The confrontation results in Grammaticus getting his nose broken and Daisy being forced to strip naked in front of her family and read a poem. Rosalind comes home, only she’s being led by knifepoint into the house by Baxter and Nigel, one of the other hoodlums that Perowne had met earlier in the day. Theo and Grammaticus eventually arrive as well. The two get into an argument over the Iraq War. He goes home and begins preparing the meal. Perowne goes through the rest of his day deeply shaken, not only by the altercation but how it relates to the protest over the Iraq war, the flaming airplane he saw that morning, and the general angst gripping the 21st century. Perowne manages to escape the situation without serious injury by confronting Baxter about his illness. It’s during this altercation that Perowne, ever the observant scientist, diagnoses Baxter on the spot with the early stages of Huntington’s disease. The lead ruffian, a street kid named Baxter, throws a punch at Perowne and threatens him. Only, the car that crashed into his is occupied by three black hoodlums. This street protest diverts Perowne onto a secluded street on his way to his squash game, and there he’s involved in what at first seems to be a run-of-the-mill auto accident. Of course, the big complication in Perowne’s day is the massive demonstration occurring on the streets of London to protest the looming invasion of Iraq. Henry has a full day planned before the evening party, which includes a game of squash with a colleague, a visit to his senile mother in a nursing home, and a trip to the fishmonger to pick up seafood for the meal that night. And what a day it will be for Perowne: his young daughter Daisy, a recently published poet, is returning home from Paris after being away for six months, and the Perownes are planning to mark her arrival with a celebratory family dinner party, which will include Henry’s wife Rosalind (a lawyer working for a liberal London newspaper), their 18-year-old son Theo (a buddy blues musician), and Rosalind’s father Grammaticus (also a poet, Daisy’s tempestuous mentor). He learns only later in the morning that it was in fact a simple mechanical issue, but the incident lingers with him for the remainder of the day. With the attacks of 9/11 still fresh in the collective psyche, Perowne wonders if this burning plane is another act of terrorism. He gets up and goes to his window, where he sees a plane with one of its engines on fire streaking across the sky on its way to an emergency landing at Heathrow. Dalloway.) Successful British neurosurgeon Henry Perowne wakes in the early hours of the morning with an aimless sense of dread.
The knee-jerk observation is that this is an hommage to Virginia Wolff’s Mrs.
A little background: the novel is set within a single day – Saturday, February 15, 2003.
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