Expectations always run high when opening a Ian McEwan novel and Saturday, his ninth novel, does not disappoint. The novel follows Henry Perowne, a middle-aged. middle class neurosurgeon, through Saturday 15th February 2003, a day of squash matches, altercations, family gatherings, a suspected terror attack and the protests against the Iraq War. Perowne lives in Fitzroy Square, London, near enough to be affected by the protests without being in the middle of them; a metaphor for the unsettled nature of Britain at this time, a time when terror attacks were seen as an inevitable part of the future and war against Saddam Hussein was unstoppable in spite of people's obvious protestations.
All of this aside, Saturday is a novel about family, literature and science: it centres around a family dinner on the Saturday evening, with all of the complications and dysfunctions that many families face. McEwan uses a third person yet limited narrator, meaning that the reader learns things as Perowne does and sees the world largely from his perspective. Therefore, the reader is able to appreciate Perowne's scientific evaluation of his own happiness or lack thereof as he considers how the word around him is changing. Interestingly, McEwan brings some autobiographical elements to Saturday: he too is an active, successful, middle-aged man living in Fitzroy Square, suggesting that some of Perowne's reflections on happiness may mirror McEwan's own.
For me, much of McEwan's (undoubtedly excellent) writing was overshadowed by Saturday's increasing topicality since it was first published in 2005, just months before London's 7/7 terror attacks. This summer, terror attacks have become weekly, almost daily occurrences - I look at the news through my fingers, dreading the next shooting, bombing, stabbing. And with the Chilcot Report out earlier this month, declaring the Iraq War 'unnecessary', the idiocy of the politicians ignoring these millions of people seems even more ludicrous. The sense of impending doom that McEwan creates, which was regarded by some as hyperbolic at the time of publishing, now seems understated - things are much worse now than anyone could have imagined then. Yet in some ways, it is much the same - the war is in Syria , not here, the attacks since 2005 (touch wood) have been elsewhere, not here. Britain, facing Brexit and division, is still somehow at a distance from all of this, but nonetheless waiting, knowing that sometime soon it will be our turn.
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