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07 September 2007
Saturday
Ian McEwan's novel Saturday was a present from my sister for my birthday. When people ask me what I'd like for a present I quite often ask them to give me a book they've enjoyed themselves.
I enjoyed reading it, too. It's about a day in the life of a neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. The day happens to be the day when more than a million people converged on London and marched to Hyde Park in protest at the proposed war on Iraq. Henry doesn't join the march, he thinks he probably supports the case for war, but he plays squash, has a minor car accident, nearly gets beaten up, visits his elderly, demented mother, hears the rehearsal of his son's new song, cooks seafood stew, welcomes his daughter and father in law to the house, and is subjected to a violent break-in, during which his wife is held at knife point.
McEwan's style suits a single day, because he is very interested in the working of people's minds, the nature of their consciousness. And of course, so is a neurosurgeon. McEwan will often describe the thought processes of Henry, the vague feelings that don't quite reach consciousness, the motives that push him towards a decision, the considerations that half come to attention, and the physical sensations and emotional resonances that colour it all: then he'll add that all this took only two and half seconds!
The plot is troublingly far-fetched. The two key events are Henry avoiding a beating by diagnosing his would-be mugger as suffering from Huntington's chorea and, like some seer, throwing this at him, and later on, Henry's daughter, Daisy, disarming the same mugger, now threatening the family with a knife (and accomplice) by reciting Dover Beach to him.
The day is a counterpoint to the question of the war on Iraq, and it also dabbles in the troubling questions of how we make decisions, and what it means for people to lose their minds to dementia. It didn't illuminate these questions much for me, but it does provide a starting point for thought.
The thing I think I shall remember the longest is the description of Henry's son, Theo's, music. There are a couple of passages in the book that I think contain the best description of music I've read, and there is real warmth here. Something lacking from the rest of the book, I thought. I didn't warm to Henry at all.
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