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 PrintableVersion Shelf lifeLooking at secular booksSATURDAY This book has received such plaudits already that it scarcely needs me to add my praise. It has been called ‘dazzling’, ‘remarkable’ and ‘brilliant’ (lots of times), and it is all those things. But I think Saturday is especially important because of what it tells us about our world, the warning it gives us Christians. The novel traces a day in the life of Henry Perowne, an intelligent and likeable neurosurgeon at the peak of his career. By choosing this demanding form, McEwan takes on the 20th century’s greats, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Like them he gets under his subject’s skin, travelling backwards in time to recount important events and history from his central character’s life, while maintaining an intricate, and multi-stranded plot which pushes relentlessly on to its climax. Plane crash over LondonHenry Perowne’s Saturday begins with his witnessing a plane on fire coming down over London; this theme of danger and threat is constant throughout the novel. Though Perowne lives an extremely privileged life, McEwan taps into a very current sense of instability; that there are dangerous people out there who want to destroy us. He struggles to find the desired rhythm of his leisure day after seeing that plane, but then a chance encounter with an unstable, violent man brings another jolt to his security. Perowne’s response (the response of our world?) is to withdraw into family; and his family is remarkable in its closeness and loyalty. McEwan writes powerfully about the love within Perowne’s marriage and his pride in his just-about-grown, extremely successful children. Love and DarwinThe fragility of this perfection is shown again and again in the story; as Perowne operates on brains, cutting and stitching with minute precision; as individuals collide on the roads and squash courts; as his elderly mother regresses further. The randomness of our genes (it is not accidental that he is struggling through a biography of Darwin), the inevitability of death, and the threat of the world outside lead Henry Perowne’s last thoughts of his Saturday to the conclusion that, ‘there is always this… there is only this’. The ‘this’ is the warmth of his love for his wife. In this way McEwan picks up ‘Dover Beach’, Matthew Arnold’s famous poem about departing faith, which plays an important role in the plot and seems to epitomise the world of the novel. ‘Ah, love, let us be true/To one another…for the world…/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light’. And isn’t that your neighbour and work colleague? Relationships are all, especially in the face of the seeming randomness in our world. McEwan’s scepticism is nothing new at all, but is expressed so powerfully and is such an accurate depiction of the worldview of so many that we must reckon with it as evangelicals. Living in comfortable West London I brush up against Henry Perownes every day, and what am I to say to them? And I must also ask myself how fit my faith is to deal with the horrors that lie around each corner. Who will I run to? My spouse or my Lord? Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - November 2006 |
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