Saturday

I have recently finished reading Ian McEwan's latest novel, Saturday. What makes this novel stand out among the novels that I have read in the last few years is the fact that its main character is at one with rather than at odds with the world that immediately surrounds him. His work (he is a neurosurgeon) engages and challenges him during his week days, and at the weekend he is fortunate enough to be able to withdraw inside a cocoon of marital and domestic harmony. The opening of the novel depicts him, early one Saturday morning, gazing through the window of his home in central London. He alone, as it seems to him, is awake. The city sleeps, unaware of the threat that seems, to him, to be closing in on it. The threat turns out to have been no such thing, and the city wakes into its regular routine. Nevertheless, the threat was real while it lasted, and given the post 9/11 scenario, it gives the rest of the novel a sense of foreboding, a sense of something terrible lurking near the periphery of our all too cosy, rather too complacent society. Perowne slips out of the protective shell of his home, into the protective shell of his Mercedes and makes his way towards his much anticipated game of squash. It is at this point that the agitation of the outside world breaks through Perowne's protective shell in the form of a thug named Baxter and his cronies. Again the threat seems to pass, but Perowne's sheltered world has momentarily been shaken. Just when everything seems to have settled back into a regular pattern once again, the agitation and terror on the outside seemingly safely located on the other side of Henry's TV screen, or having been confined to the subject-matter of his argument with his daughter, they come crashing into the family home. With the help of his daughter and her poem, Henry succeeds in neutralising the danger - diverting the dark energy of the aggressor's brain into an unforeseeable aesthetic rapture.

However despite the subsequent restoration of order and harmony, one is left, as with many of Shakespeare's so-called comedies, with a sense of the skin-deep precariousness of the "shells" within which we all find protection from the agitation and the evil of the world. Perowne (and probably McEwan too) is sustained by love within his family on the one hand, and by the sense of wonder that the miracle of human consciousness, together with the whole pantheon of science, literature, music and art that it has given rise to, inspires in him. And this is something that our protagonist has in common with millions of people in the comfortable western world. But it is a world (the world that Perowne and all of us have constructed within our minds that is) which is governed by contingency. Everything that goes right for him, and for the world, is represented here as a stroke of luck. It could so easily be otherwise. Schrödiger's cat could so easily be found dead rather than alive.

That is the universe which is inhabited by those for whom everything that is is the result of a series of lucky (or unlucky) accidents. It might be possible for people like Perowne to draw comfort from such reflections. But what about those who have not been so lucky? Are they at the mercy of contingency? Is their only recourse, as they feel the darkness closing in, to make some kind of leap of faith into the arms of a hypothetical (but actually non-existent) supernatural being?

Just suppose however that the world and everything in it is not in fact governed by blind contingency. What if, contrary to Perowne's creed, human consciousness, together with science art and literature, is actually a gift? What if this world, outside of our little cocoons, is not in fact spinning out of control but is, despite the suffering that we see all around us, on course towards restoration? Such blind faith would presumably be dismissed by McEwan as not only wrong-headed, but dangerous. But this faith, faith in God, has sustained countless millions of people through terrible national and personal traumas in the past. And it is, even from a scientific point of view, by no means such an unreasonable faith as it was once assumed to be. If it could be seen to be not a blind leap of faith but the natural response to our true awareness of the miracle of consciousness, it would provide us with a much more solid reason to hope than the precarious and brittle shell that Perowne gazes out from onto the world on that memorable Saturday morning.

"Never let me go" Kazuo Ishiguro

What is disturbing about this novel is not so much the chilling possibility of something like cloning and the use of clones for the harvesting of body parts actually occurring at some time in the future (which it might), but rather the way in which both the clones and their creators simply accept it as the way things must be. Here there is no Ewan McGreggor- led rebellion to bring down the citadel of the elite and liberate their slaves. What we have instead is unquestioning acquiescence: human beings who know full well that they are human in every sense, but who nevertheless accept their fate, and their "creators" who also know it but who refuse to face the truth, as the presence and role of these clones have become so central to the way things are. So many people are reaping the rewards of the donation programme, so much time and money has been invested in it, that no one, whatever their misgivings, is going to start rocking the boat now, are they? The scenario is poignantly reminiscent of the colonial economies that were sustained by the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Africa, among the other resources that it supplied, was a harvest of human flesh, ripe for the picking. Virtually no one challenged this assumption, whether because they had no interest in doing so, or because they did not dare to, or because they were powerless to. Virtually no one publicly defended the human dignity of the slaves. On the contrary, the scientific establishment of the late 19th century actually seemed to make it possible for the white greed-driven elites to argue that these human beings were not human beings after all. They were little more than semi-evolved primates, at best arrested mid-way between ape and man. They were "reified", turned into merchandise. Ironically they were deprived of their humanity to bring relief to the troubled conscience of those who, supposedly, had advanced beyond them in the journey towards fully-fledged humanity. The parallels with Ishiguro's novel are unmistakeable.

So this novel raises some very fundamental questions. How do we define human dignity? What is the defence, in the current ideological climate of the western world, against something like the slave trade happening again, or against something like the world of Ishiguro's novel ever coming true (once again) in our world?

Shards of truth

The purpose of this blog is to discuss the worldviews that underlie and are articulated in the arts and the media. Whatever lipservice many might give to the truism that "truth is relative", and that all worldviews are equally defensible, it goes without saying that again and again we rule out this or that view as invalid, and indefensible. I envisage this blog as a forum where the contributors can freely advocate the worldview that they have come to embrace, and freely challenge as invalid and untrue those views which, however wonderful the medium through which they are conveyed, they do not find acceptable.

I am going to be contributing as a Christian believer. I believe the Bible to be the Word of God. I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God. That is where I shall be taking my stand. But I imagine that other contributors will be defending other paradigms. I shall be starting up discussions on books and films that I have been challenged and or enriched by, and I shall be reviewing them from the point of view of a Christian believer. Having said that, I know that I have a great deal to learn from those who have seen the same films or read the same books from very different perspectives.

I look forward to some very thought-provoking discussion. Please feel free to have your say.