Saturday — Ian McEwan
Doubleday
2005
Rating:


Ian McEwan's "Saturday" opens with a lengthy epigraph from Saul Bellow's "Herzog." The fact that the reference is not only unpretentious but a kind of passing of the torch from the dearly departed Bellow to McEwan indicates just what kind of level McEwan is working on. "Herzog" tells the story of a failed academic philosopher whose belief structure becomes upended through a minor car accident, and he learns what it means to be a man "in a society that was no community and devalued the person."

A similar fate befalls Henry Perowne in "Saturday," which, like "Mrs. Dalloway," follows its main character over the course of a single day. Henry wakes up early the Saturday of a massive anti-Iraq War demonstration in London 2003. He looks from his window and watches in horror as a burning plane seemingly bent on destroying a landmark comes to a rough landing at Heathrow. The sight of the plane unnerves Henry and continues to haunt him as he goes about his ordinary day of a rigorous squash game, visiting his Alzheimer's-suffering mother, hearing his son Theo play the blues and trying to reconcile his father-in-law John Grammaticus and his daughter Daisy, poets both. The utter dullness is rendered in detail to display how easily a world so simple can be lost.

Henry crosses a street blocked off for the demonstration and is hit by a car pulling away from a strip club. Henry, believing himself to be in the right and lacking the imagination to believe that something bad will befall him, treats Baxter and his thuggish compatriots with contempt. Baxter assaults Henry and Henry only escapes after applying his neurological vocation — he diagnoses Baxter's mood swings and trembling as Huntingdon's. Henry lies and says there's an experimental cure for the disease that he could obtain if Baxter lets him go, which Baxter reluctantly does. Henry doesn't escape that easy, and Baxter will return to shatter the Perowne family.

"Saturday's" plotting is an allegory of 9/11 and, later, a metaphor for the Iraq invasion that succeeds on both levels because the symbols don't perfectly fit. Henry's crash with Baxter creates, in microcosm, the shock and tragedy of the World Trade Center attacks, with the underclass Baxter standing in for terrorists whose similar poverty breeds desperate violence. Henry's ambivalence toward the Iraq War is later remedied when he faces an occupation of his own.

The story reaches its climax with a quote from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which "ignorant armies clash by night" in a world of "confused alarms of struggle and flight." Such is the post-9/11 world. Even more so than Jonathan Safran Foer's more optimistic "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," McEwan paints the anxieties, politics and hopes of that world with horror, but with beauty, too.

Posted Sunday, July 10, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/book/ian.mcewan/saturday