The Imagination of Disaster (Page 2)

Saturday unfolds over twenty-four hours in February 2003, on the day of the massive demonstration in London against the invasion of Iraq. Driving to his weekly Saturday squash game with his squash partner, the "physically affectionate, energetic, direct in manner" American anesthesiologist Jay Strauss, Henry Perowne bends a traffic rule with the permission of a distracted policeman, finds himself on a deserted street not far from a pub called the Jeremy Bentham, and gets into a car accident with a volatile, thuggish guy named Baxter. As the city fills with the sounds of hundreds of thousands of marching protesters, the highly cultivated neurologist haughtily insults the lower-class Baxter, who assaults Henry. But the doctor, noticing Baxter's trembling hands and turbulent mood swings, realizes that his assailant has the beginnings of Huntington's disease, and he wriggles out of a beating by falsely telling Baxter that he can help him find treatment for what is in fact an incurable condition. Henry succeeds in confusing his attacker and makes his escape. But a humiliated Baxter develops a dangerous obsession with Henry that eventually puts the surgeon, his lawyer-wife Rosalind, two children and famous-poet father-in-law at risk of being murdered.

Two transfiguring events shape the novel. There is the car accident, which echoes the sudden upheaval of 9/11, and which brings into Henry's life Baxter, a disenfranchised person, who is a kind of echo of the hatred and anger of the disenfranchised, militant, impoverished Third World. Certainly he poses to Henry the ethical challenge presented by poor, starving countries to the affluent West, and Henry treats him--unthinkingly, innocently--with a reflexive contempt not unlike the West's indifference to the Third World. He also poses to the suddenly vulnerable Henry a threat of annihilation similar to the threats made against the West. These possible implicit resonances are impressions, associations, intuitions that grow entwined with other plausible meanings as the story begins to strike the primal chords of myth. They never acquire the independent meaning of a neat allegorical subtext.

But the fundamental transfiguring event in Saturday is 9/11, and also what you might call--at the time when the novel takes place--that day's shadow event, the looming war in Iraq. Henry's inability to make clear, decisive sense of 9/11, or of the justification for war, is the hothouse atmosphere in which he tries to figure out what, if any, his responsibilities are toward Baxter. Thus the Jeremy Bentham pub, named after the famous philosopher of self-interest, and the complicating details of the traffic infraction, and the policeman's blind eye--a suspension of the rules not available to people like Baxter--and Henry's arrogance, and Baxter's helpless susceptibility to the violent impulses stirred up by his illness.

Though it includes some political argument--mostly between Henry and his twentyish daughter Daisy, a gifted poet--Saturday is not a political book. Like nearly all of McEwan's work, his latest novel is about the sudden relativizing of perspective in the wake of startling change, though Henry is more resigned to his uncertainties than abruptly transformed or nearly destroyed by them, as are most of McEwan's protagonists. McEwan's fiction explores the illusions and delusions that people clutch for as they scramble to readapt to a new mental landscape, just as they might reach for trees and rocks if they found themselves tumbling down the side of a mountain. This makes him the perfect novelist to write about 9/11 and its aftermath. No two people in his novels attach the same significance to the same event. The meaning of September 11 is, at this moment, likewise up for grabs. No one can say in any clear, decisive way what 9/11 signifies in political or historical terms. No honest person, that is.

The meaning of transfiguring events in McEwan's work is always a private affair. After Joe Rose, the science writer in Enduring Love, fails to rescue a man in a hot-air balloon, he begins to doubt his courage and his ability to transcend his own self-interest to save another person's life--something like the questions that preoccupy Henry Perowne. For Jed Parry, a stranger who also tries to help with the balloon, the accident is the beginning of a mad obsession with Rose--something like Baxter's fixation on Henry. For Clarissa, Joe's wife, Joe's stricken conscience is silly, and his (accurate) claim that Parry is stalking him is a symptom of Joe's declining sanity.

In Black Dogs, the attack of a pair of rabid hounds on a woman convinces her that evil is real, a revelation that causes her to withdraw from the world into religion; the same event strengthens her husband's radical scientific opposition to religion, producing an irreparable break between them. Yet the attack leads to a fortuitous event that holds their estranged family together. In The Child in Time, the loss of a child brings out the lost child hidden within a bereft father, who begins to see behind adult pretense a vast scrimmage of childlike egos and appetites, no two grown-ups sharing the same values except through the miraculous dispensation of love. The death of a mutual former lover fills the two old friends in Amsterdam with a mortal dread that alters each one's sense of reality in very different ways, propelling them along divergent paths of delusion until they fatally collide. In The Comfort of Strangers, murder follows inevitably from the contrasting inner lives of the killers, a deceptively innocent English couple, and their victims, a decadent Venetian husband and wife: a difference between responses to erotic impulse that is like the difference between civilizations.

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