Fiction special - Happy families. Ian McEwan has set out to challenge the idea that fiction should be gloomy. But the characters in his new novel are just too contented to be likeable, writes Sophie Harrison
Published 24 January 2005
Saturday
Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, 279pp, £17.99
ISBN 0224072994
Ian McEwan is not afraid of the dark. In most of his novels, bad things happen: children are stolen, siblings fornicate, innocents go to prison for crimes they did not commit. From The Child in Time to Atonement, he has excelled at creating meticulously described idylls that turn out to harbour black dogs. At first, Saturday seems no different. It is set inside the mind of one man over the course of one day, 15 February 2003 - the date of Britain's largest-ever peace demonstration. Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon despite his unusually large hands, wakes up, makes love to his wife, drives to his squash game, visits his mother, opens some champagne and cooks a family dinner. He also witnesses an aeroplane crash in the early hours, but this turns out to have no further significance beyond introducing the familiar motif of outside menace. It is a flying red herring, a subtle echo of the disastrous balloon in Enduring Love.
An unrelated incident creates the novel's actual menace. On the way to his squash game, driving down University Street in central London, Perowne gets into an argument with a man called Baxter, when the surgeon's Mercedes collides with Baxter's BMW. Behind them, marchers walk down Tottenham Court Road. Baxter punches Perowne in the sternum; the march flows down Gower Street, oblivious. Before anything worse can happen, Perowne performs a medical magic trick: he diagnoses Baxter's neurological disease, a humiliation that instantly deflates his tormentor. The surgeon takes his bruised chest off to his squash game; Baxter nurses his injured pride and plots an unpleasant revenge.
In the foreground, there is personal violence; in the background, the implied violence of the war in Iraq. And yet - unusually for McEwan - Saturday is about feeling good rather than feeling bad. The novel addresses the idea that pleasure and happiness don't make good fictional subjects. As McEwan said in a recent interview: "I thought, 'What would happen if you've got a man who is not about to get divorced or disastrously fall in love and wreck his life, who doesn't have a terminal disease and is not alienated, whose children are not drug addicts and who has a pleasing relationship with his wife?'" These are questions that it is good for any novelist to ask, and answering them gives McEwan the opportunity to anatomise various pleasures - cooking, sex, driving, squash - that have rarely been scrutinised so thoughtfully, or indeed pleasurably. But they also leave him with the challenge of a family that is trickily unsympathetic in its perfection.
Henry Perowne is tall, wealthy, skilled at his job and still running marathons at the age of 48. Rosalind, his wife, is a smart and attractive lawyer whose skin retains its "near-luminous pallor". Their son, Theo, is wildly good-looking and a brilliant blues musician. Their daughter Daisy - "sensuous, intellectual Daisy" - is also beautiful, and a published poet. The children's grandfather John Grammaticus lives in a French chateau in which the family spends summer holidays consuming warm red wine and the occasional "simple supper of salade nicoise". They are all just about believable but incredibly difficult to like. Hearing about them is like reading one of those Christmas round robins in which you learn that Charlotte got five A*s in her A-levels and is now studying Cantonese in her time off from the orphanage.
The problem is that their composure is essentially unshakeable. War, violence, disease, distress - every negative is dipped in the warm bath of Perowne's thoughts and comes out somehow neutralised. As he walks us through his consciousness, he points out various critical thickets - he is worried about the rightness of the march and the impending war, and the wrongness of social inequality and of owning such a swanky big car - but his anxiety never really convinces. For one thing, the prose does not have the texture of worry: it is too precise, too measured, for that. And the plot smothers dissent. Aggression is dismantled; argument peters out. Baxter is inadequate; the peace march ineffectual. In Perowne, McEwan has created a know-all who knows himself but slenderly. McEwan surely wants us to find him sympathetic, but it is hard to see what there is to sympathise with.
If the novel's evil were more potent, this would not matter so much. But Baxter, with his "general simian air" and ill-fitting suit, never stands a chance against such self-assurance. Baxter is a flimsy agent of doom - he is sick, apart from anything else, which is inevitably a disadvantage when facing a doctor. The author portrays Perowne's knowingness as a professional habit, the surgeon occupationally bound to see the skull beneath the skin. But what might dazzle in clinic feels condescending in the outside world. Perowne is the kind of person who can't see a "stringy girl in a shell suit" without attaching her to a pushchair. His pity is inescapably patronising, and turns out to be both literally and metaphorically fatal to Baxter's attempts at villainy.
If Saturday's doctor isn't all that endearing, its medicine, like Enduring Love's psychiatry, is impeccable. To research the novel, McEwan spent two years observing a neurosurgeon at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. This is more than most medical students ever manage, and if the author could not himself now carry out a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, he could probably tell someone else how to go about it. Interestingly, McEwan has opted to describe Perowne's reflections on his work entirely in medical English. As a result, though we are inside Perowne's brain, it is hard to follow him into anyone else's. The scrubs room and the ward are described intimately; so is the surgery, but in language that obscures rather than reveals. "The tumour was best reached through the back of the head, by an infratentorial supracerebellar route," the doctor observes, accurately and mystifyingly. Like most medical speech, this is glamorously indecipherable. McEwan never translates what exactly is meant by a "multi-level lumbar laminectomy" - although, as we are inside Perowne's head (and it is his day off), perhaps he shouldn't have to.
In his downtime, like a professor amazed to find himself on a bus, Perowne tends to get overexcited by the commonplace. Shaving, he is bowled over by "the extravagantly disposable triple-bladed razor, with cleverly arched and ridged jungle-green handle"; making coffee, he ponders "what simple accretions have brought the humble kettle to this peak of refinement". It would have taken the tiniest nod to the possibility of pretension to redeem Perowne into charm. For all his flaws, he is interesting, and the story, as ever with McEwan, is twisting and clever. But only when the surgeon visits his mother do we glimpse a novel that is likeable as well as smart. A champion swimmer in her youth, Mrs Perowne is now a much-reduced figure, her mind destroyed by vascular dementia. Perowne's trip to see his confused parent is tender and genuinely moving. McEwan beautifully captures the rhythm of demented speech - which is rhythm only, all meaning gone, and shows how the world of the demented is too strange to submit to Perowne's professional securities. For a while there is authentic uncertainty, and distress. Admitting real badness makes goodness more real, too. Both character and novel are the better for it.
Sophie Harrison, a former deputy editor of Granta, is training to be a doctor
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
