Saturday [Hardcover]

Ian McEwan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the predawn sky on a Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sees a plane with a wing afire streaking toward Heathrow. His first thought is terrorism--especially since this is the day of a public demonstration against the pending Iraq war. Eventually, danger to Perowne and his family will come from another source, but the plane, like the balloon in the first scene of Enduring Love, turns out to be a harbinger of a world forever changed. Meanwhile, the reader follows Perowne through his day, mainly via an interior monologue. His cerebral peregrination records, in turn, the meticulous details of brain surgery, a car accident followed by a confrontation with a hoodlum, a far-from-routine squash game, a visit to Perowne's mother in a nursing home and a family reunion. It is during the latter event, at the end of the day, that the ominous pall that has hovered over the narrative explodes into violence, and Perowne's sense that the world has become "a commuity of anxiety" plays out in suspense, delusion, heroism and reconciliation. The tension throughout the novel between science (Perowne's surgery) and art (his daughter is a poet; his son a musician) culminates in a synthesis of the two, and a grave, hopeful, meaningful, transcendent ending. If this novel is not as complex a work as McEwan's bestselling Atonement, it is nonetheless a wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now. (Mar. 22)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

As McEwan writers, “When anything can happen, everything matters.” Saturday magnifies a pivotal moment in history and a day in a man’s life as secure foundations crack and uncertainty rushes in. While critics cited different overriding themes, Saturday explores ideas of fate and purpose, life’s fragility, revelation, and terror at all levels of society. McEwan, an enduring talent in Britain combines “literary seriousness” with a “momentum more commonly associated with genre fiction.” The result is an intricate, captivating novel defined by a “serene tension” that erupts into a dark reality despite its hero’s optimism (New York Times Book Review).

McEwan brilliantly builds many layers of reality from small details. Henry-a sympathetic, if conflicted, character-knows he can examine people’s brains, but not understand their minds. His ruminations on surgery, lovemaking, music, war (he’s pro-war), and literature (he’s clueless) rise to a crescendo as he slowly questions his own motives and actions. In dazzling, authoritative prose, McEwan depicts this growing anxiety with a calmness that is soon violated.

Despite its appeal on both sides of the Atlantic, a few reviewers thought McEwan’s intricate plotting and slow, dark suspense was too structured. The novel’s explicit messages deprive the reader of “feeling, rather than coolly registering, the author’s intention” (New York Times Book Review). Yet, in the end, most critics agree that Saturday is both a substantial work of literature by one of Britain’s greatest minds and a powerful piece of post-9/11 fiction.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 289 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; 1ST edition (March 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385511809
• ISBN-13: 978-0385511803
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (331 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #158,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

243 of 279 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A study of "the powerful currents...that alter fates.", March 22, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Saturday (Hardcover)

In the middle of the night, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon, awakens for no apparent reason and sees what he thinks, at first, is a meteor, but the object brightens, moves faster, and blazes through the skies at low altitude--a plane on fire, approaching Heathrow. In intensely realized descriptions, Henry thinks about this dramatic event and reacts and shares the most intimate aspects of his existence, drawing the reader into his life. Every action, thought, and question about life, fate, and destiny is articulated as Henry struggles to make sense of this one day in his life and see it in a philosophical context.

Happily married to Rosalind, a lawyer for a newspaper, Henry has two remarkably creative children--one a blues musician and the other a poet. Through their lives, he recognizes that his own preoccupation with science and reality has left him incomplete. He has come to believe that "there [is] more to life than merely saving lives," and he yearns to find a complete, "coherent world, everything fitting at last."

As the day progresses, Henry fixates on the plane accident, possible terrorism, the imminent war with Iraq, and a traffic accident resulting in an altercation with a thug. But throughout this "action," Henry is contemplating his relationships with the world at large, trying to understand his place within it. Having rejected organized religion, he finds some comfort in the conclusions of Darwin, who connects all life in a continuum in which he sees himself a part.

As he thinks of his own parents and children, he also observes contrasts in the world around him, people whose lives are different, not because of any inherent difference but simply because of chance--"the currents that alter fates." When the Perowne home is invaded during a family gathering at the end of the day, Henry faces a decisive moment in the battle between his emotions and his intellect. The climax is loaded with menace and executed with high drama, but the events themselves are less significant than Henry's reactions to them.

