Mind over gray matter

“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions -- trivial, fantastic, evanescent ... an incessant shower of innumerable atoms ... surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” The words belong to Virginia Woolf. They point to the task she set herself in “Mrs. Dalloway,” and they also describe the challenge -- the ambition -- of Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” the novel that British oddsmakers have already established as the favorite for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Only McEwan has never done ordinary. “Ordinary” is his point of departure, the shelter from which his characters step out into a storm. He writes murmurous, well-groomed prose, and his linear narratives are without the apparently wayward movement of Woolf’s own. Yet that’s exactly why his books carry such a sense of foreboding, of something dangerous waiting within the human mind.

Or is it in the brain? McEwan’s main character, Henry Perowne, is a neurosurgeon, and late in the novel, as he works inside a skull, Henry thinks about the difference between brain and mind, between the “mere wet stuff” on which he performs a kind of “brilliant plumbing” and the “bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch.” Just how does brain become mind, and which should we blame when things go wrong? Henry thinks we will know some day, finding his “only kind of faith” in the idea that we’ll eventually understand the links between consciousness and the mortal coil of our physical being. Meanwhile he “places his finger on the surface” of his patient’s cortex, pausing for a moment in the “fairy tale ... of the healing touch” before beginning to close the “unmendable brain.”

On this Saturday, Perowne wakes before dawn “to find himself already in motion ... alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated,” crossing his bedroom to look out at the “eighteenth century dream” of a London square while the details of the previous day come flooding back, the chat on the wards, the operations performed.

Then a screaming comes across the sky, the “straining, choking banshee sound” of an airplane in trouble. Henry can see the “fiery white core” of the flames and imagines the terror on board, perhaps a “fight to the death in the cockpit, a posse of brave passengers.” It is February 2003, a time when, “[e]veryone agrees, airliners look different in the sky,” either “predatory or doomed.” And this particular Saturday is one on which half of London plans to gather in protest against the coming war with Iraq. A news broadcast will later tell Perowne that the plane was only a cargo jet with engine trouble. Nevertheless the tone of his day has been set.

Perowne starts every Saturday with a game of squash against another doctor. Then come errands, including a visit to his mother, who has Alzheimer’s. (The novel never names it, but never has to.) Along the way, as Perowne guides his Mercedes through London, his mind slips back into the past, as he recalls how he first met his lawyer wife, Rosalind, or contemplates the variously developing lives and careers of his children, Daisy and Theo. There are memories too of an Iraqi patient, one of Saddam Hussein’s victims. Their conversations have made Perowne accept the case for war, and it is a sign of “Saturday’s” wonderful strength that more recent events play ironically in our minds without canceling a sense of the reasonableness of Perowne’s beliefs.

McEwan shifts from moment to moment with the smoothest of fictional transmissions. There’s never a jolt, but there’s also never the dazzling dissolve of Woolf or Joyce, the kind that leaves you breathlessly wondering just where you are, and when. Though perhaps that’s merely a sign of the fact that, for all Perowne’s interest in the brain, the flux of human consciousness isn’t really McEwan’s subject. What matters more is the way a chance encounter shadows Perowne’s routine. As he squeezes through the crowded streets, he sideswipes a BMW, and the three young toughs who emerge are not his kind of people, not at all.

The encounter leaves him physically, though not psychically, bruised. The character with a psychic bruise is Baxter, the leader of the three, a “fidgety” man with “hair razored close to the skull.” Henry can’t stop being a doctor, and even as he takes a “colossal” blow to his chest, he sees in Baxter’s fidgets the early stages of a degenerative neurological condition. By speaking to the young man about it, Perowne does avoid a beating. But he also, if inadvertently, ensures that the raging Baxter will appear at his house that night, an eruption in the middle of a dinner with everyone Henry loves.

At that point “Saturday” became a book I couldn’t put down, not only for the usual reasons, but also because I knew that if I did, it would be hard to pick it up again. Read the last 100 pages at a sitting -- the pace and the thrill allow it.

McEwan’s early novels, like “The Cement Garden” (1978), were deliberate exercises in the macabre, attacks on the strained gentility of English fiction. His mature work, in contrast, begins with the deep pleasures of ordinary life, pleasures that the narrative must then challenge and smash. That was the pattern in “Enduring Love” (1998) and “Atonement” (2002), a pattern so much a part of this author’s own narrative conventions that I was well past “Saturday’s” middle pages before I realized that the bad things coming might stand as Henry’s own personal 9/11. Yet that’s too easy a point for McEwan to rest with, and the novel moves eerily beyond Perowne’s disrupted drawing room, back to the hospital and into a final sense of mystery.

McEwan’s prose is without flamboyance, and yet every other sentence seems to offer an arresting phrase -- the “over-inhabited desks” of a newspaper office. Or rather his own kind of flamboyance rests in the careless ease with which he shows us the details of Henry’s life. Not a reader in a thousand will understand Henry’s work -- what, for example, is “a small vestibular schwannoma lying barely three millimetres from the cochlea”? -- but one never doubts McEwan’s accuracy. And Henry himself has some of his creator’s understated mastery. “It’s not possible to be an unassertive brain surgeon,” but he still makes a modest presence on the page, a man who allows himself no special claims.

Henry has a well-upholstered life in an old and expensively renovated house, with its “wine vaults” and “belittlingly high ceiling,” but he remains too self-conscious to be entirely complacent. He’s a successful man, happy in both his work and his family, who yet knows that happiness is a matter of luck. Move a few genes and it would all have been different, and indeed Henry does have a piece missing. He listens to Bach in the operating room, but he’s immune to literature and can never see the point of the books his poet daughter Daisy recommends. He would not pick up this novel, and one source of “Saturday’s” great appeal lies in its portrait of an urbane but utterly unliterary mind. Certainly he wouldn’t recognize the sources that McEwan has used to orchestrate the apparently spontaneous events of this day; events that provide, above all, a persistent echo of the understated dread in the poems of Daisy’s favorite, Philip Larkin.

But another name might also come to mind in reading this account of the way we live now. Perowne describes the “second-by-second wash of his thoughts” as a form of “white noise.” It’s a phrase impossible to use without evoking novelist Don DeLillo, and “Saturday” does indeed offer an English version of DeLillo’s picture of mass urban life. Larkin and DeLillo -- true, both writers are interested in our understanding of death in a world without faith. Still, I can hardly imagine two more wildly divergent social landscapes, two more radically different voices, and it is a measure of “Saturday’s” exhilarating scale to say that it manages to cover them both, and all the world between. *