Saturday by Ian McEwan
15 01 2006
–Saturday by Ian McEwan–
My rating: **** and 1/2
Of late I have found myself ebbing away from critiquing books and movies. Blame that on the academia hell that medicine is. But off and on, comes a book so breathtakingly fresh–it gives this whole new lease of life to my hobby of reading. Ian McEwan and his latest book, Saturday is precisely that.
Spanning just a single day (yup, its the Saturday that gives the book its name), the novel sees Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon waking up in the middle of a Feb 2003 night and drifting about near his window overlooking a posh central London street. A comet flashes him by just that very instant but as he’s about to wake up his asleep wife, he hears the loud rumble of the aircraft. What he thought was a comet is in fact a plane coming down in flames. As it happens in such moments, he starts off on a thinking frenzy… contemplating whether he should sign in at his hospital (negates that as the plane’s going towards Heathrow direction–far removed from his own borough), fixates himself on the plane, its state of passengers… with one thought leading to another, Perowne starts introspecting bigtime. On everything. His wife Rosalind, his two kids–the blues rocker Theo and the poet daughter, Daisy; his job, his friends, sick mother, father-in-law, life, present political state of affairs–the impending Iraq war. But of course, all this doesn’t stop the actual Saturday to dawn. And with this new day comes a host of incidents–Perowne shopping for his family reunion, his visit to Lily, his mentally demented mother and on his way to a Saturday squash match, his brush with a ruffian called Baxter. Later that day, the re-intrusion of Baxter in his life brings probably his worst fears alive.
Saturday boasts of probably the most liveliest of first person monologues I have had the chance to read in contemporary literature besides Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Neil Cross’s Always the Sun. The characterisation is par excellence. With only one character–Henry–allowed to lay open his psyche in 300 pages, this is one amazing and thoroughly entertaining character study. Right from his constant blabbering to himself and his analysis on almost everything his eyes fall on to his introspection on family, age, politics, literature, children, God, fate–I saw eye to eye on almost every sentence of him. Every word rung a knowing bell, so its no understatement that for me even the tiniest of movements that Henry made, made me hold my breath. I could almost feel his fears, vulnerabilities, triumphs… seldom have I found a connection so astutely made by an author with his reader.
The setting couldn’t get more contemporary and topical than it is–watching Henry reacting to the whole plane incident and the media coverage of the incident the following day is a telling account of how deeply politics and national concern have permeated our everyday lives. Though I do doubt if the general people found the neurosurgical procedures almost as much a delight as I did, it was indeed a pleasant surprise to see an author incorporating these in the most unpretentious way (Robin Cook, please read this). But of course the moments one does get illusioned into believing that this is indeed an autobiography of a surgeon is when we find Henry suddenly and randomly introspecting “scientifically”. Then be it people walking down the street described in a fit down to their neurotransmitters or Henry deducing the neurological disorder of a ruffian who’s about to give him a second punch. Numerous tiny touches like these coupled with those in which Henry checks himself from his thoughts, trying to focus in on the present (dunno how many times that’s happened with me) and yet finding it difficult to hold back a dam of thoughts–you almost feel sitting next to Henry. Hearing him speak about life. Which makes it sometimes a bit too shocking and difficult to read (the whole sequence of Baxter’s re-intrusion and the turn of events thereafter sends chills down the spine–its that real). But since the book culminates at a feel-good, safe juncture (again, entirely plausible in context of the main character), it does make one think about the importance of a family–our natural confidantes, in events of tragedy and humiliation.
I guess just for evoking such a deep interest and empathy from his reader in a seemingly anonymous life of a human being in a remote corner of a metropolis and how his life, his opinions, his expectations from others get their shape from experiences big and small, pleasant and unpleasant, McEwan deserves a pat on the back. It might seem a banal and futile exercise in fiction as I clinically dissect it here, but trust McEwan to rope all that self-analysis, all those perceptions of a single human in the classiest, richest, most enjoyable and possibly the most quotable prose ever. Its like amidst all those larger-than-life thrillers, convenient A to B adventure fiction and hyper-intellectual magic realism and fantasy fiction is this beautiful book that chronicles a life of one of us.
There’s something McEwan does fundamentally right in this book and that is, he writes about a layman, breathes life into him and takes us on a roller-coaster ride with him as he experiences the weakest and strongest moments in a single day, a Saturday. I am touched by how thoughtful and ultimately humane it is.
PS: Can’t wait to read McEwan’s other works. If critics are to be believed, this isn’t even his best. God, what is this guy!
I, on the contrary absolutely hated this mongol of a book. Beyond the third chapter, I was dozing off already - and didnt even finish it! And to think I got the hardbound version.
I must say though I HAVE read better novels from Ian McEwan. I rate this one of his worsts actually :D. Try reading amsterdam
Suyog
I am so not surprised by what you said Suyo. I am still to find someone who’s as mad about this book as I am. I guess the fact that I can be one of those navel-gazing obsessive freaks who stares into space and can keep on introspecting hours on end, there couldn’t be a more identifiable work. And then his opinions, the whole setting, the way the incidents unfold in a single day… I was just blown away by everything in this book from the first page.
Can’t wait to read McEwan’s others!
PS: Probably the neurosurgical details in the 1st quarter of the book put you off?!? While reading it, even I felt how the non-medics are gonna cope with this much medical mumbo-jumbo. Just like I shut Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music down simply because I couldn’t be bothered about C minor and C major.
