The Imagination of Disaster (Page 5)

Henry, however, has something Herzog did not, which is the capacity to act consequentially on reality. He has the ability to repair a human life, even Baxter's. Yet, as McEwan stresses again and again, Henry lacks something fundamental--an artistic imagination. He hates fiction. He especially hates the characters in magical realist fiction, one of whom he found particularly galling: "one visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him." The scene is from McEwan's The Child in Time, and Henry's aversion to it is playful proof of his distance from the author.

In fact, it is Baxter who has the artistic imagination. In a scene of terror strangely animated by the spirit of comedy, someone's recitation of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" has the most remarkable transforming effect on Baxter, a moment that swerves the narrative in another surprising direction. The fact that the scene turns on Arnold, who would not have let the likes of Baxter into his front yard, amplifies its weird hidden ironies. These are the poem's famous last lines, which describe a world that

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

There is no "help from pain" for poor Baxter, yet both he and Henry are living in a precarious situation in which, somewhere in the Middle East, "ignorant armies clash by night." It is not enough for decent Henry to tell himself that Baxter's desperate social situation is the caprice of a bad gene, and that therefore Henry should do all he can to help Baxter, up to the limit of his self-interest, his self-preservation. The moment created by Arnold's poem--Henry has no idea who Arnold was--proves the elusive existence in Baxter of an imaginative sympathy that is even stronger than Henry's own kindness. It proves that Baxter has an equal value as a human being, and an equal claim to the dignity society confers on Henry, no matter what Baxter's genes and social class have determined.

There are no words for the feeling that irradiates Baxter when he hears the poem. It is mute and inarticulable, a fusion of mind and matter, love and biology. This intuition embedded in the flesh is the origin of McEwan's thoroughgoing materialism, expressed with Shakespearean power at the end of The Child in Time, when Stephen Lewis is helping Julie, his wife, give birth and sees the head of the baby emerge:

That it was suddenly and obviously there, a person not from another town or from a different country but from life itself, the simplicity of that, was communicating to him a clarity and precision of purpose.

That clarity and precision of purpose--to live, and to love--come to McEwan's characters only in the wake of a transfiguring event. It's these intimate catastrophes that create the hunger in all of McEwan's dark, disturbing fictions for more love, more life. How unlike the effect of 9/11, which has propelled some people past the limit of self-interest and self-preservation into the desire for more violence, and more death. This extraordinary book is not a political novel. It is a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics.

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