So, I finished reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday about two weeks ago, but I haven’t had time to get down my reflections on it. Like his last book, Atonement, this is a very quiet, but very good book. Ordinary people with ordinary lives, who sometimes find themselves spinning slowly out of control. Saturday is an explicitly post-9/11 book, and it was more than a little eerie to being reading the opening scenes, in which the main character rises from bed in the middle of the night, walks over to the window and sees a flaming airplane heading toward Heathrow–particularly because my reading corresponded with the London bombings.
For the most part, the text is an exploration of how we live our everyday lives in the post-9/11 era. It’s about our assumptions and fears. And, it’s about our ambivalence concerning US interventions in Iraq. These larger geopolitical concerns float around the periphery of Henry Perowne’s not so typical Saturday in February 2003. For me, there is always a haunting possibility that the next time I turn on the radio or the TV or the computer and see something tragic and intentional. The feeling of subtle vulnerability is pervasive. And, so it is for Perowne.
Perowne is a neuro-surgeon who is making his way through the day. He is anticipating a dinner marking the arrival from France of his daughter and his father-in-law, both of whom are poets. His involvement in a minor traffic accident early in the day–caused in part by his efforts to circumnavigate an enormous anti-war protest–provides an infusion of drama for the story. By the evening hours, this brief altercation has put his entire family in a great deal of danger.
Such a normal day, but really not….