A plane on fire crosses the sky, and an ordinary day becomes extraordinary
It seems both appropriate and poignant that an Englishman would be the one to get it right -- to render not the immediate aftershocks of 9/11, but the longer legacy of steady-state apprehension, that uneasy alliance between denial and emotional free fall. Most of the calamities of the past century have been handled with a particular sidelong acuity by English writers, whether the street-scene anguish of Virginia Woolf's ``Mrs. Dalloway" or the political bleakness of Vietnam in Graham Greene's ``The Quiet American." Accordingly, Ian McEwan's ``Saturday" is never about the day itself -- not that day, anyway, but another 24-hour eternity in February 2003. This one belongs to a London neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne , and he will try to spend it immersed in the errands of privilege and pleasure. He can't, of course: If it's happiness you're after, McEwan is not a writer you can trust.
``Saturday" pays faint homage to ``Mrs. Dalloway" in two mutually enhancing ways: its rendering of a vast landscape of politics, art, and morality within its protagonist's interior consciousness, and the use of its characters' dilemma as a metaphor for the cracked, unfixable fault line in the world. Like Clarissa Dalloway in search of her flowers, Perowne will embark on a London odyssey of serene detail -- buying fish for that night's dinner, playing squash with a colleague, ruminating over his daughter's recent success as a young poet. But his morning has begun, pre-dawn, with the accidental witnessing of a plane on fire on its approach into Heathrow, a scene eerie with paranoid assumptions and nightmarish familiarity, of ``catastrophe observed from a safe distance." Even when Perowne learns that a disaster was averted, he perceives the reprieve as temporary: London, he knows, is merely ``waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities."
So the good doctor will do what civilization has always done: furrow the brow and scavenge for hope. He will make love to his wife, check on his patients, placate his drunken, famous father-in-law. And then fate intervenes, in the form of a street bully who could happen upon any of us; the encounter will represent, throughout the novel, the margins of darkness in a world changed utterly and laid bare to chaos. (McEwan may be alone in his willingness to mention the untidier emotions of a populace beset by fear, including what his protagonist considers ``a darker longing in the collective mind . . . a blasphemous curiosity.") Perowne's is a life of fine cars and domestic tranquillity and even a certain self-satisfied inner dialogue, but he recognizes these as the thin panaceas they are. Slyly, McEwan has made his protagonist a bit of a philistine, a man who prefers Darwin to Flaubert and can't recognize his daughter's recitation of ``Dover Beach." And yet Matthew Arnold's elegiac darkling plain is the real precursor to ``Saturday," both narrators seeking refuge from a world ``with neither joy, nor love, nor light." Perowne at the end of the novel is a weary and vulnerable man, hardly ennobled by his frailty but set more on mercy than on Old Testament wrath, aware that vengeance is hardly a province of the Lord.
I've tended to flinch at most efforts in American fiction to address 9/11 -- too much prime-time ash and sorrow, and my own admitted gut response that says too soon, too soon. But it will always be too soon, whether the Somme or Hiroshima. And art is obliged to appropriate and excise horror; it's part of what Perowne thinks of as ``a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of consciousness." That's the only redemption to be had in ``Saturday" -- that, and the grave and graceful closing of the day, ``faintly, falling," in snowy Joycean splendor, toward maybe one more untouched dawn.
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. 
