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.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial theory and critiques of McEwan's Saturday; also echoes Gilroy's work on postimperial melancholia.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 119