A novel can contest Islamophobia’s surface while its framing reinforces Western liberal self-exculpation

Evidence

Seen in this way, Perowne’s own ambivalence, like that of the text itself, ends up being a testament to the liberal good faith of the West. His magisterial autonomy is played out literally over the prone body of Baxter as he operates on him. The rational agent has survived a nasty scare but is finally given the ability to “invade” the very body of his disarmed adversary, shining the light of scientific knowledge into the dark mind of one whose own fate is, as we have already been told, the subject of unrelenting biological determinism that is leading him to an early grave. Perowne’s professional diagnosis is rolled out again at the end as the neurosurgeon muses on the day’s events from the comfort of his bedroom. Here it is used as a blanket to throw over all those who do not enjoy the material benefits of progress and civilization. As Perowne, “the professional reductionist,” thinks of his family, he reflects: “So much divides them from the various broken figures that haunt the benches.… It can’t just be class or opportunities.… [I]t’s down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code at the level of molecules.… No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public spaces of every town.… You have to recognise bad luck when you see it, you have to look out for these people” (272). The social drivers of class and race, then, purportedly have a negligible role to play in producing Perowne’s own advantages and the disadvantages of others. Superior breeding, in all senses, wins out. … As Perowne muses, he conjures up an affable Edwardian doctor, standing at the same window one hundred years earlier, looking optimistically at the new century, unaware of the cataclysms to come: the Somme, Hitler, Stalin, Mao. “If you described the hell that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor … would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of the path to the ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing” (276). In this account, the privileged Englishman is a bemused spectator to the atrocities of history, which happen elsewhere and may draw him in, but his pragmatism inures him to the dreamers of dreams. But now the utopianists arise once again, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, in the robes and combat fatigues of the Islamist. Strangely, colonialism and decolonization do not figure in this list of defining upheavals of the twentieth century. As Paul Gilroy has remarked, the besetting inability of the British to face the profound change in status that followed the end of empire has resulted in a “postimperial melancholia” that has only gathered pace with widespread immigration. The denial of the cruelty and injustice accompanying empire—from which Perowne’s privileged lifestyle ultimately derives—has a considerable psychological and moral cost. In explaining away injustice as the product of genetics and in symbolically eliding the anger of the dispossessed with the terrorism of the Islamist, McEwan flattens multiple historical factors and normalizes the exculpatory viewpoint of the rich, white, male subject. In a novel full of optical images, the most disabling blind spot is that experienced by Henry Perowne as he gazes from his bedroom window. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reading Hamid and Naqvi — both novels stage a first-person narrator whose ambivalence could function the way Perowne’s does. Key question: does the framing of Changez and Jimbo close down the postcolonial critique they voice, or does the novel wed it to larger structural critique?