Saturday post on Saturday the novel

Finally finished Ian McEwan's Saturday which Pru wanted me to read. I didn't want to read it most of the way through since it only seemed to increase my anxiety; he did such a good job of describing that lingering fear that has colored our lives since our awakening to uncertainty on 9/11. This wasn't the kind of reading I wanted to do in my few spare minutes for light reading. Give me Pym, give me Howatch, I yearned, but plowed through . Spoiler warning ahead. I didn't know what to expect, having not read any of his books before and when I started a review that said something about how one knows what to expect when reading some other authors and McEwan, I stopped, because I was enjoying not knowing. (Although I did know, from the character's comments on magic realism--that if anything can happen, nothing matters--that this author would probably not have characters start flying out the window, at least, not unless they fell to gruesome death). I feared the worst, deciding, midway through, that his beloved wife would probably be murdered right before his eyes. But the actual ending turned out, after all, to be cathartic and satisfying. But. The idea that listening to someone recite "Dover Beach" would have a powerful effect on a criminal is absurd. McEwan has clearly not taught English. He was not stood in front of a classroom, reciting it, practically acting it out so that the students (adult working class women returning to college!) can hear it, can visualize it and been met with their blank stares, their disinterest, their "just don't get it" comments. All right, this is America. Maybe it's different in England. Maybe it's more like hearing the pledge of allegiance (and for that matter, Baxter probably would have heard it in school even if he'd quit at 16). Maybe there's something about the disease of Huntington's chorea that is supposed to make one especially sensitive to language (explaining Woody Guthrie's talent?)

But still, it is of course the perfect poem to act as a unifying thread in the novel. It functions much the way the recitation of the Wreck of the Deutschland did in Muriel Spark's, The Girls of Slender Means. That classic explored the nature of good and evil in an England traumatized by World War II, and, I would suggest, reaches the same conclusions about the necessity of a gesture towards the good, despite or perhaps because of the predominance of evil. This one probes similar points in the post 9/11 world. Interesting isn't it, that these two great poems of written by Victorian Englishmen should so shed light on these 20 and 21^st century situations. I did, of course, think from the beginning, when Henry spends so much time staring out his window, of "Dover Beach" (can any literate person see someone standing at a window in literature without making that association?). I remembered how my Victorian studies professor had spoken of the motif of staring out windows as an omnipresent theme in Victorian literature, though I can't think exactly what he said about it. Liminality, perhaps: being neither fully in or out… Questions of consciousness were paramount for Victorians. Who is the perceiver? How does perception change the ultimate reality of the object perceived? And so of course windows, those instruments through which we perceive the world, signify these questions, the questions that haunt our neurosurgeon protagonist. Brains look out through eyes, characters through windows. The sea of faith, in Arnold's poem, recedes, but now we know that such a dramatic recession prefigures a tsunami—the return of faith with a vengeance~