Saturday: Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man – a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind, a newspaper lawyer, and proud father of two grown-up children, one a promising poet, the other a talented musician. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world – the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city, its openness and diversity, and his happy family life are under threat.

However irrational it may be, I cracked open this book expecting to dislike it. It could be a combination of the critical and popular acclaim awarded upon McEwan’s writing and the fact that I tend to not gravitate toward this sort of fiction. So I was somewhat surprised to find that I loved the writing style and the level of detail given to every aspect of Henry’s life. Saturday follows a day off in the life of a neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, as he navigates his way around London in the midst of a huge anti-war rally, from his traumatic experience mid-morning which colours his attitude throughout the day, his chance encounter with an afflicted hoodlum and a family dinner. In the first section, as Henry awakes early mid-morning and sees a plane on fire in the sky we are given insight into him, his thoughts, his work, his history and his family. In this section McEwan adequately captures that particular brand of post 9/11 paranoia, Perowne’s thoughts instantly turn to the worst possible scenario. He turns to that institution of instant reportage of the early morning news to discover more about what he has just witnessed, lightly distressed that it isn’t given too much importance.

Throughout, the writing maintains this high attention to detail. McEwan is able to inject Perowne’s thoughts as he goes about his daily actions and touches upon recollections of his past, insight into his profession, how he views the world and how it contrasts with those around him, and even how he thinks he came to hold such a position. There also seems to be a running hyper-awareness of the mediatization of experience:

He is cast in a role, and there’s no way out. This, as people like to say, is urban drama. A century of movies and half a century of television have rendered the matter insincere. It is pure artifice. Here are the cars, and here are the owners. Here are the guys, the strangers, whose self-respect is on the life. Someone is going to have to impose his will and win, and the other is going to give way. Popular culture has worn this matter smooth with reiteration, this ancient genetic patrimony that oils the machinations of bullfrogs and cockerels and stags. And despite the varied and casual dress code, there are rules as elaborate as the politesse of the Versailles court that no set of genes can express. For a start, it is not permitted as they stand there to acknowledge the self-consciousness of the event, or its overbearing irony: from just up the street, they can hear the tramping and tribal drums of the peace mongers. Furthermore, nothing can be predicted, but everything, as soon as it happens, will seem to fit.

However, this detail laden writing becomes something of a hindrance with the episode of violence upon the Perowne family. Rather than giving insight into what should be seen as a terribly traumatic experience, here it seems that Perowne is largely cold and detached from what is happening to him and his family. It is as though he is just recounting something from his past, something that they’ve already moved beyond. It could be that this is just his way of responding to the unknown, the frightening invasion of privacy and peace. It could also be a comment on how acts of terror are reported in the media, as something distant and unknowable, sanitized for our daily consumption. So while the style of writing may have placed me as a reader at an emotional distance from the turmoil, at the same time it triggered further ruminations upon the effects of doing so, and where else these effects are at work, and the implication of such distancing.

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