Saturday by Ian McEwan
Novel about a Privileged Londoner on the Eve of the Iraq Invasion
During 2003 Iraq War protests,Henry Perowne's perfect life as a London neurosurgeon threatens to unravel after a traffic accident with a disabled criminal named Baxter.
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Publication Date: March 2005
ISBN: 9780385511803
Perowne’s idyllic life crosses paths with London antiwar protesters
The novel Saturday, by Ian McEwan, author of the novel Atonement, which became a hit movie in 2008, takes place entirely on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003. On that day, the streets of London were choked with crowds protesting the looming American invasion of Iraq.
Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne wakes up in his inherited house off Tottenham Court Road to the sight of a few protesters trickling into London. He does not realize the size the protests will eventually reach. In fact, he is disdainfully amused by the news coverage of the protests as he prepares breakfast. Having treated a victim of the Sadaam Hussein regime, Perowne is not altogether opposed to the invasion, though the justifications for it seem inadequate to him.
Perowne’s Saturdays are usually devoted to an energetic round or two of squash with a colleague, and the crowds and police keeping order are considered as mere annoyances delaying Perowne from reaching the squash court on time.
Mercedes-driving Perowne talks a police officer into moving a barrier and waving him across a crowded street rather than making him take a detour, confirming Perowne’s privileged status to both. But soon after avoiding the detour, Perowne is in a minor traffic accident involving a handicapped criminal and the criminal’s disloyal sidekicks.
Perowne’s expertise in neurology lets him diagnose the criminal, at a glance, as having Huntington’s Disease, a devastating neurological disorder. This humanizes the criminal, named Baxter, to Perowne, but he is soon forgotten as Perowne proceeds to his squash game. However, Baxter’s disease becomes important again later in the story.
After an uneasy resolution with the criminal, Perowne’s day begins to change
Perowne’s squash game that day is more competitive and heated than usual, and he chalks it up to the dual inconveniences of the war protesters clogging the streets and the minor car accident he has experienced. But as he heads home after stopping at the fishmonger’s to buy the ingredients for the dinner he plans to make, he believes that the day will proceed as expected.
That evening, as Perowne prepares his perfect dinner for his perfect family – wife, college aged son, grown daughter, and elderly father-in-law – Baxter shows up at the door, presumably having identified Perowne’s house by the presence of the scraped Mercedes parked out front.
A harrowing climactic scene ensues, and divulging the events of that scene would spoil the ending for the reader. Suffice it to say that Perowne eventually comes full circle on his extraordinary Saturday, but as a slightly wiser and more compassionate person.
The thrum of the protesters as a backdrop throughout the novel functions as a sort of oblique Greek chorus, drawing attention away from Perowne’s perfect little life to the historic events unfolding. Perowne has been described as the “perfect philistine,” because of his privileged removal from the hardcore facts of modern life. It is up to the reader to decide whether this description is apt.
Ian McEwan, like Henry Perowne, is at the top of his literary game with this novel. Some reviews have even speculated on further parallels between author and character.
McEwan’s novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award in 2002, National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award and Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction in 2003, and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel in 2004. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the novel Saturday.
