The study of professional mind in Ian McEwan's Saturday and the children act

Ian McEwan is one of those writers whose name on the book cover is enough for me to want to buy it immediately. However, it seems that no matter what he writes these days, it is bound to be compared with his masterpiece, Atonement, and to be found lacking in one way or another - in depth, plausibility of the plot, psychological truthfulness, vividness of the characters, etc. (It is enough to read the reviews in The Guardian by Tessa Hadley and in The New York Times by Zoe Heller). Nevertheless, I really enjoyed his works Saturday and The Children Act, both of which proved to be a compulsive reading. Although there is a gap of about ten years between them (The Children Act was published in 2014 and Saturday, in 2005), they are both exploring more or less the same theme: the way the professional mind works, with Saturday being less and The Children Act more emphatic about it. As I see it, these novels seek to answer the questions: is it possible to draw the boundary between the person you are in your private life and yourself as a professional? How does being a professional in a certain sphere affect your personality? Should you abide by your professional ethics in your private life and in what situations (if there are any) should you ignore it?

Saturday and The Children Act are focused on the lives of top-ranked specialists: a neurosurgeon and a High Court judge. For each of them, their profession consitutes an important part of their identity: their professions are pointed out in the very first or second line of each novel. ('Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion...' [McEwan 2006: 3] and 'London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening...' [McEwan 2014:])). Both novels are written from the third person limited presenting the main characters' perspective. Another common feature they share is the choice of professions, which play an important social role and have a great impact on other people's lives: Henry Perowne's work helps people preserve their consciousness and memory ('the essentials of being', as he calls it [McEwan 2006: 85]). By an irony of fate, though, he can't help his mother, who suffers from dementia and is gradually losing her memory: the episode describing his visit to her skillfully probes into the way Henry's mind works, with flashbacks into his childhood and school years mingling with the medical analysis of the neural mechanisms underlying his mother's disease. Henry's thoughts are dominated by two intertwined discourses, one of which sounds quite common, it is similar to any other educated person's inner monologue, while the other is a professional discourse, which analyses symptoms and makes a diagnosis almost automatically. While Henry as a person might experience all sorts of emotions Henry as a professional is always calm and concentrated.

It is a bit different with Fiona, who seems to be more absorbed in her professional work than Henry. Fiona's flow of consciousness resembles the style in which she writes her judgements, which is intelligent, coherent, exact and rational:

Among fellow judges, Fiona Maye was praised, even in her absence, for crisp prose, almost ironic, almost warm, and for the compact terms in which she laid out a dispute [McEwan 2014: 13].

While in Henry's spare time the 'common' discourse prevails, in Fiona's mind her professional discourse inevitably dominates, with brief intrusions of the thoughts about her troubled private life:

Her judgement must be ready for printing by tomorrow's deadline, she must work. Her personal life was nothing. Or should have been. Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door [McEwan 2014: 16].

It is hinted that it is Fiona's absorption into her work that has become the reason for her alienation from her husband. Fiona's negligence of her family life is revealed through minor details: an empty vase in which she has not put flowers for a long time and a fireplace, 'not lit in a year' [McEwan 2014: 1].

Like Henry Perowne's, Fiona Maye's decisions affect people's lives in a powerful way: she is to decide the fate of children and their divorcing parents and she even takes decisions on more serious, life-and-death matters. Both, Fiona and Henry, do not have regular working hours, they must be available 24/7 and they are always ready to swing into action. Thus, in each case we are dealing not with just a 'job', but with a 'mission' or a 'calling', which requires complete commitment, even a sacrifice, and a high degree of personal responsibility: Fiona decided against having children of her own in order to concentrate on her career as a judge; Henry has to try hard to spend time alone with his wife. In The Children Act, the theme of personal responsibility is raised, when, trying to solve the case of Siamese twins, Matthew and Mark, Fiona unwillingly assumes the role of God, since ultimately it is for her to decide who to live and who to die. And she accepts full responsibility for that:

For a while, some part of her had gone cold, along with poor Matthew. She was the one who dispatched a child from the world, argued him out of existence in thirty-four elegant pages [McEwan 2014: 31].

This theme is further strengthened by Adam's case, for whom she took the place of God and religion, denying him the consolation and the sense of belonging they used to provide.

It is remarkable that there is no heroization of these professions in McEwan's novels and there is no excessive pathos about what Fiona and Henry do: we are just plunged right in the middle of their daily routines including their most intimate, physiological side, we also share their thoughts, joys, hopes, fears, and worries, everything our everyday lives are made of. They are both middle-aged people with their minor ailments, 'approaching old age with dread'. They are self-contained pragmatists believing in common sense and preferring facts to illusions: Henry has trouble with the works of fiction which his daughter tries to make him read (there is an excellent passage where he ruminates over his preference for William James' works in comparison to those of his brother, Henry James) while Fiona treats religion just as one of the factors she needs to consider when analysing a certain case (interestingly enough, most of her cases are somehow connected to religion).

Both novels use quite a traditional way of giving a more in-depth description of their characters: the moment when we get relaxed and completely immersed in the flow of their daily lives, the plot makes a sudden twist and makes Henry and Fiona face an extraordinary, critical situation, which requires from them more than just simple performance of their professional duties. In Saturday, Henry encounters street thugs, whose leader, Baxter, as Henry notices, suffers from Huntington's disease. Using his professional expertise, Henry repeatedly manipulates Baxter by appealing to his hope to find a cure for his illness, first, in order to avoid the risk of being beaten and then to save his family from an even greater danger. Interestingly enough, it is Henry's manipulation in the first encounter with Baxter and his cronies that aggravates the situation and results in the armed assault on Henry's house. The question whether it was an ethical thing to do - to give false hopes to an incurably-ill person and to use one's medical knowledge to manipulate - is likely to be answered in the affirmative in this case since the criminals threatened the life and health of Henry's beloved ones. Not surprisingly, Henry himself does not feel particularly guilty about his behaviour.

In The Children Act, Fiona's situation is much more interesting and controversial: after she has got personally involved in the case of 17-year old Adam, who refused blood transfusion for religious reasons, she finds that he seeks further contact with her, striving for her support and guidance. In her professional practice Fiona is orientated towards performing a somewhat maternal role of a 'protective judge' and although she tries not to get emotionally involved and to keep her distance from the cases she hears, she fails to do so with Adam. At the same time she is so worried that her professional reputation might be compromised that she fails to feel Adam's desperation and to foresee the tragic consequences of her refusal, her betrayal, as the boy sees it. Unlike Henry, she feels infinitely sad and guilty about what happens to the person whose life she affected and whose expectations she did not manage to meet. Here the problem of Fiona's responsibility goes beyond the boundaries of mere professional ethics further into the sphere of universal moral values, in which it is immoral to deny help to somebody in need even if it does not fall within the range of one's direct duties. In the case of Adam, the professional system of values which Fiona has been relying on is no longer sufficient: although emotional involvement is generally considered unnecessary and undesirable in her work of a judge, it would have enabled her to save the boy's life.

Even though Saturday and The Children Act in some places might seem too contrived and lacking in plausibility, these novels provide the reader with a unique experience since they skillfully reconstruct the intricate work of a professional mind, in which the professional 'mode' of thinking is mixed with mundane thoughts and impressions. The study Ian McEwan carries out would be sufficient to make both stories exciting, but the dilemma each character has to face raises a number of other, equally interesting questions, exploring the limitations and the boundaries of the characters' professional ethics.