A day in the life

SATURDAY
By Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, 280 pages
Available at Powerbooks

British novelist Ian McEwan is no Nostradamus, and no psychic. He didn’t predict the recent terror attacks on London’s subways. But the characters in his latest novel, Saturday, live in constant anticipation of terror, which is slightly different from living in fear of terror. They have accommodated the idea of terrorism into their daily meanderings. The attacks on London these past weeks no doubt came from long-hatched plans — opportunities denied, then seized. But for Dr. Henry Perowne, successful neurosurgeon, they were inevitable as early as 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq.

He turns back to the window. London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. Rush hour will be a convenient time. It might resemble the Paddington crash — twisted rails, buckled, upraised commuter coaches, stretchers handed out through broken windows, the hospital’s Emergency Plan in action. Berlin, Paris, Lisbon. The authorities agree, an attack’s inevitable.

Early in the novel, Perowne can’t sleep. He goes to a window of his family’s posh apartment overlooking a city square and sees a streak in the sky: something is barreling in over London — something on fire.

This is the setup for McEwan’s follow-up to Atonement, a big hit novel on both sides of the Atlantic. Clearly, McEwan’s preoccupations since Sept. 11, 2001 have turned to matters of security, preoccupations of fear, and how people learn to live with these things.

It’s a slim novel, with a rather compressed narrative that covers exactly one day. We follow Perowne from his early-morning vision in the sky to his morning rounds. The day is Saturday, a day off. The doctor has many things to occupy his day: a morning squash game with a colleague, a visit to his mother in a nursing home, marketing, cooking dinner for his father-in-law and young daughter who is returning home from Paris. And, as with most McEwan novels, something unexpected happens to tip the day over on its side.

Such upsets are the stuff of McEwan’s work — whether it’s the breaking of a vase in Atonement that sets in motion a series of deceptions or the sight of a runaway air balloon on a calm picnic day in Enduring Love. He has long delved into human discomfort, not to mention human perversion (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent). Anxiety, even dread, permeates his tales. There is a great deal of tension in Saturday, but mostly McEwan seems content to take a pulse reading of the modern world.

What he finds is eye-opening, sometimes banal and occasionally transcendent. It’s surely not his best or most ambitious work, but like Updike’s Rabbit books, it tells us a lot about the way the world is at a specific point in time.

We know Perowne will meet with a rude awakening because, early on, he comes across as a bit self-contented and smug. His wife is a media lawyer, his son a talented blues musician and his daughter a published poet. He’s the only one in the family without creative yearnings, we understand, because he’s a rational man, a man of science. He derides, for instance, university professors who see modern life as "a sequence of calamities."

It’s their style, their way of being clever. It wouldn’t be cool or professional to count the eradication of smallpox as part of the modern condition. Or the recent spread of democracies. One evening, one of them gave a lecture on the prospects for our consumerist and technological civilization: not good. But if the present dispensation is wiped out now, the future will look back on us as gods, certainly in this city, lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life-spans, wondrous machines. This is an age of wondrous machines.

This love of machines and materialism extends to his beautiful Mercedes S500, a stereotypical "doctor’s car" that figures in the novel’s first minor upset.

Plot does exist in Saturday — it drives the major events — but mostly this is a "novel of ideas." McEwan is here to describe the zeitgeist. And mostly, we gather, Brits are feeling a little guilty about their accumulated wealth, their numerous material comforts, while numbly aware that some awful retribution is at hand.

Interesting, too, is McEwan’s (or Perowne’s) take on Tony Blair. He describes meeting the Prime Minister at an art gallery on the eve of Britain’s commitment to the Iraq invasion. Blair mistakes Perowne for one of the artists. "We’ve got two of your paintings hanging in Downey Street," he tells Perowne. "Cherie and I adore them."

Perowne, the rational man, must quickly correct the Prime Minister: "You’re making a mistake." And we recognize that this simple statement is also a kind of challenge to Blair’s entire political gambit, his tested talents as a politician, his decision to cast his lot with President Bush: "On that word there passed through the Prime Minister’s features for the briefest instant a look of sudden alarm, of fleeting self-doubt. No one else saw his expression freeze and his eyes bulge minimally. A hairline fracture had appeared in the assurance of power."

McEwan has many such insights, moments where he just nails the anxieties of the modern age. He picks up on our absorption in the news, how we can’t seem to live our lives without a constant explanation of what’s happening around us — how we, in fact, have become prisoners of the media. ("His nerves, like tautened strings, vibrate obediently with each news ‘release.’")

Given McEwan’s gift for prestidigitation — he’s a master of sleight-of-hand and reader manipulation, as Atonement will attest — Perowne’s views — the views of a prosperous white man in his late forties — are inevitably meant to collide with the world around him. Saturday is a slice-of-life look at how such a collision could take place, and how people must find solace in the fact that, for every Saturday, there is surely a Sunday to follow.