... is not ironclad and can change with time. NOVEL I FALL 2007 "fill up thought 'The first section of this essay focuses on sentences as images of the mind of the protagonist, Henry Perowne. The second concentrates on images of time as both Perowne and McEwan's readers may be said...

... on. Through the eyes of Henry Perowne, a surgeon living the life of the upper middle classes, the reader is con- fronted with the traumatic effects of 9/11, a slightly paranoid sense of insecurity, the impending war on Iraq, antiwar rallies, and the question of social class. Above all, however...

... headmistress. The tumour sat above the motor strip and was sharply defined, rolling away neatly before the probing of his Rhoton dissector—an entirely curative process. Sally closed that one up while Perowne went next door to carry out a multi-level lumbar laminectomy on an obese forty-four-year...

... Dogs (1992) and Saturday (2005) are positioned within the context of “a newly emergent Anglo- British contemporaneity” (37), where the latter novel’s juxtaposition of the Perowne fam- ily’s defensively apolitical domesticity with the worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq war illustrates...

... of immodesty that Saturday cri- tiques. This kind of bad-faith argument is particularly clear in Banville’s assump- tion that the character Henry Perowne’s view of literature is endorsed by McEwan. It turns out that what Banville really means when he says that the novel’s poli- tics are banal...

... of judgments, with “the background to some dispute or dilemma crisply summarised, characters drawn with quick strokes” (“Ian McEwan”). His narrative voices often suggest an authorial pleasure in adopting such expert professional registers: we might think of the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne in Saturday...