A Day In The Life

By Richard Lacayo/London

Ian McEwan is a very successful novelist, but he hasn't let it go to hi s head. "Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry," he says evenly, stretching out his long frame on a sofa in his London town house. "And no one would deny the richness of their thoughts." Most of humanity probably won't read his new novel, Saturday (Doubleday; 289 pages), which arrives in stores next week. But the sizable part that does will gain definite advantages in the richness of its thinking about brain surgery, the war in Iraq, the psychic burden of life after Sept. 11 and how it feels to be sucker-punched by an excitable creep.

For the part of humanity that reads--that's still a goodly chunk, by the way--McEwan's new book is a major event. His last one, the bleakly magnificent Atonement, put him in the front rank of English-language novelists and became an international best seller--in the U.S. alone, there are 750,000 copies in print. The story of a young girl with a powerful imagination and of the terrible consequences that occur when it's misused, it was a nuanced psychological study, a powerful war drama and, finally, by way of a brisk twist at the end, a devastating moral tale.

Could Saturday hope to be its equal? McEwan doesn't try to imitate his past success. What his new book does is proceed serenely into very different territory, where the most secure existence is ringed by sinister possibilities--an enduring theme with McEwan and, these days, a good metaphor for the world post-9/11.

Saturday takes place on a single day, Feb. 15, 2003, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have filled the streets of London to protest the impending war in Iraq. Henry Perowne, the central character, is a prosperous and contented neurosurgeon. But his happiness is infringed by a persistent, low-intensity fear of a terrorist attack. The pros and cons of the Iraq invasion are among McEwan's concerns here; the son of a career officer in the British army, he says he was more opposed to the war than Perowne. "But I gave him my ambivalence about it."

But McEwan also has much wider matters in mind, like happiness, family and work in a world in which life is a brief interval before the extinction of death. "I don't believe in God," McEwan explains softly. "But the world is just as warm, as rich, if not warmer and richer, when seen without a religious point of view." And just as menacing. While driving to his regular squash game, thinking of the dinner he will cook that night to celebrate the return of his grown daughter from France, Perowne has a small collision. The other car is driven by a minor thug named Baxter, one of those twitchy characters a writer summons up to give a face to all the foul energies at large in the world. Before the day is over, Baxter and Perowne will cross paths again. It won't be pretty.

You think of Perowne when you approach the London town house that McEwan shares with Annalena McAfee, his second wife, an arts editor at the Guardian newspaper. Located on a neo-classical square laid out by Robert Adam, it also faces onto the British Telecom Tower, a '60s-era spike. Perowne lives in a house with the same views. And the poignant ramblings of his mother Lily, who suffers from vascular dementia--"I put sap in the clock to make it moist"--are transcribed directly from the speech of McEwan's mother Rose, using notes McEwan took on visits before her death five years ago. "I had tried doing without notes," he says. "But I could not get the precise magical nonsense of her sentences."

So it's safe to say this new book comes from a place close to home. Certainly the contented side of the neurosurgeon comes from the man who imagined him. At 56, McEwan swings up and down the stairs of his house with the ease of a man who still does his share of hiking, a passion of his. He has a Booker Prize for his 1998 novel Amsterdam, and several of his novels, including The Comfort of Strangers and Enduring Love, have beenturned into pretty good films. Moreover, judging from his descriptions of Perowne's marital bliss--"What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife"--McEwan's eight-year marriage must be quite something. "When he thinks of sex," the book tells us, "he thinks of her."

After Atonement, with its focus on the past, McEwan wanted his next book to engage fully with the world after 9/11. "The present," he says, "had become horribly interesting." Horribly interesting is also not a bad way to describe most of McEwan's work. Among his generation of British writers--Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie--McEwan always stood out as the one with the morbid streak. His early short stories brought to nasty behavior and abnormal psychology the full resources of literary nuance. Then came his first novel, The Cement Garden, in 1978, about four children who have buried their mother in the basement. In The Comfort of Strangers, published three years later, a listless young couple on holiday find themselves in the clutches of a suavely murderous host. The film version was written by Harold Pinter and starred Christopher Walken, a conjunction of names that tells you a lot about what was then McEwan's trademark atmosphere of literate weirdness.

"But with The Comfort of Strangers, I came to the end of something," he says. "I had been in the grip of the last gasp of existentialism, writing about people adrift in cities that are not named. Now I want specificity. Maybe it's a function of aging. I feel as if I've got less time left; I want to make sense." Not perfect sense; his later novels, like The Innocent, Black Dogs and Enduring Love, are still full of absurdity and enigma. But the characters have a more full-blooded life. Combine that with McEwan's companionable mind--strange to say of a man with such a dark disposition, but there it is--and with his intricate but unfussy prose, and you understand the gathering power of his work. Perowne finds majestic pleasure even in the simple act of shaving with his "extravagantly disposable triple-bladed razor ... drawing this industrial gem over familiar flesh sharpens his thoughts." Just keep in mind that blades against flesh will come up again in the story.

For Saturday, McEwan also befriended a London neurosurgeon, Neil Kitchen, and spent two years following him at the hospital, finally joining him in the operating room. What he learned is set down in long passages that describe in loving (and graphic) detail the procedures of brain surgery. Work itself is a form of heroism in this book. So is love. So is a dry-eyed realism about our fates. McEwan and Perowne are both fond of quoting Charles Darwin: "There is a grandeur in this view of life." There's a grandeur in Saturday too.