Customer Reviews

Saturday

5 star:		(103)
4 star:		(75)
3 star:		(43)
2 star:		(56)
1 star:		(56)

 

 

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

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.

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?

I noticed a trend in a number of other reader reviews (mostly lukewarm or negative responses) which struck me as so off-base that it kicked off my own impulse to review "Saturday."

The suggestion is that McEwan's novel suffers from a protagonist who is too pristine, too blessed with a fine family, too lacking flaws to be believable or interesting. Shocking, considering I had just finished describing "Saturday" to my wife as a meticulous (albeit very gentle) critique of its protagonist, Henry Perwone, flawed hero du jour.

McEwan, no stranger to writing about the upper-middle class, sees Henry as a decent man; a good man, even. But it's awfully clear that McEwan's creation, though warm and intelligent, troubles the author. He reveals his concern with great subtlety. Yes, Henry is a highly accomplished medical professional, respected and at the top of his game. He's blessed with a passionate and loving marriage, and his grown children are extraordinarily good-natured, unique, and talented. Henry's family house is magnificent. So is his automobile.

It's with irony, then, that author McEwan weaves a compassionate portrait of Henry as an afflicted man. His case is minor, sure, but that's the beauty of "Saturday:" between the well-manicured lines of McEwan's novel is an quiet indictment of middle-class complacency, isolationism, passivity. Though his distaste for literature (in particular, non-realistic works) is completely forgivable, it's related, perhaps, to an overall smallness of vision. It's that smallness, we're meant to gather, which comes smashing back to bite him one Saturday.

McEwan has fashioned a protagonist who regularly rejects a worldview founded on connectivity--Henry prefers the scope of his private sphere too much to wonder for too long about the ripples any individual sends to others. He's oddly lacking in imagination. "Saturday" seems to suppose, aloud, whether Henry is exceptional, or, on the contrary, if he's the very picture of the succesful family man of the modern age.

Though that answer is ours to determine, Henry's all-too-typical collection of middle-class imperfections meshes with the titular day's events in a tide of slow-rising dread. Drawing a complex character study into the unfolding events of a single day is a tricky-sounding task, but McEwan pulls it off smartly. "Saturday" is observed with enough detail that the narrative slows from time to time (particularly in the first third), but stick with it; there's a great sense of humanity in McEwan's prose. These characters are well-portrayed, and when the narrative builds harrowing momentum, you'll cringe for them.

This book suffers from the same affliction as ATONEMENT: beautiful, textured prose with no sense of how a story should be paced and told. I tried very hard to like this book, but the self-absorbed stream of conscious of the narrator repeatedly gets in the way of moving the plot along. I found myself thinking, over and over, "For God's sake, man, get on with it!" Wasting ten pages on a meaningless game of squash - and I used to be a tournament-level player - does nothing to advance the plot. Nor does his painfully long-winded description of making a fish stew (I can buy a Julia Child book or CD for something like this). McEwan is unable to keep from wrapping the story around the axle in paragraph after paragraph of boring detail, much of which seems designed to simply show off his writing skills, which are considerable. Finishing this book was a real chore. I do not recommend it, and I'm surprised that it was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Like Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" and James Joyce's "Ulysses," Ian McEwan's novel takes place on a single day. A Saturday in February 2003 was supposed to be consultant neurosurgeon Henry Perowne's day off. On the way to his weekly Saturday morning squash game, Mr. Perowne (as medical consultants in Great Britain are known) gets into a minor automobile accident with a lowlife named Baxter while trying to avoid a massive demonstration in central London against the impending Iraq war (and its downright unpredictability, not unlike Henry Perowne's day off will turn out to be). Even the name McEwan assigns to Perowne is a play on the words "one's own personhood," the ephemeral nature of which the novel meticulously explores. Baxter, whose first name we never learn, has a noticeable tremor and is clearly emotionally unstable, which leads Henry to humiliate the man by making an on-the-spot diagnosis of a neurodegenerative disorder that Baxter had been trying to keep secret from the two ruffians with him at the time of the accident.

McEwan, in his novels, paints portraits, not landscapes, portraits in "Saturday" that depict in exquisite detail the life of a neurosurgeon both in and out of the operating room and the physical and psychological hell into which those afflicted with Baxter's condition descend. Henry's ambivalence toward Baxter -- whether to look upon him with compassion and empathy as he does all his patients or as a stalker threatening the lives of Henry Perowne and the family he deeply loves and cherishes -- is further reflected in Henry's ambiguity about joining in protest against a war to oust a brutal regime which tortured and maimed an Iraqi exile Henry had operated on.

In addition to the suspenseful pas de deux between Perowne and Baxter, McEwan provides the reader with majestic passages of poetry written by Perowne's daughter -- which the rational, scientific Perowne has difficulty comprehending -- and glimpses into the life of Perowne's mother, now in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's disease. While the novel's early pages test the reader's patience, the later chapters proceed smoothly toward its surprise ending.

