City Square

As Henry enter's the club to listen to Theo's music he is not not in the mood but he came anyway because it's his responsibility as a parent. When Theo's band begings to play their new song which they saved just for Henry's arrival Henry immediatly begins to analyze it into its components.
He begins by describing the different parts, of the music in a very concrete manner, "The piano and rhythm guitar lay down they're thick jazzy chords,"(174). There are several experiences of the music cannot be describing in the way above, so Henry must use more abtract terms, " He lets it engluf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than theyve ever found before ... when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love"(176).
It seems that in the description of music like this, it is unable to be portrayed effectively without the use of a certain amount of abstract language. The problem with this type of language is that it can be interpreted differently by each reader, or maybe that is its strength? Although the portrayal of music through words can never transfer the entire experience to the reader. This may be as close as one can get.

The Individual

The epigraph, a passage from Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, refers to “the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible.” The individual becomes a mere number in the context of statistics, a blurry face in the context of a crowd. The novel highlighted the importance of remembering the individual, especially in this age of technology and globalization and conflict.

Henry’s profession, while noble and respected, is not very conducive to the perception of people as individuals. Baxter, for instance, while having a large impact on Henry’s life, becomes, in Henry’s eyes, merely a patient, a medical case. In the end, however, Henry is forced to see Baxter as a real person. He visits his bedside after the surgery, realizes that sleep and death are Baxter’s only reprieves and makes the decision to not press charges. Baxter’s life will be hard enough as it is. While one cannot totally excuse him from his actions, so much of his situation can be attributed to chance. The impartiality of genetics gave him the disease that will disintegrate his body and mind. We’ll never be able to tell who Baxter might have become had his genes not displayed 40 copies of a certain DNA sequence, or had his relationship with his father been different.

Art serves as a contrast to Henry’s scientific approach in that it highlights the uniqueness of the individual. Ten doctors will treat a heart attack in pretty much the same way, with the same results, but ten artists asked to portray a certain object will give ten vastly different depictions. In fact, it is art that saves Henry… not Henry’s calculations, or his medical knowledge. It’s Daisy who recites “Dover Beach,” and Theo who tackles Baxter. Henry’s two children, accomplished artists, are responsible for the situation’s turn-around.

A struggle to the death

Baxter’s behavior parallels that of a suicide bomber. He believes “he has no future and is therefore free of consequence” (217). Thus, he has nothing to lose in harming Henry and his family because of the dark future that awaits him. Baxter reaches a point where he is willing to put his future and his life on the line to pursue Henry, the man who stripped him of the little dignity he possessed. When Baxter attacks Henry’s family, he does so without contemplating the retribution of his actions because he believes that no possible punishment could be worse than the slow, grueling but inevitable death he will face as a result of his debilitating disease.

Henry takes an interest in Baxter not because he feels sympathetic towards Baxter’s situation or because he likes him as an individual but rather because Baxter is a fascinating, difficult case. Henry desires to add Baxter to his collection of medical conquests, viewing him as something and not someone. When Henry completes Baxter’s surgery, he records Baxter’s information in his notebook adding Baxter to his collection of patients and confirming his victory in their mutual struggle for control that began in the streets of London.

After Baxter’ surgery, Henry is restored to his high pedestal where he returns to observing the world through microscopes and scalpels. He no longer feels helpless because the surgery reminded him that he can “exercise authority and shape events” (288). In the outside world, Baxter may have appeared threatening. However, submerged in a medical universe where Henry is “king, he’s vast, accommodating, immune,” Baxter was merely a lost, confused soul who Henry saved in order to reaffirm his power in the one place he can still move mountains.

From Large Scale to Small Scale

Henry Perowne's day is filled with a constant variation of large things beyond his control to smaller events which greatly affect him. He goes from feeling like the greatest neurosurgeon in all of London to an ant in the great scheme of things when discussing the war in Iraq. His argument with his daughter really hits home Henry's feeling of "if I'm not directly involved, how can I have any affect on the matter". His entire day is dodging the crowded streets of London where protests against the war are taking place. It is as if he is not only dodging the crowd, but the entire struggle with the war.

This all changes though when his encounter with Baxter inherits a visit to Henry's home during a dinner with his family. Baxter's break-in gives Henry a revised outlook on himself and his existence. His courage with Theo to repel Baxter is Henry's first step in his growth, which this book shows, is never over.

