Saturday

A day in the life of a neurosurgeon? Sounds interesting enough. A day in the life of a neurosurgeon, which just happens to be the day when a curious chain of events culminates in the protagonist performing an emergency operation upon the man who threatened to slit the throat of his wife and rape his daughter? Is it sounding better, or just trashier?

This book works thanks to the detail. I'm not sure if it's McEwan (I must reread Atonement and some of his other books; Enduring Love is on the pile) or just the persona he took on for this novel, but the protagonist Henry Perowne hyperanalyses every single instant in his life. And endlessly self-justifies. It may just be my unreasonable but deep-rooted dislike for all neurosurgeons speaking here, but do I really want to be reading three pages about some rich guy explaining why he doesn't feel bad about spending a lot of money on a fancy car? Seriously, who's he trying to convince?

When On Chesil Beach was published, I read a review that criticised, in passing, the implausibility of Saturday's ending. Since then I haven't been able to get it out of my head. Not only does the ending now seem totally ludicrous, but many other things do too. The characters, for example. While they possess a realism that withstands a passing glance, most of them possess an aura of Mary-Sueness. Henry Perowne spending five or so pages to explain that he loves his middle-aged wife and has no desire for a younger woman does nothing to dispel this impression. The budding poet daughter, the up-and-coming guitarist son, the intelligent, beautiful wife, snatched from the jaws of blindness, the massive house, the French chateau, the squash, the irritable father-in-law. Everything is bathed in an almost soap-operatic glow of perfect-but-slightly-damaged-so-that-it-has-character upper-class Englishness.

Whatever its faults, everything is saved by McEwan's beautiful prose. I swear he could write a novel about a bootlace and make it un-putdownable. Meticulous, erudite, flowing, perfect. There is no particular stylistic feature of his work. He just writes normally, but really really really well. And he writes about interesting things: the Iraq war, evolution, Islam and Alzheimer's disease, among other topics. There are some really great bits about literature and poetry, too.

I've just spent about forty minutes looking through all the pages I dog-eared as being particularly outstanding examples of his prose, and there are so many to choose from. This particular one doesn't sparkle as much as some, but I think it shows his way of combining beautiful writing with concepts that make interesting reading.

"For all the recent advances, it's still not known how this well-protected one kilogram or so of cells actually encodes information, how it holds experiences, memories, dreams nad intentions. He doesn't doubt that in years to come, the coding mechanism will be known, though it might not be in his lifetime. Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious? He can't begin to imagine as satisfactory account, but he knows it will come, the secret will be revealed - over decades, as long as the scientists and the institutions remain in place, the explanations will refine themselves into an irrefutable truth aboutr consciousness. Ir's already happening... and the journey will be completed, Henry's certain of it. That's the only kind of faith he has. There's grandeur in this view of life."