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  • Reading Saturday

  • For anyone who ever cried at the prospect of reading a painstakingly detailed novel, Ian McEwan's Saturday will not be a great selection. For that matter, none of McEwan's novels would be a good choice, as he immerses himself into the environment about which he is writing and graphically illustrates ... Continue

    For anyone who ever cried at the prospect of reading a painstakingly detailed novel, Ian McEwan's Saturday will not be a great selection. For that matter, none of McEwan's novels would be a good choice, as he immerses himself into the environment about which he is writing and graphically illustrates that world. In Saturday, that world belongs to a neurosurgeon whose Saturday becomes eventful fairly early on when he has a car accident with some thugs.

    Frankly, the plot of the book is fairly immaterial to the overall experience of reading Saturday. I know that is strange to say, but I speak the truth. While the plot that interweaves main character Henry Perowne and his thug Baxter is the backbone of the novel, Saturday is really about how we experience all of our days since the events of 9/11. He thoughtfully posits that we will never look at an airplane flying through the sky in the same way again (it's true). There is that constant fear that we will turn on the television to something catastrophic. Even the news channels have adjusted their programming to this notion, with the crawling scrollbars at the bottom of the screen that are ready to announce BREAKING! NEWS! AT! ANY! MOMENT! It's a devastating reality.

    

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• ― moogle said on Mar 27, 2007 | Add your feedback

From the pen of a master — the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement — comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before.

On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne’s day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne’s professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him — with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive.

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