For every great cataclysm, there is, historically speaking, great literature. In the wake of any major tragedy, there seems to be a visceral need among readers and writers alike to bring the events witnessed back from their incomprehensible magnitude to the scale of human consciousness. Of course it is just five years since the Twin Towers fell and hence probably too early to start looking for the author that will join the ranks of the Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, and those other great guardians of our historical memory. But if any novelist has succeeded in lending clarity to the unlikely movements of the mind in the face of disaster, it is Ian McEwan in his 2005 novel Saturday.

In the most technical sense, Saturday is not a 9/11 novel. We do not hear the stories of those who happened to be roaming near the World Trade Center that fateful day, nor do we see, yet again, images of skyscrapers collapsing into rubble. In fact, it takes place over a year later and a whole ocean away from the streets of New York. Set within the context of a single day—February 15, 2003—the novel tells the story of Henry Perowne, a London neurosurgeon, going about his regular life on what should be a regular day.

What makes Saturday such a compelling portrait of post-9/11 urban existence is the way McEwan manages to weave the current events unraveling around Henry Perowne into the banal routines of his day and, even more deftly, into the very texture of his mind. What happened on 9/11, as McEwan shows, has engrained itself subtly but deeply in our basic faculties of perception. Even as Perowne lies in bed nestling against his wife, his thoughts can wander "from the erotic to Saddam." The ever-present flickerings of the television and the presence, on this particular Saturday, of a massive anti-war march trigger radiating memories and speculations about politics, about war, about the what's really going on at the highest levels of government. And how could they not? In the very recognizable world that McEwan sets up for us, it makes perfect sense that our thoughts would be permeated by a vague and implacable sense that the ominous is not out of reach.

It is easy to think, five years after the fact, that all this dread and paranoia is a bit melodramatic. To say that 9/11 was an event of massive proportion with even more massive after-effects is one thing; to say that it has fundamentally shifted the way our consciousness operates on a day-to-day level is another. But this is exactly what McEwan does so well: he highlights the way our consciousnesses interact with the post-9/11 world by intertwining precise indications of time and place—Hans Blix commanding the headlines and rumors about planned attacks by radical jihadists circulating conspiratorially on the internet—with the experience of the ordinary. Perowne, like all of us, has seen the unthinkable, and for that reason there is something eerily familiar in the way even the most mundane pursuits of his day—playing squash, visiting his mother, shopping for fish—hinge upon a lurking suspicion that somehow, somewhere, this life is being threatened. "The nineties," Perowne reflects as he and his teenage son sit silently in front of the news, "are looking like an innocent decade, and who would have thought that at the time? Now we breathe a different air." For his teenage son, he realizes, "International terror, security cordons, preparations for war—these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds."

If McEwan's greatest strength in Saturday is the atmospheric sense of foreboding he manages to build so steadily, his efforts to propose a means of escape from this endless uncertainty prove less convincing. Revisiting one of the defining themes introduced in his previous novel, Atonement, McEwan departs from his depiction of the quotidian in order to draw the tension and fear that runs below the surface of ordinary life into stark relief. The bizarre plot turns that interrupt the rhythms of Perowne's consciousness culminate in an unconvincing scene in which, as criminals break into the house during a family dinner, Perowne's daughter Daisy disarms them, figuratively speaking, by reciting a poem. Although McEwan justifies this sudden transformation with the fact that Baxter, the gang's ringleader, suffers from a disease that makes him vulnerable to rapid shifts in emotion, the situation is nonetheless as unfathomable as it seems.

Why would McEwan, whose aim is clearly to explore how people navigate the basic challenges of post-9/11 existence, conclude his novel with a scene that departs so dramatically from the familiar? While protests and sinister headlines are now the stuff of daily life, having one's house broken into by a thug susceptible to the power of 19th century verse is certainly not. Can writing—or art—really be the best way to escape our quiet but unrelenting fears, to master these new forces of chaos? Is literature our best weapon against our lingering unease?

As McEwan grapples with these questions of the post-9/11 world, his prose and his plot prove at odds. Set against the backdrop of his own skillful rendering of the contemporary mind, McEwan's exaggerated notion of art as salvation from the political world seems all the more ludicrous for his having already revealed what it is the novel can actually offer—an intimate look at the way 9/11 has roiled the depths of our consciousness. It articulates our uncomfortable, inexact sensation that something permanent has changed rather than helping us escape it.

If it didn't spiral off into chaos on the level of plot towards the end, Saturday would be the perfect record of the mind in its post-9/11 state of heightened sensitivity. As is, it is at least an example of how a novel can tactfully take up the most urgent event of our time—one that desperately requires the refined commentary possible only in art—on a scale simultaneously human and infinitely expansive. What McEwan reminds us is that in the pages of fiction, perhaps better than anywhere else, we can try to work through the reverberations of what happened that September.

 

Despite her qualified enthusiasm for Saturday, Amelia Atlas '06 thinks that, really, Atonement is a whole lot better.