McEwan gives the grown-ups their own Harry Potter. Robert Howse’s first novel, Mozart, is available at Amazon.Com and Barnes and Noble online.
Posted by Administrators on April 17, 2005 at 08:34 AM