Saturday
Ian McEwan
Johnathan Cape
Price Rs 795
Thirty years ago, Ian McEwan made his name first with his debut collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites and then, its equally rivetting, equally acclaimed follow up In Between the Sheets (1977). Soon enough, as is the nature of these things, his strength (the most original voice in the genre in English fiction whose concerns were the marginalised, the maladjusted, the damaged) was seen to be his weakness. As slim, chilling, novels (The Cement Garden, The Child in Time, Black Dogs, among others) followed, the man who at the beginning of his career had earned the sobriquet Ian Macabre began to be described as a writer who was dressing up his short stories as novels.
Enduring Love (1997) changed all that. McEwan’s characteristic brooding menace permeated the novel; it was informed by the trademark edgy exactitude of language; the preoccupations that have always been McEwan’s — science, medicine, materialism, memory and identity — were at its heart. But it had something its predecessors did not.
No one said it was a short story padded out as a novel.
Having achieved that breakthrough (in terms of popular critical acclaim), McEwan began to go as wide as he went deep. (1998) was his slightest but most accessible work (it won him the Booker Prize). And (2001), which should rightfully have won the award its predecessor did, was as different a novel could be from McEwan’s fiction of the 1970s and the 1980s — or even from the McEwan who wrote . Sprawling, hefty, spanning generations and filled with nodding tributes to the author’s literary heroes (McEwan has called it his “Jane Austen novel”), had a warmth and emotional vitality that one does not associate with its author.
Where, you wondered, would McEwan take you next?
The new novel provides the answer. Set on February 15, 2003, the day London saw the largest ever demonstration in its history (against the Iraq war), Saturday is a novel which is like a miniature painting that contains a world within it. At one level, it is rooted in specificities: the events in the life of a single man (successful, middle-aged, contented neurosurgeon Henry Perowne) on a single day in a single city.