Saturday by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online

was?’
    â€˜No. Too far away, too dark.’
    â€˜Just that Chas is due in from New York this morning.’
    He is New Blue Rider’s sax player, a gleaming giant of a lad from St Kitts, in New York for a week’s master class, nominally supervised by Branford Marsalis. These kids have the instincts, the sense of entitlement proper to an elite. Ry Cooder heard Theo play slide guitar in Oakland. Taped to a mirror in Theo’s bedroom is a beer coaster with a friendly salute from the maestro. If you put your face up close you can make out in loopy blue biro, under a beer stain, a signature and, Keep it going Kid!
    â€˜I wouldn’t worry. The red-eyes don’t start coming in until half five.’
    â€˜Yeah, I suppose.’ He swigs on the water bottle. ‘You think it’s jihadists…?’
    Perowne is feeling dizzy, pleasantly so. Everything he looks at, including his son’s face, is receding from him without growing smaller. He hasn’t heard Theo use this word before. Is it the right word? It sounds harmless, even quaint, rendered in his light tenor. This deepening of the boyish treble is an advance Henry still can’t entirely take for granted, even though it’s five years old. On Theo’s lips – he takes the trouble to do something fancy with the ‘j’ – the Arabic word sounds as innocuous as some stringed Moroccan instrument the band might take up and electrify. In the ideal Islamic state, under strict Shari’a law, there’ll be room for surgeons. Blues guitarists will be found other employment. But perhaps no one is demanding such a state. Nothing is demanded. Only hatred is registered, the purity of nihilism. As aLondoner, you could grow nostalgic for the IRA. Even as your legs left your body, you might care to remember the cause was a united Ireland. Now that’s coming anyway, according to the Reverend Ian Paisley, through the power of the perambulator. Another crisis fading into the scrapbooks, after a mere thirty years. But that’s not quite right. Radical Islamists aren’t really nihilists – they want the perfect society on earth, which is Islam. They belong in a doomed tradition about which Perowne takes the conventional view – the pursuit of utopia ends up licensing every form of excess, all ruthless means of its realisation. If everyone is sure to end up happy for ever, what crime can it be to slaughter a million or two now?
    â€˜I don’t know what I think,’ Henry says. ‘It’s too late to think. Let’s wait for the news.’
    Theo looks relieved. In his obliging way, he’s prepared to debate the issues with his father, if that’s what is required. But at four twenty in the morning he’s happier saying little. So they wait in unstrained silence for several minutes. In the past months they have sat across this table and touched on all the issues. They’ve never talked so much before. Where’s the adolescent rage, the door-slamming, the muted fury that’s supposed to be Theo’s rite of passage? Is all that feeling sunk in the blues? They discussed Iraq of course, America and power, European distrust, Islam – its suffering and self-pity, Israel and Palestine, dictators, democracy – and then the boys’ stuff: weapons of mass destruction, nuclear fuel rods, satellite photography, lasers, nanotechnology. At the kitchen table, this is the early-twenty-first-century menu, the specials of the day. On a recent Sunday evening Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, ‘When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we’re going to do with Chas,or snowboarding next month,