Ian McEwan – Saturday

I’m sitting in a Tully’€™s Coffee House in Kirkland across the bay from Seattle and in the near distance I can see the towers of the city. The coffee is good, the place is comfortable and there’s free wifi. I have a headset and I can talk to and see my family five or six thousand miles away. It strikes me that these mere trifles are incredible feats of technology and the rewards of living in the West.

I’m struck by the ordinariness of my life. My family life is stable, no big drama, my children are healthy and strong, not especially brilliant but happy I think. I’m not pulling up trees at work, but maybe planting a few. And I thank God for all of this.

Before connecting with my family I finished reading Saturday by Ian McEwan which, it seems to me is an extended meditation on Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach in the light of a post 9/11 Western world.

It is easy to envy Perowne, the central character; hugely successful, a beautiful and intelligent wife from whom he has never even been tempted to stray. He has a wonderful relationship with his children who are now grown into mature adulthood with grace and talent all of their own. The children have taken different routes from  the rationalistic, scientific medical/law partnership of the husband wife. The siblings are an artistic poet/musician combo and there is a spiky, though loving connection.

MeEwan’s skill is in making this man an admirable character who faces the real challenge of retaining humanity in the face of apparent global meltdown (represented by the ever-present threat of violence) and the determinism of our genetic make-up (in the character of Baxter and the gradual decline of Perowne’s mother).

The book opens with words from Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel Herzog in which he says:

"you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot"

It finishes with Dover Beach whose closing stanza reads:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In a way the novel is pessimistic. There’€™s nothing else for us but to be true to one another in the face of a desperate, violent world and the inevitability of decline. And this apparently small thing means nothing really.

But there is also something heroic there. It is possible, perhaps even understandable for people to despair in the face of overwhelming odds. It may be understandable when people turn violent to oppose an oppressor, whether that oppressor is the military might of the West, or the closed mind governments of the UK and US, or the genetic juggernaut of DNA. More often than not however these protests are often futile.

The conclusion of the novel holds out hope however for heroic action that doesn’€™t change the order of things but which can ennoble the character of an individual who refuses to surrender to the spirit of the age. It’s the kind of action which costs, but which always holds open the possibility of redemption.

Some will interpret the conclusion of the novel as weakness, but I don’t. From the perspective of faith it’€™s inspiring.

The novel says some big things. It says that in a world where some terrible things seem inevitable, there is still power in the written word. That a poem can still move the beast. And that there is still something deeply human about love, and faithfulness and commitment, and ordinary family ties. We don’t have to change the world to live heroically and humanly in it.

I won’€™t tell you the end. Go and read it yourself.