As a foreword to this excellent novel Ian McEwan quotes a passage from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, in which the bedevilled protagonist launches a passionate indictment of the moral disorders of his time, extracting from them a small nugget of hope, or rather of value, to set against his justified despair. Bellow or Herzog is explicit: McEwan’s Henry Perowne is more measured, is even mandarin, in his survey of the life he is living. Like Herzog, Perowne lives in interesting times. It is February 2003, and the peace marchers are gathering in Gower Street, near to Perowne’s spacious Bloomsbury house and within walking distance of his hospital, which is presumably in Queen Square. Perowne is a neurosurgeon and it is here that we receive the first intimation of McEwan’s preferred method, which favours the set-piece extravaganza. I withheld my admiration from the famous balloon incident in Enduring Love, thinking it disproportionate, but here my admiration is unconstrained. As Perowne goes over his previous day’s work we are treated to such terms as ‘radiofrequency coagulation’, ‘multilever lumbar laminectomy’, ‘vestibular schwannoma’, an ‘infratentorial cerebellar route’ to a tumour, and many more. All this within the first nine pages!
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