Ian McEwan – Saturday: A novel – Comment.

 

In the tradition of modernist literary fiction, following Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, McEwan has written a free-associating interior monologue, expressing numerous themes and motifs about the concerns of modern people through the eyes of a single character in a single day. As the character in Ulysses, Bloom, stumbles through the streets of Dublin, free-associating on Shakespeare and theosophy, music, love, and politics, so too does McEwan's character, Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, who attains a state of epiphany at the beginning of the novel, as he observes a fiery meteor or jet streak across the early morning sky. 

 Perowne experiences a moment of intense clarity, which sets his mind in motion, moving in many directions, contemplating the nature of consciousness, musings on society, family, work, sex and politics, and the human condition in general. He traverses the streets of London in his Mercedes, has a minor car accident, plays a hard game of squash with a colleague, shops for the evening's meal, visits his mother in a nursing home, to then come full circle where he experiences a startling situation in his home. On the surface these are mundane events, but it is his thoughts that are triggered by the details that represent wider concerns. Like Joyce's Ulysses, London like Dublin, Perowne like Bloom, becomes a microcosm, our world in miniature, to make sense of it all. 
 
McEwan is a mature writer. Perowne's thoughts and free associations pull us into our own concerns about who we are and the absurdity of our modern world. As a neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne is typically a realist, a man who values control, facts, and the comfort of rational thinking. He is a man who keeps his emotions in check, is not prone to flights of fancy, but knows in his heart that, as a human being, he is deficit in many respects. Perowne's daughter, Daisy, is a young poet, who forces her father to read Romantic 19th century literature and poetry, but Perowne tries to view the world through the eyes of a poet and finds it terribly difficult. But what does it mean to be truly human? In the end, Perowne, based on his instincts, even without thinking it through, being rational, reveals a man with a tremendous capacity for compassion. He does show us what being human truly is... 
 
The novel ends where it begins, Perowne has come full circle, gazing out his window at the early morning sky, but he has changed. It is not an earth-shattering transformation, a glimpse at the secrets of our existence, however he does attain a subtle certainty, a personal knowingness, about his place in the world. 
 
Saturday is an excellent novel.