Saturday…
… is not my favorite Ian McEwan novel, though not his worst either. (That distinction surely must go to Amsterdam.) But this quote, from a scene where the protagonist, Henry Perowne, prepares a festive dinner for his daughter who’s returning from Paris, seemed exactly right of the mixture of fascination and dread I feel about the news, any sort of news, since that fateful Tuesday afternoon:
Three bottles of champagne are already in the fridge. He takes a step towards the CD player, then changes his mind for he’s feeling the pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It’s a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit’s grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days. The government’s counsel — that an attack in a European or American city is an inevitability — isn’t only a disclaimer of responsibility, it’s a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there’s also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don’t let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it’s happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know.
