Saturday by Ian McEwan

the train to a welcoming home in London, and another young woman of the same age to be led away by a wheedling boy to a moment’s chemical bliss that will bind her as tightly to her misery as an opiate to its mu receptors.
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    The quality of silence in the house is thickened, Perowne can’t help unscientifically thinking, by the fact of Theo deeply asleep on the third floor, face-down under the duvet of his double bed. Some oblivious hours lie ahead of him yet. When he wakes he’ll listen to music fed through his hi-fi via the Internet, he’ll shower, and talk on the phone. Hunger won’t drive him from his room until the early afternoon when he’ll come down to the kitchen and make it his own, placing more calls, playing CDs, drinking a pint or two of juice and messily concocting a salad or a bowl of yoghurt, dates, honey, fruit and chopped nuts. This fare seems to Henry to be at odds with the blues.
    Arriving on the first floor, he pauses outside the library, the most imposing room in the house, momentarily drawnby the way sunshine, filtering through the tall gauzy oatmeal drapes, washes the room in a serious, brown and bookish light. The collection was put together by Marianne. Henry never imagined he would end up living in the sort of house that had a library. It’s an ambition of his to spend whole weekends in there, stretched out on one of the Knole sofas, pot of coffee at his side, reading some world-rank masterpiece or other, perhaps in translation. He has no particular book in mind. He thinks it would be no bad thing to understand what’s meant, what Daisy means, by literary genius. He’s not sure he’s ever experienced it at first hand, despite various attempts. He even half doubts its existence. But his free time is always fragmented, not only by errands and family obligations and sports, but by the restlessness that comes with these weekly islands of freedom. He doesn’t want to spend his days off lying, or even sitting, down. Nor does he really want to be a spectator of other lives, of imaginary lives – even though these past hours he’s put in an unusual number of minutes gazing from the bedroom window. And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. The times are strange enough. Why make things up? He doesn’t seem to have the dedication to read many books all the way through. Only at work is he single-minded; at leisure, he’s too impatient. He’s surprised by what people say they achieve in their spare time, putting in four or five hours a day in front of the TV to keep the national averages up. During a lull in a procedure last week – the micro-doppler failed and a replacement had to come from another theatre – Jay Strauss stood up from the monitors and dials of his anaesthetic machine and, stretching his arms and yawning, said he was awake in the small hours, finishing an eight-hundred-page novel by some new American prodigy. Perowne was impressed, and bothered – did he himself simply lack seriousness?
    In fact, under Daisy’s direction, Henry has read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary , two acknowledgedmasterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. These books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation.
    They had the virtue, at least, of representing a recognisable physical reality, which could not be said