Intensely introspective and beautifully integrated, this is McEwan's most thoughtful--and least plot-based--novel to date, with every detail adding to the complex characterizations and themes--a wonderful meditation on individuals and culture, connection and disconnection, and the arbitrariness of fate. Mary Whipple

Atonement
On Chesil Beach
Enduring Love
Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide

123 of 145 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The challenge of the professional reductionist, March 22, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saturday (Hardcover)

This day in the life of a moral, conscientious man serves as a metaphor for the quality of a man's life, how unexpected violence may disrupt and injure, but not destroy. London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sets out on his Saturday with a full schedule and a brimming mind, much of his internal musing triggered by the events of 9/11, the incipient war with Iraq and a massive anti-war demonstration taking place that day to protest Bush's potential attack on Iraq: "Saturday's he's accustomed to being thoughtlessly content..."

Perowne carries on an inner dialog made more complex by current events, though always engaged in thoughts of his patients and family, perhaps recently with a sharper edge, a poignancy, a nod to the random destruction that has become part of the new world landscape. A minor accident triggers a chain of events, so unexpected that Perowne is blindsided by his own lack of foresight. This one day becomes a metaphor for what has so recently stunned the world and left it shaken. Like a country attacked on a bright New York day, Perowne, and by extension his family, are briefly assaulted, then left to deal with the repercussions of violence.

The well-trained, educated brain screams danger, but the acculturated man is still in shock, unable to adapt to quickly changing circumstances: "Questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved." Facing imminent danger to himself and to his family, Perowne cannot make his precise mind plan, his mental calculations serving instead as stumbling blocks for extricating the family from a volatile situation.

I find it fascinating that the author's protagonist is a neurosurgeon, for McEwan writes with the precision of a surgeon, his novel as brilliantly structured as Perowne's mind. In a world gone mad with terror and the quest for a semblance of its former identity, Perowne creates an island of objectivity, the thinking, civilized man recreating a sane world, albeit one forever altered by circumstances. The real test is in the aftermath of such an event, how one moves on the key to the quality of life desired, whether left helpless and raging or refusing to concede those small fragments of integrity that must be repaired, though imperfect, forever scarred with a hairline crack. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

74 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Well written, smug, unbelievable, February 26, 2006

By 

Ian Forth (Melbourne, Vic Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saturday (Hardcover)

You'll have no problem reading Saturday. There's nothing difficult about it. Indeed, as usual with McEwan, you won't be able to remember one phrase, or even word, a week after reading it. Surely the best novelist in England should be leaving something memorable behind him?

And then there are the characters. It's not surprising all those politicians thought Saturday was the book of the year. The protagonist is living the life they all hanker after. He's living the life of McEwan himself, basically, with the exception of the brain surgery bits which have been clumsily grafted on to mask the autobiographical element, and also to invite eulogies pivoting around the surgeon's incision / the novelist's incision.

Now those characters. Lead: most gifted brain surgeon of his generation. Daughter: most gifted poet of her generation. Son: most gifted musician of his generation. Father-in-law: most gifted poet of his generation. Mother: most gifted swimmer in her county. Wife: a top lawyer (incredibly not the most gifted lawyer of her generation, as far as we know anyway). Does this sound like any family you know? Me neither. I appreciate he's drawing a picture of privilege, but he's also inviting us to admire and like these people, and they're all so horridly smug it's unbearable. I actually felt delighted when the edifice was shattered, and disappointed that calm was restored so effortlessly - can that be the desired effect?

And the details. Can you seriously imagine a guy coming up to 50 who's able, in the course of one day, to have sex, face down a mugging, play squash, drive around for a few hours, prepare a huge family meal, overpower armed intruders into his house (with the aid of his daughter who reads poetry to prevent being raped), sit down for the meal he prepared, go off to conduct brain surgery all night, come back and then, oh yes, where was I, I'm ready for a bit more sex now, it only being 5 o'clock in the morning and the police coming round at 10 o'clock and everything.

So it's readable. But is any of this likely? Is any of this likable? Is any of this helpful?