Actually, “Saturday” is muchu, much more interresting if you have studied one of his other novels in detph. I have with “Atonement”, and I found back in his one several themes like the father/daughter relation, the social class clivage etc… So for everybody who’s still studying contemporary literature, this is a little pearl…
What is unusual about the structure of Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” and how does this, coupled with tension, engage the interest of the reader?
Constantly building up to a climax, then drifting off into some part of the past, surely this would strongly deter the reader? No. With “Saturday” only being structured around twenty-four hours, McEwan does not have a lot of time for plot to develop, instead he gathers tension and then breaks off into the memories and thoughts of Henry Perowne, the protagonist, creating an anti climax, which urges the reader to continue. By using neurosurgical terms almost as if he expects the reader to understand them, McEwan further engages the appreciation and interest of the reader.
The fact Perowne is a highly successful neurosurgeon adds irony to McEwan writing “Saturday” in first person context. The reader really gets into the mind of Henry Perowne, and the constant fluctuation between present events and memories, further makes the reader feel part of Perowne’s frontal lobe. It is this becoming of the main character that grips the reader.
Towards the end of the twenty four hour day-in-the-life, the reader finds themselves in the Perowne household, in the middle of an intrusion by Nigel and Baxter. With Baxter’s knife threatening the flesh of her mother’s throat, Daisy obliges to undress for Nigel and Baxter, and with the reader expecting the nowadays-common worst, Perowne slips into unconscious thought and remembers Daisy as a child:
“Head bowed, Daisy stands with her hands at her sides, unable to look at anyone.
Perowne hasn’t seen his daughter naked in more than twelve years…he remembers this body from bath times…”
This anti-climax makes the reader almost want to rush through the coming sentences, past Henry Perowne’s thoughts and memories, to find out what Baxter will do to Daisy.
After the slow start to the novel, the reader staggers over the first climax in the twenty-four-hour saga. Cruising along in his, model S500 Mercedes to a regular squash game, Perowne makes his way down a narrow road and has a scrape with a series 5 BMW. The car accident coupled with McEwan’s listing and word choice raises the tension and McEwan ingeniously uses these two rivals of car manufacture to indicate a forthcoming clash between their drivers: Henry Perowne in the Mercedes corner and, unknown yet to the reader, Baxter in the BMW corner. Just like an advert interrupting a key scene on a Friday night soap, McEwan interrupts the climax by retreating into Perowne’s thoughts about insurance costs and the fact his beloved S500 will never have its original perfection. Perhaps he should be more concerned about the immediate damage and who’s in the BMW…
“…the snap of a wing mirror… the staccato rattle of the red car on his left side raking a half-dozen stationary vehicles…thwack of concrete against rubber…The slewed cars stop thirty yards apart, engines cut, and for a moment there’s silence and no one gets out.
* * *
… He already sees ahead into the weeks, the months of paperwork, insurance claims and counterclaims…Something original and pristine has been stolen from his car…His car will never be the same again.”
This sudden tension cut again engages, and makes, the reader want to continue with their read. Despite the constant tension then anticlimax, like a heart-rate monitor, throughout the novel, the reader continues because they want to find out what happens next, they want to get inside Perowne’s head, just like he’d do during neurosurgery.
With so much detail, depth and reader-involvement, one might think these events would almost have to take place over a few days or at least a weekend? No - the unusual thing about “Saturday” is that it’s structured around one day. Twenty four little hours. This doesn’t allow McEwan a lot of time to put the reader in Perowne’s mind or even get much detail in? True, but McEwan crams in so much detail, with ease, in this one eventful day.
McEwan even manages to go into surgical depth with relevance to the novel when Perowne invades Baxter’s brain:
“Perowne takes a scalpel…makes a small incision in the dura…Baxter’s brain is indeed covered with a clot…He extends the incision… Perowne suspects that one of the nearby arachnoid granulations could be a source… Rodney sews up the dura with purple thread -3-o Vicryl – and inserts the extradural drain.”
One could argue there’s also a degree of irony- Baxter invades Perowne’s life and affects almost everything in it: his car, his wife, his children, and his home, even his father-in-law and his job. Justly and very fittingly, Perowne invades Baxter’s brain, which affected his life and future. This all links with the idea of the reader getting inside the mind, inside the brain of Henry Perowne.
Another unusual thing about the structure of “Saturday” is the way the novel ends; instead of a stereotypical happy ending or a fade into the future, Perowne falls asleep. Perowne actually, and deservingly so, wants to fall asleep. It’s his way of ridding himself of Baxter, the hospital and the stresses of this day. Starting a fresh, unblemished Sunday:
“This time there’ll be no trouble falling into oblivion, there’s nothing can stop him now… And at last, faintly, falling: this day’s over.
This leaves the reader feeling considerate towards Perowne, accepting the novel coming to an end, the end of “Saturday”.
By engaging the reader in such a way that one feels they are Henry Perowne, the reader actually wants to find out what is going to happen to them on this Saturday. The tension built by repetitive anti-climax, like a pulse on a heart monitor, further engages the reader’s interest of this day-in-the-life novel.
Structuring “Saturday” around a short twenty-four hour period, McEwan snugly fits in masses of detail and appeal, like a brain fitting into a skull: so much complexity, so much information, in such a small space. McEwan further engages the reader by involving them in familiar events, such as a scrape between cars. But the cleverness behind it all: the car incident is the key component to the structure of “Saturday”. It is the brain, the central nervous system, the vital organ, in the novel’s body. Without it, “Saturday” wouldn’t survive; it would be a mere diary entry for Saturday, February 15th 2003.
What do you think?
Saturday is like masochims, some people enjoy it but for the rest of us it’s just painfull