Ian McEwan’s post-9/11 novel Saturday (2005) has divided reviewers and critics mainly due to its exclusive focus on the complacent elite protagonist, Henry Perowne, who can be described as a Blairite neoliberal, and its use of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) as a deus ex machina. Interestingly, Perowne’s complacency endorses Foucauldian ‘pastoral power’, now in the hands of medical professionals, which bears a close parallel to the godlike power of a novelist, a theme explored in Atonement (2001). Indeed, McEwan’s neurosurgeon exercises a form of control over the populace: on the one hand, he guides his patients to live a normal life by removing abnormalities and getting everything in the right order; on the other, he decides who is worthy of receiving further care. McEwan’s analogue between neurosurgery and creative writing consolidates this pastoral power of Perowne, who changes the course of people’s lives as easily as a novelist does. In addition to performing a life-saving surgical intervention for Baxter, he abuses his power for his personal and emotional ends in determining how this genetically abnormal intruder should live. This essay aims to understand the novel’s exploration of the power of this new pastorate in the era of medicalised politics.
Genichiro Itakura (Mon,) studied this question.