Pynchon and McEwan, friends in the figures in the carpet?

[Mark Kohut]

Reading some more Ian McEwan, cause I think he and P are some kind of friends. We remember when TRP signed that letter in defense of him re Atonement and his research for it.
McEwan is a decade younger. Essentally a realist,--"I believe in the documentary touch"--[2nd half of his life at least; pretty Gothic explorer earlier], and one of our best, says his friend Jonathan Raban, a writer whose non-fiction I would usually rather read than McEwan's fiction. And many feel this way, but I never have, so it could be me, as I told a reviewing friend (to whom he is a 'god'). 

In the opening chapter of Saturday, McEwan makes some choices such as "the southern sky", an allusion to the rocket bombing of WW2, three mentions--he doth project too symbolically, I might suggest---of the Post Office Tower, a metaphor using a 'coral' reef [see M & D], again a gratuitous therefore thematic I suggest, '"perfect circle of garden---an 18th-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity" and, again gratutious, "two figures in dark overcoats crossing a square diagonally" all around the major bit of plot: a plane on fire, mistaken at first for a comet, at second for "jihadist-hit" going toward Heathrow Airport at 4:30 AM. The protagonist learns with relief and some embarrasment that the plane just had a cargo fire, landed safely and no one is even hurt. No screaming across the sky this morn [my words, not McEwan's]

Think he has learned anything from, is in a buried dialogue with, TRP's work? 

Later in the novel, the protagonist, a middle-aged London neurosurgeon, reflects on a past age when everyone believed in a divinity which united the society---very Henry Adams. 
And, a very short time later, reflects on the possible  immorality of loving a car...