Fiction: On the eve of a major public demonstration against an impending war, one man can't sleep, but his restlessness has nothing to do with politics. Henry Perowne, gifted brain surgeon, husband, father, keen squash player and unabashed materialist, notices an aircraft in the night sky.
Is it a terrorist attack? Or merely a routine flight about to land? Here is a man who is acceptably ambivalent about politics, a bit of a dreamer, wealthy, successful, no longer young, but not old enough to accept ageing. He is facing his day off and is unable to relax.
Saturday, Ian McEwan's outstanding 10th novel, is both public and personal. It is also most emphatically about being alive now. Perowne's restless night becomes early morning and, following a brief discussion with his teenage musician son, he returns to bed. There he makes love with his newspaper lawyer wife. She goes to an important meeting, he prepares for his squash date. His shining new Mercedes car is pointedly countered by his tatty sports gear. More than anything, Perowne wants his youth back.
Early in the narrative, McEwan, a writer of cool perception, establishes his central character as likeable, detached, engaged with his own world and very human. Aware that his large hands tend to frighten potential patients as much as reassure them, he likes his job, the intricate business of repairing the human brain.
In tandem with the reader's response to McEwan's portrait of a man whose sense of self has been shaped by his career is an awareness that this novel is an urgent exploration of the way the recent becomes history. Always a serious, committed observer of people and the ways in which they deal with the weight of the past, McEwan has looked to the legacy of the second World War. Yet, from his first two books, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, both short story collections, he appeared driven by a macabre reading of sexuality and fear. The strange and the uncomfortable also dominated his first two novels, The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers. Perversion, complete with bizarre twists of fate, appeared to be his natural medium.
But a subtle maturity asserted itself with The Child in Time (1987), in which he brilliantly explored how the ordinary suddenly becomes terrifying. A routine visit to the supermarket explodes into every parent's nightmare as a little girl vanishes, leaving hell in her wake. The ultimate unfairness is expressed by the way in which normal life continues around the tragedy. It proved an important novel for him, as it suggested the profundity of his thought more than matched his efficient, understated prose.
He began as part of a British literary fraternity which emerged in the late 1970s. Several of these writers swaggered through youth and have become beached on the shelf of mid-life. Martin Amis, comic street satirist capable of virtuoso flights of language saying very little very well, remains the undisputed stylist; Julian Barnes, clever, knowing, self-congratulatory and overrated still feeds off his youthful precociousness; Peter Ackroyd, always entertaining, is resolutely rooted in London's retreating past; and William Boyd, whose engaging fiction owes much of its tone and voice to Anthony Burgess. McEwan, in common with the invariably interesting and equally unshowy Graham Swift, searched for something more quietly radical.
Swift's fiction tends to ask questions rather than offer answers, and has increasingly looked to the ordinary. McEwan travels a step further - he allows the ordinary to be blown apart by the aggressively unexpected.
In Enduring Love (1997), a picnic scene is disrupted by a struggle with a helium balloon - and it proves one of his most dramatic set pieces to date. The Innocent (1990) begins as a romance but quickly develops into a murder conspiracy featuring a suitor as accomplice.
No, the easy has never held much allure for McEwan, who examined mental darkness and fear in Black Dogs (1992). In true Booker tradition, he won in 1998 with Amsterdam, a deceptively appealing if minor narrative, leaving his finest novel, Atonement, to finish as runner-up in 2001.
Atonement represented a major shift for McEwan, his preoccupation with the legacy of the second World War yielded to a wider sense of English social history, and more specifically, the English literary tradition as represented by Evelyn Waugh. If Atonement is McEwan's salute to Brideshead Revisited, Saturday is his Mrs Dalloway. Just as Woolf sought to capture the random mood-swings of her character's self-consciousness over the course of a day, McEwan's brain surgeon revels in his temporary freedom from the operating theatre. Still, his place of work has become his natural home, the language of neurology his own.
Balanced against the private preoccupations, his pride in his neurological expertise, which is convincingly described by McEwan, is his tentative pleasure in his happiness. For Perowne, loved by his wife, is happy, albeit nervously so, preoccupied with his squash, his rituals and the meal he will later prepare for his family. There is an honesty about this, as there is about his apparent detachment on the subject of the pending Iraq war. For this is no ordinary Saturday. The novel is set on February 15th, 2003, the day hundreds of thousands protested against the pending invasion of Iraq. As marchers gather, Perowne prepares to do battle on the squash court, pitted against a colleague, equally middle aged and equally aware of putting pressure on an ageing heart. Outside, the streets of central London "the scene has an air of innocence and English dottiness".
Perowne's view on Iraq has been informed by the experiences of one of his patients, an Iraqi academic who had suffered torture. Similarly, his opinions on literature have been shaped by his daughter, an about-to-be-published poet whose grandfather, Perowne's touchy father-in-law, is an established literary figure sustained by his professional grudges. Although the other characters are sketched not drawn, McEwan's achievement is making his brain surgeon think like a brain surgeon, not a novelist. Perowne has a scientific intelligence, not a literary one; he sets out to read Darwin and is struck by the phrase, "There is a grandeur in this view of life", but he distrusts fiction.
A minor car accident results in him meeting Baxter, a thug in the early stages of Huntington's Disease. Like a chess player, Perowne seizes his advantage and later pays for his opportunism. After the obscenely vicious house siege, he finds himself operating, albeit implausibly, on the man who has threatened his wife and humiliated his daughter.
But the true drama of this eloquent, intelligent novel occurs during the surgeon's visit to his mother, a former county swimmer, now beaten by Alzheimer's, her mind and memory gone. For all his surgical triumphs and expertise, he can not repair his mother's dying brain.
Philip Roth's late flowering has shown his preoccupations shift from himself as self-obsessed writer to exasperated chronicler of his country. Ian McEwan, as writer, witness and thinker, has here articulated the essential ambivalence of survival at its least heroic if most obviously human.
Saturday By Ian McEwan Cape, 279pp. £13.99
