Like Solzhenitsyn’s A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, all of the action in this novel takes place from the perspective of one individual and all in the space of 24 hours, in this case on a Saturday in February, 2003, in London. The narrator is Henry Perowne, a middle-aged neurosurgeon, and the few other characters are either members of his family (a lawyer, a Blues guitarist, a couple of poets, and a demented mother), patients, colleagues, or a few street thugs. Some are involved in more than one of these roles.
In the background is the political turmoil over the imminent American and British Invasion of Iraq, with the pervasive fear of terrorist attacks still fresh in everyone’s mind after the events of 9/11. The plot is hardly complex, but the atmosphere of the times is captured beautifully, and the characters are very realistic and alive. The description of the neurosurgical procedures that Henry performs is more precise and detailed than anything I have ever read outside of a medical text. I could quibble about some of the medical details; for example no mention is made of the usual lifelong need for hormone replacement therapy after a transsphenoidal hypophosectomy, but this is just a small detail. His musings about the interplay of the brain and the environment in forming a personality are thought-provoking and come close to the conclusion that we are nothing but the result of firing patterns of neurones within our skulls, in turn partly determined by genes we inherit, and in part by our chance environmental encounters.
There are many memorable quotes but this is my favorite: “It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get…… what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in two decks are chosen, how they are shuffled, halved, and spliced at the moment of recombination. ….. it can be quite an affront to parental self- regard, just how much of the work has already been done. On the other hand, it can let you off the hook.”
I have not read any of McEwan’s other novels, but if anyone thinks his others are as good as this one, I will be forced to add them to the long list of books to look for, although I like to sample a wide variety of novels and seldom read all of any one authors’s work. But this is one of the best pieces of fiction I have read this year.
Thanks, Lois.
The Passionate Reader 