Henry, who even when discussing the war with his daughter seems to not even really comprehend that 9/11 and Iraq are serious matters, now has a new understanding on society and life. Perhaps the most moving part of the novel is when he starts to think about his family and realizes that something could happen to them at any time. He thinks of Rosalind's baby that is on the way and the future with a grand child in the picture. This entire scenario pushes Henry past his surgeries and squash matches to a better understanding of the world around him. It is amazing how one event can really make one realize just how important everyone and everything is around him, and that it is the same with those in Iraq.

a day off?

“For certain days, even weeks on end, work can shape every hour (23).” Henry describes how he and his wife Rosalind are so busy with the demands of their respective occupations that they must attempt to schedule the rest of their lives accordingly. However, McEwan shows that it is not only Henry’s schedule, but also his thoughts, that are inextricably linked to his occupation as a neurosurgeon. As McEwan intimately follows Henry’s consciousness throughout his day off, we discover that this is no day off after all. Neurology weaves its way through Henry’s activities as he attempts to understand every person and explain every situation by way of precious, calculated science.

Upon waking up in the wee hours of his Saturday morning, Henry immediately wonders what “chemical accident” could have occurred in his brain causing him to wake (4). Looking from his window at the square below, Henry analyzes the people passing through it, even going so far as to diagnose one girl as a heroin addict after he sees her continually scratching her back, presumably a result of “amphetamine driven formication” (58). During his first encounter with Baxter, he notes the man’s “poor self-control, emotional lability, [and] explosive temper” as early signs of Huntington’s disease, an observation that would have evaded the attention of the average person.

Neurosurgery offers Henry a sense of control that he wishes to extend into other areas of his life. At work, Henry feels at ease because he knows “precisely what he’s doing,” but outside of the hospital, Henry loses this feeling of power and security. Thus, we see Henry constantly analyzing every situation in terms of neurology, perhaps in order to make him feel as though he still has everything under control as he does in the operating room. When Henry finally finds himself back in the hospital despite his scheduled day off, he discovers "he's happier than at any other point on his day off" (266).

"An orthodoxy of attention"

Henry dismisses his daughter’s ways of thinking as “the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real” (66). However, as displayed by the argument he has with Daisy over the Iraq war, his focus on “the actual” affords him little advantage in their debate over the war. It also reveals that his own daughter is just as much a slave to fear as he is, rattling off dozens of near-disaster scenarios that she finds likely to occur if the invasion takes place. Should we back down from our principles in order to avoid what are in reality possibilities, but not certainties? That question could be posed to both sides. Both Daisy, who relies on her poetry and literature in general to find solace, and Henry, the consummate realist, are slaves to the “buzz-words” and the talking points as laid out in the debate on the international stage. This evidences the idea that no one, no mater what way one goes about finding solace, can escape the threatening and suffocating threats to humanity. McEwan himself recognizes this when he states that obsession with the debate over the war and the validity of either side’s argument “amounts to a consensus of a kind, an orthodoxy of attention, a mild subjugation in itself” (185). Neither path allows Henry or Daisy to escape this “orthodoxy,” but the end of the novel seems to suggest that people should choose whichever path best suits them. Baxter, having lived within the constraints of hard reality on the street his entire life, is swayed to euphoria with Daisy’s reading of a single poem. Daisy also escapes to her own world when reading this poem. Henry, in operating on Baxter and saving his life, validates himself and is able to go about his life without regret. The novel, to me, concludes with the notion that no one can face the real dangers that exist in this world without some degree of ignorance or distraction. And that even when these realities are faced, that they are skewed by the amount of rancor and emotion that has been injected into them by international attention. I can’t figure out what McEwan sees as the solution to all of this. From what I can tell, he offers no solution, other than to advise us to look turn our attention away from a debate whose issues are so momentous and unmanageable as to be insoluble.

"Everything belongs in the present"

During his visit with his aging mother, Henry’s day is quickly thrown into sharp relief by the relative motionless and stagnate day experienced by Lillian Perowne. His mother’s dementia alters not only her state of mind but her relationship with time, as well. Unlike his mother, Henry constantly deliberates over his past actions and experiences. Whether reflecting on his initial meeting with Rosalind or a family rift between Grammaticus and Daisy, Henry’s thoughts continually wander to the past in order to make a connection with his present.

Lillian’s inability to remember her past life strips her of anything else but the present moment. McEwan presents her as a figure divided into two selfs: the former woman of the past who swam extraordinarily well and raised a son and the old woman sitting at the elderly community like a blank page, desperately waiting for someone to fill in the lines of her life. She remains a nonentity without any memories of her former self and a future offering nothing but a handful of empty moments.

Imprisoned in the present, Lillian offers an understanding to the reader that even though the novel transpires along the course of one Saturday, Henry’s “day” transcends the framework of a limited 24 hours and spills over into his past as well as his ponderings of the future.