Regarding Henry (Saturday - Ian McEwan)

Member Name: sheri3004

Product:	Saturday - Ian McEwan
Date:	20/01/06 (1597 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautifully written, engrossing, intelligent and humane

Disadvantages: May drag for some readers

Ian McEwan’s tenth novel describes one Saturday – February 15th, 2003, to be precise - in the life of Henry Perowne –forty-eight years old, consultant neurosurgeon, loving husband and father. Henry’s thoughts and actions over the course of this day , which include mundane activities – playing squash, visiting his mother, making a fish stew – as well as some more dramatic occurrences, are all rendered in loving detail by McEwan, setting down the textures of everyday life in a way which is both absorbing and believable.

Although the novel takes place over just one day, we learn a great deal in the course of it about Henry, his family and his background. Henry’s existence is comfortable and secure, his job worthwhile and fulfilling, his family successful and happy - but his day begins with a sense of danger and over the course of the novel the outside world forces its way in. Like McEwan’s previous “Enduring Love”, the novel opens with a shocking event witnessed – though not, on this occasion, involving – the protagonist. Meanwhile, protesters against the impending war in Iraq are converging on London, causing Henry to consider and analyse his own feelings about the conflict. Again paralleling the previous novel, a disturbing encounter with a stranger - in this case, a young man called only “Baxter” - sets off a train of events which ultimately cause the elements of Henry’s day to collide dangerously.

I very much liked the character of Henry. He is a good, intelligent and loving man, committed to his work, who wrestles mentally with the dilemmas and conflicts of the world around him, aware of the complexity of the issues and struggling to clarify his views. Henry’s humanitarian, liberal and self-questioning viewpoint is one I sympathise with and I share his “ambivalent, shifting” feelings on the war in Iraq, which are contrasted with the certainty – on both sides - expressed by some of the other characters. His relationships with his wife, newspaper lawyer Rosalind, and his two adult children – poet Daisy and blues guitarist Theo – are also well-drawn, and I thought the argument with Daisy over the war was particularly convincing and believable. A steadfastly scientifically-minded man, unresponsive to literature and poetry, Henry nevertheless has well-developed sensitivity and compassion.


Henry’s secure, affluent lifestyle to some extent insulates him from the world’s harsher concerns, but he is aware through his work of how quickly life can change and the potentially devastating impact of the outside world on what an individual holds dear. This sense of ever-present danger is a constant theme of the book on both a global and a personal level.

Henry spends his working days literally “inside the heads” of his patients – in McEwan’s novel, the tables are turned by the author’s careful probing of what goes on in Henry’s own head, and very revealing it is. Indeed, the human brain and its potential problems takes a leading role in the book – depicted not just in the description of Henry’s patients but in the harrowing deterioration caused by his mother’s vascular dementia and in the calamitous consequences for Baxter of a defective gene.


McEwan describes Henry’s mother Lily, once a champion swimmer, now a care home resident profoundly impaired by dementia, absolutely wonderfully. His humane but unflinching portrayal of Lily’s total loss of short-term memory, her nonsensical conversation and sudden, quickly-forgotten spells of distress and agitation, will resonate with anyone who has experience of this condition, as will Henry’s responses and feelings. I found this part of the book to be very moving and an excellent portrayal of a condition which is rarely described in fiction - certainly not as well as this.

I suspect elements of McEwan’s own life are reflected in this novel – most specifically, an only thinly fictionalised encounter with Tony Blair. More seriously, McEwan’s mother’s death after a long slide into dementia has surely informed his portrayal of Lily.

Glowingly reviewed by the majority of critics, some readers have found the novel slow-moving and its in-depth focus on everything Henry does – the squash game is often mentioned – to be excessive. This was not my experience, however, as I found it a riveting read, and my undoubted favourite among the McEwan novels I have read. The set-pieces are brilliantly written and the encounters with Baxter pervaded by an entirely convincing feeling of threat.

Ultimately, Henry’s view on the basic uselessness of literature is resoundingly disproved by McEwan’s achievement with this novel, a novel which, via its concern with apparent minutiae of everyday life, has a great deal to say about the world and the human condition.

Random House Vintage paperback, 279pp – cover price £7.99, but widely available for less.

Summary: Inside the mind of a brain surgeon.