Abstrakt
Ian McEwan is one of the most prominent cartographers of modern urban life among contemporary British novelists as the city, in various forms, has featured in most of his fiction so far. This article deals with his two notably urban novels, Enduring Love (1997) and Saturday (2005), and argues that the latter can be understood as a sequel to the first in terms of its continuation of the theme of the city as a reflection of the main protagonist's mind.
Yet, as the role of London in Saturday is much more complex and varied than in its predecessor, the article also focuses on how the city is used in Saturday in order to explore the theme of the relationship between the private self and outside reality, and thus attempts to demonstrate how the novel captures the Zeitgeist of the post-9/11 Western world as well as the very essence of the postmodern urban condition.