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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Saturday
by Ian McEwan |
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Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Diurnal Ian
McEwan’s new novel, Saturday,
presents a day in the life of a There is grandeur in
this view of life. He
wakes, or he thinks he does, to the sound of her hairdryer and a murmuring
voice repeating a phrase, and later, after he’s sunk again, he hears the
solid clunk of her wardrobe door opening, the vast built-in wardrobe, one of
a pair, with automatic lights and intricate interior of lacquered veneer and
deep, scented recesses; later still, as she crosses and re-crosses the
bedroom in her bare feet, the silky whisper of her petticoat, surely the
black one with the raised tulip pattern he bought in Milan; then the
business-like tap of her boot heels on the bathroom’s marble floor as she
goes about her final preparations in front of the mirror, applying perfume,
brushing out her hair; and all the while, the plastic radio in the form of a
leaping blue dolphin, attached by suckers to the mosaic wall in the shower,
plays that same phrase, until he begins to sense a religious content as its
significance swells—there is grandeur in this view of1ife, it says,
over and again. There is grandeur in this
view of life. When he wakes properly two hours later she’s gone and the room
is silent. There’s a narrow column of light where a shutter stands ajar. The
day looks fiercely white. He pushes the covers aside and lies on his back in
her part of the bed, naked in the warmth of the central heating, waiting to
place the phrase. Once, on a walk by a
river—Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a
dusting of snow—his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved
Philip Larkin the way she did. “If I were called in
/ To construct a religion/I should make use of water.” She said she liked
that laconic “called in”—as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They
stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne,
tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call,
he’d make use of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep
of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living
beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation,
natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms
continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them
morality, love, art, cities—and the unprecedented bonus of this story
happening to be demonstrably true. At the end of this not
entirely facetious recitation—they were standing on a stone bridge at the
junction of two streams—Daisy laughed and put down her cup to applaud. “Now
that’s genuine old-time religion, when you say it happens to be demonstrably
true.” He’s missed her these
past months and soon she’ll be here. Amazingly for a Saturday, Theo has
promised to stick around this evening, at least until eleven. Perowne’s plan is to cook a fish stew. A visit to the
fishmonger’s is one of the simpler tasks ahead: monkfish, clams, mussels, unpeeled prawns. It’s this practical daylight list, these
salty items, that make him leave the bed at last and
walk into the bathroom. There’s a view that it’s shameful for a man to sit to
urinate because that’s what women do. Relax! He sits, feeling the last
scraps of sleep dissolve as his stream plays against the bowl. He’s trying to
locate a quite different source of shame, or guilt, or of something far
milder, like the memory of some embarrassment or foolishness. It passed
through his thoughts only minutes ago, and now what remains is the feeling
without its rationale. A sense of having behaved or spoken laughably. Of
having been a fool. Without the memory of it, he can’t talk himself out of
it. But who cares? These diaphanous films of sleep are still slowing him
down—he imagines them resembling the arachnoid,
that gossamer covering of the brain through which he routinely cuts. The
grandeur. He must have hallucinated the phrase out
of the hairdryer’s drone, and confused it with the radio news. The luxury of
being half asleep exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety. But when he
trod the air to the window last night he was fully awake. He’s even more
certain of that now. He rises and flushes his
waste. At least one molecule of it will fall on him one day as rain,
according to a ridiculous article in a magazine lying around in the
operating suite coffee room. The numbers say so, but statistical probabilities
aren’t the same as truths. We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. Humming this wartime tune, he crosses
the wide green-and-white marble floor to his basin to shave. He feels
incomplete without this morning rite, even on a day off. He ought to learn
from Theo how to let go. But Henry likes the wooden bowl, the badger brush,
the extravagantly disposable triple-bladed razor, with cleverly arched and
ridged jungle-green handle—drawing this industrial gem over familiar flesh
sharpens his thoughts. He should look out what William James wrote on forgetting
a word or name; a tantalising,
empty shape remains, almost but not quite defining the idea it once
contained. Even as you struggle against the numbness of poor recall, you know
precisely what the forgotten thing is not. James had the knack of fixing on
the surprising commonplace—and in Perowne’s humble
view, wrote a better-honed prose than the fussy brother who would rather run
round a thing a dozen different ways than call it by its name. Daisy, the arbiter
of his literary education, would never agree. She wrote a long undergraduate
essay on Henry James’s late novels and can quote a passage from The Golden
Bowl. She also knows dozens of poems by heart which she learned in her
early teens, a means of earning pocket money from her grandfather. Her
training was so different from her father’s. No wonder they like their
disputes. What Daisy knows! At her prompting, he tried the one about the
little girl suffering from her parents’ vile divorce. A promising subject,
but poor Maisie soon vanished behind a cloud of
words, and at page forty-eight Perowne, who can be
on his feet seven hours for a difficult procedure, who has his name down for
the London Marathon, fell away, exhausted. Even the tale of his daughter’s
namesake baffled him. What’s an adult to conclude or feel about Daisy
Miller’s predictable decline? That the world can be unkind? It’s not enough.
He stoops to the tap to rinse his face. Perhaps he’s becoming, in this one
respect at least, like McEwan’s prose in Saturday
satisfies demanding readers, and his plot requires attention. Readers who
enjoy being stimulated to think will enjoy spending a day with Saturday.
Steve Hopkins,
May 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the June 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Saturday.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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