THE 2000S: SIGNS OF THE TIMES IN IAN MCEWAN’S NOVEL, SATURDAY

Abstract

This paper seeks to present Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday (2005) in the prism of the new century, manifesting itself in the cluster of signs of the times. It discerns seven key attributes of the first decade which collectively outline the contour of the 2000s.The novel which spans a day is evocative of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway as it centres on the life of a middle-class 48 years old Henry Perowne - a successful neurosurgeon, and rationalist who moves through the streets of London in anticipation of a dinner with his dearest ones at the evening’s familial reunion. His dense observation of the time he lives in combines rationality and spontaneity.Perowne (and McEwan) catalogues signs of the 2000s. They include a fear of global wars in the aftermath of 9/11, which is recognised by both generations of the Perownes (of the 1950s and 1980s); growing awareness of the exhaustion of natural resources and its disastrous consequences; increasing secularisation in the post-Christian Great Britain; unprecedented scientific progress with technologies impacting the whole society; excessive mediasation in the digital era resulting in lack of scepticism.In the novel’s fictional world, the tension between private and collective is epitomised in the protagonist’s acknowledging the threat of unprovoked violence as well as accepting his own increased personal vulnerability and precarity as a mode of existence.Henry Perowne reaffirms domesticity as his response to the new global world; he also finds consolation in the profession of neurosurgeon as it provides a unique control of reality where he can give life to those who balance life and death.Typical of Ian McEwan is his reliance on the English literary tradition — first and foremost on the Modernist writing of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, prioritising the individual perception of the world. The author also refers to the resources of the ‘Man-in-Society’ tradition, evoking the conventions of realistic writing which he combines with postmodernist techniques such as play with the reader, dramatic turns, hybridisation, emphasised intertextuality (from Shakespeare onwards) and indeterminacy.