Music and communion

Ian McEwan’s Saturday is from one angle a novelization of Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which also figures prominently (if improbably) into the plot. The book begins with neurosurgeon Henry Perowne looking out a window early on a February morning on a world where ignorant armies clash by night, and ends with him kissing his wife Rosalind’s neck and declaring “There’s always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there’s only this.” Come, let us be true to one another.

McEwan always writes beautifully, and often with remarkable insight. One of the most arresting passages in this novel occurs as Henry bathes in the sound of his son Theo’s blues band during a rehearsal: “There are these rare moments when musicians together tough something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever – mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and its’ tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.”