Saturday

Saturday was lent to me by my boyfriend after I enjoyed Atonement and On Chesil Beach. Before that Ian McEwan and myself weren’t really on speaking terms after I tried The Cement Garden at the age of 18, inspired by an A Level mock exam when we were given the opening to Enduring Love (two people are having a picnic when they witness a freak accident). I was taken in by his pacing – these couple of pages on an exam paper weren’t enough, I needed to know what happened next. The Cement Garden was on my Mum’s bookshelf at home, but somehow the tale bored me. I gave Enduring Love itself a go a couple of years later, but again, the dramatic opening seemed misleading. I raced through it waiting for something to match the excitement of the opening.

I’m beginning to see it’s all about the detail with McEwan. You can't race through it. The first section of Atonement deals with the course of one day in the main characters’ lives, centered on one house and the rest of the book with the repercussions from that day (but of course you’ve all seen the film now, right?). On Chesil Beach does a similar thing with a couple’s wedding night to great effect. Saturday is set on the day of the mass protests against the second war in Iraq, Saturday 15th Feburary 2003. Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is awake in the small hours of the morning and thinks he sees a plane on fire, heading towards Heathrow. This event pops up again and again in the book, on rolling news, and on Henry’s mind: is it an accident, a terrorist attack, or what? Over the course of the novel we follow Henry as he spends his day in preparation for a family meal in the evening and how an small car accident, bringing him into contact with Baxter, a petty criminal, will disrupt his plans. We are taken around London and touch on the edges of the march, and are thrown into the issues head on with an argument between Henry and his daughter Daisy about the proposed war.

Taking pleasure in the detail is something speed readers have to work on, but I felt I was beginning to crack it with these last three McEwans I’ve read. There are moments where you do just want to yell, “ok, I get it, he’s a NEUROSURGEON” after yet another sentence using medical jargon describing Henry’s view of someone’s behaviour or a memory of a patient. There is a description of a squash game and it really, really, didn’t need to be related to the reader point by point. Next time, I’ll just turn on 5 Live.

However, taking, or not taking, an interest in the details and our knowledge are interesting themes in the book. There’s a good point where Henry’s watching the news while cooking, interested in both the developments on our plans for war and whether there’s been any more information on the plane crash he witnessed. When he discovers (there’s a nice touch about the item having been moved down the news agenda and the slight disappointment in the newsreader’s voice) the event is a simple accident rather than a malicious terrorist attack, it sets off a chain of thought about his own complicity in the coming war, in the workings of the state:

This Russian plane flew right into his insomnia, and he’s been only too happy to let the story and every little nervous shift of the daily news process colour his emotional state… He’s deeper in than most. His nerves, like tautented strings, vibrate obediently with each news ‘release’. He’s lost the habits of scepticism, he’s becoming dim with contradictory opinion, he isn’t thinking clearly, and just as bad, he senses he isn’t thinking independently.

Henry, we are told, doesn’t eat books, unlike his daughter, a soon to be published poet, and his father in law, a renowned poet and contemporary of Heaney/Motion and the like. (There are a bit too many overachieving characters in this book, his son’s a talented jazz guitarist…) And it’s the literary knowledge that appears to be the family’s salvation when the evening takes a violent turn, rather than Henry’s medical knowledge which only appears to escalate the situation. I’m not sure how believable I found this plot twist, but it made for a tense, vivid set piece.

Nick Hornby (by happy coincidence for my first blog, Saturday pops up in The Complete Polysyllabic Spree) makes an interesting point about the overachieving nature of the characters: he says: “writing exclusively about highly articulate people…Well, isn’t it cheating a little?… They don’t need (McEwan’s) help.”. I couldn’t help feel a bit sorry for Baxter, the character who attacks the Perownes, (although maybe that’s what McEwan wants, to tug on my leftie sensibilities) because he obviously had so little (in material and knowledge terms) compared to them, even though he’s entirely responsible for his own violence. Now I’m thinking again about how Henry’s behaviour in the car crash incident (where he tries to use his suspicions about Baxter’s medical condition to diffuse the situation, to get one over him) misfires badly and whether there’s a connection between that and British and American attempts to bestow democracy on another country… there must be someone somewhere doing a phD on the Iraq war in contemporary fiction, right?