No Ordinary Day

Author Ian McEwan. AP Photo by Adam Butler.

Henry Perowne, the hero of Ian McEwan’s shrewd new novel, Saturday, is an unshakeable realist. As one of London’s top neurosurgeons, he’s trained to be pragmatic, meticulous, exacting; decisions are based on hard science, not emotion. These qualities constitute his world outlook and his view on that most divisive of current issues, the Iraq war.

Henry’s daughter Daisy, on the other hand, is an idealist, a burgeoning poet who plies her father with literature to demonstrate fiction’s power to illuminate reality. Finding no hidden truth in so-called “classics” like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Henry is convinced more than ever of fiction’s futility in a post-9/11 world. “Daisy’s notion,” Henry muses, “that people can’t live without stories, is simply not true.”

You wouldn’t mistake Henry as a stand-in for McEwan, who is, after all, an acclaimed inventor of stories. But the British author does share some of his character’s frustrations.

“In those months after 9/11, I didn’t read much fiction,” says McEwan, on the phone from a tour stop in Boston. As it did many of us, the assault on the World Trade Center drove McEwan to non-fiction, to untangle truth from propaganda about Islam and the Middle East. Fiction, no matter how socially astute, offered little comfort – even to those who made a living at it.

“Any large-scale death provides a challenge to literature, especially to the novelist,” says McEwan, author of Atonement and the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam. “While a novelist can make a great deal of one death, and make that the subject of a whole story, 3,000 deaths or 20,000 deaths are nearly impossible to [explore] with any justice. The scale of the suffering is too much for 350 pages.”

Still, he felt compelled to try. McEwan, one of the most bankable names in contemporary world literature, never goes in for the obvious or predictable narrative. Wrought with his enviably mellifluous prose style, Saturday is another instance of his literary deftness: terrorism is clearly the book’s preoccupation, and yet it doesn’t directly influence any of the major plot points. The result is a rather clear-eyed depiction of the modern world, where we try not to let daily reminders of potential destruction dampen our joie de vivre.

Henry Perowne wakes up early on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003. While standing at his bedroom window — groggily recalling the previous day’s surgery — he catches a glimpse of a most uncanny sight: a blazing aircraft hurtling through the sky, on a seeming course for Heathrow. Is this the airborne terror campaign Londoners – and, indeed, dwellers in most of the world’s biggest cities – have been silently anticipating?

Actually, no. News reports soon confirm that it was not the handiwork of al-Qaeda, but rather a cargo plane that caught fire. (There were no casualties.) Even so, the image of the burning plane sets the psychological tone for Henry’s day. His reflection on the post-9/11 world is only intensified by the million-strong anti-war protest in the streets of London (this is the book’s only true-life detail).

Courtesy Random House Canada.

Henry’s no Rumsfeld, but he does feel that the ouster of Saddam Hussein can only benefit the Iraqi people. This puts him at direct odds with his dogmatic daughter, who argues fervently in favour of military restraint and sees her father’s pro-war stance as symptomatic of his emotional detachment and Western arrogance. The truth, McEwan explains, is a lot more complicated.

“I know many doctors and scientists who were passionately against the war, and of course, there were some – not many – writers who took a more hawkish stance,” says McEwan. “I think one of the interesting things about the Iraq war was that it was pretty hard to predict people’s stance, on the basis of, you know, their position on capital punishment and socialized medicine. Usually, opinions come in packages. This didn’t, partly because it was complicated by the fact that there were people on the left, for example, who did see a humanitarian case for the war.”

For his part, McEwan was anti-war, though he admits “my certainty was undercut by a long-standing desire to see Saddam Hussein overthrown.”

A credible work of fiction must present a spectrum of opinions, which is why Saturday argues all sides with equal vigour. “I think anyone who gets into the long, slow haul of writing a novel will find that [promoting a political agenda] is pretty unsustainable,” he says. “It falls apart in your hands. Not only is it a bad idea, it’s condescending.”

Amid the vague threat of terrorism, life goes on. On his way to a squash game with a friend, Henry gets into a fender bender. As soon as the other driver emerges from his car, things go wrong. Baxter, as the man calls himself, is uninterested in swapping insurance info; flanked by two thugs, he seems prepared to mete out street justice. Braced for the thrashing of a lifetime, Henry senses something peculiar about Baxter. In an ingenious narrative twist, Henry tells his attacker that he detects in Baxter’s pinched movements the first signs of Huntington’s Disease. Stunned by the doctor’s spot-on diagnosis of his secret affliction, Henry’s would-be assailant turns tail.

The encounter is the crux of the novel, but McEwan cautions not to overanalyze its meaning. “I’m not writing a kind of parable here,” he says. “I’m not trying to say that Henry Perowne equals the wealthy west and that Baxter equals an unreasonable section of the impoverished Third World.” Henry spends the rest of the day replaying his exit strategy. He defused a potentially violent situation — but was it the proper response? As a doctor, did he abuse his authority? The set-to with Baxter has nothing to do with the war on terror, and yet Henry’s dilemma may well be the crucial question of our time: how do reasonable people deal with an unreasonable threat?

Saturday has been paired with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the sophomore novel from American wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer, as the first “9/11 novels.” (An American producer, Scott Rudin, has already snapped up the movie rights to Saturday.) McEwan is certain that the 2001 terrorist attacks will loom large in American literature. But he worries about the tendency to construe 9/11 as the most horrific incident ever.

“We’ve had numerous atrocities against civilians, and we should be careful of making a fetish of one above the other,” he cautions. Having said that, McEwan acknowledges that while the death toll of 9/11 was small when judged against the genocides in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, it has come to dictate American and British foreign policy, and has already occasioned two wars.

“We do live in different times,” says McEwan. “I think, too, that the period after the cold war, the ’90s, now looks like a kind of Edwardian summer.”

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.