A day in the life

His first book, First Love, Last Rites, a collection of short stories, was full of child molestors, young boys who lost their virginity to their sisters and other like creepy crawlies.

So in his latest book, the polished Saturday, we are slightly bemused to find his protagonist is an elderly, slightly fussy, slightly smug neurosurgeon who seems to have everything going for him.

He is rich; he has a wife he is still deeply in love with many years after marriage; his son and daughter are a blues musician and a poet respectively, with far too much talent between them than seems strictly decent.

But this is Ian McEwan. Something must happen to shatter this calm. And it does: the novel is set on June 15, 2003, the day London was thronged by protestors against the then forthcoming Iraq war.

Thus, the shadow of war, of international terrorism, the constant awareness every citizen of every country must feel of the looming threat the outside world poses; and the awareness that this threat is present even in the most private recesses of one's life -- all these are factored into one day in the life of Henry Perowne.

The novel starts when Perowne wakes in the middle of the night, wanders onto the balcony thinking contentedly of his life and his work, and sees what he imagines to be a terrorist attack.

A plane is on fire and attempting to land""and, watching this, he can only jump to all the inevitable conclusions that we in this age would be bound to jump to.

As the day unspools, as Perowne goes about his normal Saturday routine (a squash game, a visit to his mother, buying fish and cooking dinner), this threat somehow never goes away.

It takes definite shape when he is involved in a mild accident while driving to his squash game, again feeling content in his swanky Mercedes. The car he collides with is driven by a man called Baxter, and after a period of affected casualness, Perowne finds that he is in acute personal danger.

Luckily, if that is the word, he recognises that Baxter is in the early stages of an illness called Huntington's Disease, and his professional integrity sacrifices itself to his fear for his safety.

He is able, by making a few allusions to Baxter's condition, to save himself a beating, but in doing so he causes Baxter to lose face badly in front of his friends, something you know and Perowne knows will lead to repercussions.

We follow Perowne past this incident and onto his other chores, and through McEwan's precise recounting of them Perowne is revealed to us, not that he's particularly complicated.

Despite the fact that his daughter Daisy and his father-in-law are poets, Perowne is not a literate man, and although he conscientiously struggles through the books that Daisy sends him, he does not understand how to fit literature into his own life's equation of hard work and results gained through earnest application: he is baffled about what he has gained after ploughing through Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.

"If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down."

He is not sure where he stands on the Iraq debate, especially since he has worked with an Iraqi man who was tortured by the Ba'athists.

He is astonished by and disdainful of some of the marchers, especially the ones with the "Not in My Name" banners: "Its cloying self-regard suggests a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice.

Henry prefers the languid, Down With this Sort of Thing". Perowne is mistrustful of any kind of certainty, whether it is that of the war protestors, or that of suicide bombers.

This position, and indeed much of Perowne's life, has been carved from McEwan's own; Perowne's politics, his affluent lifestyle and comfortable personal life, even his insane mother are all on loan from his creator.

As for the rest, McEwan has filled in the blanks meticulously, so that a complicated surgical operation, a squash game and even the cooking of stew for dinner are exactly, perfectly detailed.

McEwan has a dazzling flair, though some might call it mania, for taxonomy.

There is a story to tell, however, beyond the simple recounting of Perowne's day. Despite the uneasiness, the vague threat Perowne feels all day when he is outside his home, when the definitive McEwan shock occurs (and it is a gasp-out-loud, wring-your-hands and clutch-at-your-hair-in-distress moment), it strikes actually right in his backyard.

The conflict itself is hard to pin down "" how much is due to factors that are beyond the control of any one person's individual actions, to circumstance, to genetic make-up? It becomes impossible to be safe, to calculate risks or even to assign blame after the fact.

Near the end of his day, Perowne shrivels in the face of this relevation: "He's weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control... until you're led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose..."

Perowne's story appears to (or this could be a result of the shared exhaustion and heightened emotion the reader feels with Perowne that has led her to see meaning where there is none) shadow the recent American experience, from the unexpected attack on his own ground to the overwhelming defeat of the enemy, right up to the hand he plays in rehabilitating his victim.

And, also as it is with international politics, nothing is clear-cut. Perowne is unsure of his own knowledge and power right up until the end; for instance, he is astonished at the power of lines of poetry, not simply in the face of danger, but as a startlingly precise summing up of our modern human condition.

If Saturday is a celebration of Perowne's empiricism, his rationality, his eminently civilized way of life, it is also an indictment of his lack of imagination and a triumphant demonstration of literature's importance: only a novel, written by a master novelist, could allow us to so completely immerse ourselves in one man's character, in the stuff and minutiae of one life.

Saturday

Ian McEwan
Random House
Price: Rs 795 (special Indian price)
Pages: viii+280