Saturday (2005) was the first of Ian McEwan's novels I read, sometime back in 2006, soon after it became available on the Library of Congress's "special media" for the visually handicapped. It didn't seem to have made that big an impression on me. Now, after having read seven of his other novels (including Black Dogs twice), I'm curious enough about why to read it again. I've been supposing that reading McEwan requires a special receptivity, something I had to develop through reading. That may be true, but I can't yet define it.Before I picked the book up again, I couldn't even have told you that the main character was a neurosurgeon. But neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is, and in the very first pages McEwan describes Perowne's whirlwind Friday of surgeries, including a long operation on a young woman with a tumour (I'll follow the text's British spelling) "deep in the superior cerebellar vermis":
Andrea's operation lasted five hours and went well. She was placed in a sitting position, with her head-clamp bolted to a frame in front of her. Opening up the back of the head needed great care because of the vessels running close under the bone. Rodney leaned in at Perowne's side to irrigate the drilling and cauterise the bleeding with the bipolar. Finally it lay exposed, the tentorium—the tent—a pale delicate structure of beauty, like the little whirl of a veiled dancer, where the dura is gathered and parted again. Below it lay the cerebellum. By cutting away carefully, Perowne allowed gravity itself to draw the cerebellum down—no need for retractors—and it was possible to see deep into the region where the pineal lay, with the tumour extending in a vast red mass right in front of it. The astrocytoma was well defined and had only partially infiltrated surrounding tissue. Perowne was able to excise almost of it without damaging any eloquent region. [p. 13]The year 2006 was the tenth after my own five-hour brain operation in the region where the pineal lay. And my tumor lay even deeper than Andrea's, in the pineal itself. My neurosurgeon was able to remove only about 85% of mine. And there was enough damage to the eloquent region of my mid-brain to leave me—apparently permanently—unable to overlay left and right images closely enough for my brain to resolve them into one.
Maybe ten years had not been enough time away from my own brain's invasion for me to read about a brain surgeon and abide a lasting impression....
A poignant vignette, Moristotle, and well told. I can well imagine that rereading McEwan's book would have special significance for you.
ReplyDeletePerhaps your experience has even helped you to tolerate House and Gray's Anatomy. :-)
I think you're right. In re-reading Saturday I'm opening myself up not only to appreciate the book again, but also to reflect on "where I might have been" in 2006 during my first reading.
ReplyDeleteInteresting conjecture about my surgery's helping me tolerate "House." And tolerate may be the right word; my wife often cringes through scenes even of sticking in a needle for an IV. But she has had more surgeries even than I've had, and they don't seem to have helped her similarly. I've always been able to look while a nurse has inserted a needle into a vein in the crook of my elbow.
I've never watched "Gray's Anatomy." And we haven't watched the last couple of episodes of "House"; I may at last have had my fill of its over-the-top, extremely improbable scenarios and at last grown tired of the indeed rather tiresome Dr. House. I have long suspected that Hugh Laurie probably longs to be done with him too (and perhaps wishes for another episode of "Jeeves" in order to reprieve his Bertie Wooster).