Krishna
Ian McEwan is not a new author for us. We have reviewed his books earlier here, including his brilliant Atonement and Enduring Love, among others.
The neurosurgeon Henry Perowne lives with his wife Rosalind in a mansion. His daughter is in France but will be visiting him on the day the story opens, which is a – you guessed it – Saturday.
We learn that he is a very successful and rich surgeon and his wife Rosalind is a lawyer working for a large corporation, also very successful. But son Theo eschews conventional forms of success and dreams of making it big as a blues musician, vests with studs and all accouterments in place.
Henry admires his son’s pluck in throwing all certainties and venturing out into the risky world of music; he knows his son has talent, from the reviews and also from his personal experience of listening to the son.
He reminisces about how he met Rosalind all those years ago when she came because of a tumour in her brain which was causing headaches and also affecting her vision. He was an intern then but hung around her, and started a very cautious and very chaste courtship that eventually won her over. She was idolizing her dead mom and he was very sensitive to it.
This is the kind of story that can test your patience and see how persistent you are in continuing to read. Because for the first 70 or so pages, absolutely nothing happens at all. You wait and wait but you cannot even call it a slow burn story because you get the impression that it is a ‘no burn’ story, like an unlit match.
In many of McEwan’s novels the story just jogs along the mundane lane until something happens to trigger subsequent events. In this book, it happens finally when he is taking his luxury car to his gym and gets into an accident. No, not what you would expect. The accident is minor and his car is barely touched. However, he has to now confront three ruffians in the other car which has a broken rear view mirror. He manages to resist the demand for money and also cows the lead bully by diagnosing his developing disease which he got from a parent.
Anyway, don’t get too glad. Don’t put away other work to continue reading. He goes away from there and you are treated with a squash match point by point, to no ostensible purpose. The story goes back into the boring quotidian details that sickened you in the first place.
Even when the author describes the famous but grouchy father of Sandra, inanities abound. He wanders all over the place and you lose interest and even track for a little bit. The only thing you learn new in this book is the trivia that Falun Gong, the rebel group that is a fierce critic of the Chinese communism, believes that a mini sphere revolves so many times clockwise and then counterclockwise inside everyone’s abdomen.
More boring details about how Henry’s wounds are healing, how he drives home after buying meat through various areas, how he visits his mother who has a severe case of dementia, how he visits his son’s performance and is impressed – you go ‘who cares?’ You don’t pick up a McEwan story to read the daily diary of a rich man, and that is what exactly the story is – so far at least.
Are you interested in the mundane thoughts of an ageing neurosurgeon? Are you interested in the two sides of the argument about blindly invading Iraq that the Prime Minister of the day (Tony Blair) was so gung ho about? Then, yes, you may enjoy this book. The rest of you may find the story boring and pointless.
When the story takes off, with violence threatening the Perowne household, the book is nearly two thirds done. OK, yes, there are some things that make you want to read but such a long prolog of ordinary life notes would have made me give up reading well before the scenes if I was not determined to recover my investment in reading and kept on with the story.
The last part of the book takes off almost vertically. When they get together – the daughter also arrives home, Henry’s famous poet father in law is there. But when the wife arrives, two hooligans come with her, threatening to kill her with the knife and exacting revenge on Henry for humiliating the lead man. There is a back story to it. That man’s car had an accident with Henry’s Mercedes and Henry walked away without paying, humiliating the street tough in front of his subordinates who were traveling in the same car.
There are scary scenes where, in front of the whole family, Daisy, the daughter is humiliatingly forced to strip naked and read her own poem from a newly published book.
Henry and his son are helpless since they are scared that the wife will be murdered if they make a violent response. The father in laws nose is broken when he tries to resist.
After a very tense, long interval, the crisis is over and the family is together and all members are safe again.
When a call comes from the hospital for Henry’s expertise in operating on the very same guy who tormented them, Henry surprisingly accepts and goes to the hospital.
The description of the operation is interesting, but extraneous to the plot on hand.
The ending is as expected. The thoughts of Henry are far ranging, and from one angle unrelated to the main story. But the narration and the ideas presented are themselves interesting.
The story ends like how you would expect it to end, and you can complain that there is no ‘final’ resolution but then, hey, the whole story wanders all over the place except the small incident towards the end of the book that makes you sit up and take notice.
Want to say that the book is pointless but the narration and the descriptions are somewhat captivating, so let us say 5/10
— Krishna