Book Review by B.D. Brown

"The Ordinary Majesty of Henry Perowne"

Dr. Henry Perowne, the protagonist in the novel, Saturday by Ian McEwan, is one of those lucky individuals who has found his niche in life. Both personally and professionally he has succeeded beyond the dreams of most people on this planet. The salient point here and the value of this character-driven story is that Henry happens to be not only a nice guy, in the bargain, but also that nice guys can still win given the existential angst and all of the day-to-day rigors we are all privy to.

Henry knew early on that he wanted to go into medicine—his choice of career, as a neurosurgeon, put him squarely on a path that enabled him to happily, romantically intersect that of his wife’s. Not only still in love with Rosalind after twenty-five years, it is obvious that she is his soul-mate. Of course, as the fantasy plotting of  novels frequently dictates, Henry’s wife is especially beautiful, and between them they have managed to produce two, talented, good-looking offspring.

Rounding off the “happy-ever-after” parameters of McEwan’s story, there is

the 7000 square foot townhouse in an upscale section of London, where Henry and his family are headquartered; there is his enviable position at the hospital, only a walk away; and there is  Henry’s friend and professional cohort, with whom he plays squash. And even though they don’t see eye-to-eye on abstractions, Perowne can still claim a famous father-in-law, who becomes influential both in his daughter Daisy’s choice of lifework, and later in the saving of all their lives in the most dramatic moments of Saturday, featuring the antagonists, Baxter and Nigel.

There are many very popular fiction writers today who would hungrily take all of the preceding factoids and weave them into another exciting, suspenseful, but ultimately prosaic read—nonetheless a good read for pure enjoyment—the kind of books that are consumed by the public like popcorn. These wildly-popular writers of a certain romantic fiction genre—Danielle Steele comes easily to mind—have created unprecedented commercial success by presenting similar plotlines to Saturday, of beloved family ties, a sustaining or illusive wealth, twisted by something tragic, some betrayal, something gained, something lost, and the beauty of life as it was gone askew.

Ian McEwan does so much more than this in Saturday. By taking introspection and self-examination to a much-deeper level, he lifts Henry from the flatness of caricature and instills him with a vulnerability very like our own, the depths of which one seldom has the courage or desire to explore. Henry Perowne’s tender and honest feelings for his wife and family and his professional expertise and devotion to duty as a doctor, his consistency of behavior and lack of quirkiness—all of these aspects of character, instead of boring the reader, provide continuity, texture and a common grounding experience. From this advantage of confidently gaining the reader’s involvement and compassion, the author then relentlessly pursues the utter truth about Henry—he’s a regular guy. He is everyman. As such, his worries are the same as the rest of us; his discomfort and psychic pain is universal. And so the reader, along for the ride, gets to explore the postmodern-rendered themes of terrorism, pollution, future technology, politics, even marital relations—all aspects of Henry’s day-to-day awareness of life in the raw world as Henry sees it—without rose-colored glasses. Henry is a realist. It is an advantage in his personal life enabling him to accept, for example, the life-choices of  his children, and in his professional life, as he continues to hone his surgical skills and narrow his margin for experimentation and error.

By the end of Saturday, the reader knows Doctor Perowne in a satisfying, admiring way that has everything to do with Henry’s being a solid, good guy—a nice guy and perhaps even the intelligent, preferred choice a reader would  make in the necessity of a very delicate operation.