Risk and Morality in Ian McEwan's 'Saturday'

This essay aims to map out the fictional space of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) through the privileged focus of the sociology of risk. The latter has been compellingly explored and systematized since the 1980s in the works of leading social scientists such as Deborah Lupton, Anthony Giddens, Samuel Huntington, Frank Furedi and, most famously, Ulrich Beck. Beck’s theory of the ‘world risk society’, in particular, points to a major crisis in conventional humanist tenets and values against the current backcloth of liquid modernity, ridden by ‘manufactured’ risks. This essay highlights the way these theories have been popularized and pervasively circulated across multiple public spheres, giving currency to the so-called ‘discourse of risk’.Saturday explores the way individual consciousness is constituted and evolves amidst staggering moral instability and epistemic uncertainty, and schematizes the systemic fear inherent in our way of life as a result of the dissolving boundaries between public and private violence.Confronted with Tony Blair’s massive persuasive deployment of the discourse of risk, McEwan’s protagonist attempts in vain to rationally assess the elusive moral balance and speculative accounting of risk, only to experience, instead, the feeling of utter ‘ambivalence’ that Beck describes as systemic to the world risk society.