Saturday | Ian McEwan

Saturday | Ian McEwan | Excellent

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Saturday

	Saturday Ian McEwan Anchor, 2006 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 293 reviews view larger image
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In his triumphant new novel, Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement, follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish. Henry Perowne?a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deeply in love with his wife and grown-up children?plans to play a game of squash, visit his elderly mother, and cook dinner for his family. But after a minor traffic accident leads to an unsettling confrontation, Perowne must set aside his plans and summon a strength greater than he knew he had in order to preserve the life that is dear to him.

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Fantastic!

This book is sooo good on many levels. The author did research for this character, the descriptions of neurosurgey were particularly fascinating for me, but also the interior thoughtlife of the doctor contemplating his life and the events of the times (the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003). This is a novel I want to make several friends read. It is very well-written and thought-provoking.

Excellent

This is a terrifically engaging and intelligent novel that is both meditative and pleasingly dense in vivid, narrative detail. Altough it swells with inner dialogue and deep explanation, there is deft movement to the story as it progresses from rumination to flashes of personal and potential horror and back again into the territory of character background.

The passing thoughts of the chief character, a British neurosurgeon gliding through a day off until things go awry, comprise the main story line. But all along there are bright tangents on terrorism, the case for war, road rage, family life, brain disorders, violence, poetry and literature.

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Good but not great

I liked Ian McEwan's Saturday partly because of its focus on the mind-body relation. The main character, Dr. Perowne, is a materialist -- there's nothing more to a mind than a brain.

Perowne regards three persons through this reductionist lens:

1. Perowne's alcoholic father-in-law, a complicated poet whose foibles grow predictably from the effects of alcohol on the brain;

2. Perowne's mother, who suffers from dementia; the sections about her are the most profound in the book, focusing on the pathos and tragic affront when a good and caring person is deleted by brute, neural wiring malfunctions; and

3. Baxter, the intelligent thug; the issue here is the conflict between, on the one hand, our natural moral indignation at the heinous crimes of a free person and, on the other hand, the picture of the criminal as an unfree victim of his own gnarled neural wiring. (Shades here of philosopher Wifrid Sellars' contrast between the Manifest Image [our common, everyday sense of ourselves and others as free and responsible persons] and the Scientific Image [in which those persons dissolve into amoral atom-swarms].)

The main weakness of the novel is its plot, which seems implausible and jury-rigged in places, as if McEwan had notebooks full of good passages and riffs that he was itching to publish and just threw together any old narrative in which to embed them. Still, there's some great writing in Saturday.

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Well worth the effort.

Ian McEwan has a voluble, poetic style, with most of his writing elaborating his characters' fleeting, chaotic, but insightful thoughts. He has a way of turning a second's reflection into pages of meditation, or a day into 279 pages, so that his characters seem unusually lucid, but still the reader can see familiar branches of thought that make the characters real. At times it can be exhausting to read, but McEwan skillfully tightens his vast web of character introspection into a cohesive and powerful conclusion.

This book follows Henry Perowne, an English neurosurgeon approaching fifty, on his day off, an extraordinarily memorable Saturday. The setting is London in 2003 just before the start of the Iraq War, an issue central to the concerns of the novel, not for only for its politics but for its effect on the lives and minds of people, real and fictional. McEwan introduces us to his narrator and then brings the pivotal event into the story about eighty pages in, after the reader has begun to wonder when something is going to happen. He also has a way of weaving in many circumstances that seem vital, then inconsequential, and then vital again, or symbolic, so that reading this is like a mystery novel where the mystery is the plot and the clues are the myriad tiny details of life and thought interspersed with larger happenings. It all comes together into a brilliant picture. Having read Atonement, I was prepared for this slow and unexpected unfurling of the story, but I admit to getting impatient and restless for things to get moving and for Henry to shut up already. I was not to be disappointed. The last part of the book brings everything together beautifully, passionately, and completely, and it was all well worth the ride.

The book is firmly grounded in the moment, not only in the almost stream-of-consciousness narration, but in the subject matter and themes, reflecting the confusion and preoccupation of many in the post-9/11 western world. By setting the events of the novel against the political background of the protests against war in Iraq, McEwan constantly addresses his characters' concerns and views, but translates them into more immediate events. This is a truly great novel that seamlessly merges setting and story into something greater, a narrative that captures time and feeling. It is not a succinct book, but it is moving, lyrical, and rewarding. If you enjoy contemporary fiction, character analysis, or the pleasure of beautiful writing, this is an excellent choice.

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