The book left me cold--I never really felt engaged, although I agree with others who noted that the last 100 pages were the best.

Most of the novel consists of Henry's thoughts about his life and the world, as well as a lot of description (too much, in my opinion). It just seemed overly intellectualized, so much so that it struck me as self-involved and heavy handed.

It's true that it captured some of the angst of today's world from the perspective of the privileged. And it demonstrates how an "ordinary day" can turn into one that changes our lives. But it did so from an arm's length, over intellectual perspective, which always felt a bit artificial to me, and it never managed to capture the emotional impact of it all. And, finally, I really never cared much about what happened to Henry.

Perhaps it's a gender thing and a male reader would connect better to it? Especially a man at this particular phase of life (approaching 50--I'm a woman in the same phase of life).

At any rate, I didn't care for it and I wouldn't recommend it.

I love McEwan's writing enough to forgive him for the few faults this novel almost conceals. At its best, the prose evokes Fitzgerald's effortless beauty. At worst, it feels showy, or show-offy: 18 pages to describe a squash match? No need. We GET it. Ian knows squash, Ian knows fine wine and food, Ian knows Neurosurgery, Ian knows Blues. The problem is that the novel Hangs too long, or too deeply on each of these subjects. Ok, so the book is only about one day in this guy's life, one 24 hours of his hyper-consciousness, and as a result it HAS to go deep. Still, I felt at times like McEwan was showing off, not just showing.

The protagonist of this very literate novel, a neurosurgeon named Perowne, awakens early one Saturday morning, gets up, and looks out the window. Somewhat later he gets dressed, and goes downstairs to leave for his Saturday squash game with another doctor. We are now 62 pages into the book. The story proceeds at this slow, Proustian pace, and like reading Proust we are privy to the thoughts of Dr. Perowne as he makes his leisurely entrance into a usually quiet weekend.

There is a sudden blip to this relaxed routine when the doctor is involved in a fender bender accident with another car. It disturbs his squash game, but then he is off preparing for the evening reunion of his wife, son and daughter, and father-in-law. His daughter is a poet; his son a musician. Daughter Daisy frequently criticizes her father for his lack of interest in reading. Perowne thinks about that. Is he too busy saving lives to have a life of his own. London is busy on this day as it hosts a large march protesting the approaching war in Iraq. When his daughter arrives at the family home they begin a somewhat heated argument on this issue, and Perowne seems to be for it, although exhibiting some ambivalence.
Our slowly moving story suddenly turns into a thriller. A home invasion takes place, terrorizing the family. During this episode the daughter reads a poem, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach to one of the thuggish intruders, who finds the poem beautiful and exhilarating. This is in pointed contrast to the doctor's almost total lack of reaction. How interesting. The uneducated, street person sees beauty; the intelligent, educated doctor feels nothing.

If you decide to read this novel, and have never read this poem or you have forgotten the words to it, please do read it. It is vitally connected to the novel. It captures many of the doctor's thoughts and the moods of the book. You learn a lot about Dr. Perowne in this book as the reader is privy to most of his thoughts. He likes to look out windows and observe and think, complying with the command in the Arnold poem: "Come to the window, sweet is the night air."

I have read all of Mr. McEwan's novels, and this is one of his finest. He is a brilliant writer. Although a significant portion of the book involves the doctor's thoughts, these thoughts are always clear and accessible to the reader. You are not forced to follow some confusing stream of consciousness. This is the best novel I have read this year.

I have been reading Ian McEwan since his first book, "Cement Garden," was published thirty years ago or so. I have been a great fan of his, awaiting with bated breath his every new utterance. "Atonement", "Enduring Love," and "Amsterdam," his latest books preceding "Saturday," were even better than his previous works, even the mysterious and suspenseful ones, like "Black Dogs." It was a huge disappointment to me, therefore, when I first tried to get through "Saturday," and found that I could not maintain my interest. I put it down and left it for several months, and tried again after some friends at dinner discussed it and praised it. Alas, I got stuck at the same spot, when he meets the unsavory characters at the scene of a car accident.

It seems to me McEwan has stopped time in this book, and the pace is unbearable for me. His manipulation of the scene in which the neurosurgeon, completely unbelievably, is able to control a potentially dangerous individual by diagnosing him with a congenital disease at the scene of the accident, simply by observing his hand tremors, is simply not plausible. I would have accepted that plot contrivance if the pace had been more engaging, but in this context it was, again, the last straw, and I stopped reading it, for the second and last time.

If you've not read him before, start with "Atonement," an astonishingly well-written book with a well-constructed story line, engaging characters, and a page-turner pace.