Sunday, April 30, 2006

Saturday

by Ian McEwan


Henry Perowne, a London neurosurgeon, wakes up before dawn on a Saturday in February 20003. He goes to his window, sees a burning plane land, turns on the TV and discovers that it is not a terrorist attack, goes back to his bedroom, makes love to his wife, goes out for a squash game in the morning, crashes into a BMW while trying to avoid an anti-Iraq war protest in the city, is saved a roughing up by the driver Baxter because he diagnoses Baxter’s neurological disease, finishes his squash game, buys fish at the fish market, visits his ailing mother in an old-age home, attends his musician son’s concert, comes home and makes fish stew for dinner and awaits his son, poet-daughter, poet-father-in-law and lawyer-wife for a re-union dinner. The family re-union is interrupted by a furious knife-wielding Baxter but the day ends with Perowne saving Baxter’s life in an operation theatre. It’s all a Saturday in the life of Henry Perowne.


The plot is deceptively simple. The running track through Perowne’s mind takes us through his unambiguous love for his family to his ambivalence about the Iraq war (he argues for it with his dove-ish daughter and against with his hawkish American partner) and his compassion for and fear of Baxter. It weaves the specific Perowne story with an awareness of the happenings in the world – the growing possibility of the Iraq war, impending terror attacks on London and the war in Afghanistan are never too far away. At its heart, Saturday is a story of an individual’s moral code, executable at a personal level, set against a backdrop of an increasingly uncertain world morality. Henry Perowne is all that is decent in humanity.


McEwan’s language is precise and sharp. You can feel the dry red chillies between your fingers when Perowne crushes them for the fish stew. You can sense the tension in the room when his father-in-law, the famous poet Grammaticus, trashes his 19-year old daughter Daisy’s award-winning poem. And you can feel for Perowne when he describes the dismantling of his mother’s house when she has to be taken to a home. Even the medical procedure in the operating theatre is so vivid it’s like being there.


Saturday reads honestly. There is little here that seems false or clichéd. It’s real and complex and true to life. You can imagine this Saturday happening to a similar man in a similar place. And it holds your attention in a way that reality manages to do. It’s a riveting book.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Proof

Just saw a small, sweet movie - Proof. It's based on a Pulitzer-winning play and all the reviews I had read about it were mixed. So I went into it without a lot of expectations and was pleasantly surprised.

Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhaal, Proof is a story about a young woman Catherine (Paltrow), daughter of a brilliant mathematician (Hopkins) who leaves college and any semblance of a real life to look after her father when he becomes mentally ill. Years of taking care of her unstable father leaves her little scope for furthering her own mathematical genius. And when her father dies and when her less-than-understanding sister comes back home for the funeral, Catherine begins to doubt her own mental stability, especially since she knows she has inherited some of her father's genius. Things come to a head when one of her father's pupils and her lover Hal (Gyllenhaal) discovers a notebook filled with the construction of a 'proof', that both he and Catherine's sister attribute to her father but which she herself claims to be her own.

It's not a long story, but it explores the thin line between genius and insanity with a lot of power. Short, sweet and well-told is how I would describe the film. I am not terribly fond of either Paltrow or Gyllenhaal. But in this movie, they fit their roles admirably. Paltrow's terribly waxy, pale skin is a downer, though.

Proof is a good movie, not one of the great ones for sure. But it has its moments. Worth a watch, I would say.

The Power of the Story

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