Saturday by Ian McEwan

Saturday by Ian McEwan has been sitting on my bookshelf for years, and often when I was searching for the next book to read, I picked it up, flipped through the pages, and put it back down. Not because it didn’t seem interesting, but because lately I can’t seem to make myself read a lot of “worthy” fiction. Instead I end up over in the horror section of my bookshelves, or the mysteries. This time, though, I picked it up and followed through. Boy, am I glad I did, because Saturday was engrossing in a way I don’t find much in books (probably because I keep reading the crap fiction over in my mysteries and horror shelves).

In Saturday, we follow an entire day in the life of Henry Perowne. It’s a Saturday, of course, and it’s been a long week for Henry. He’s a neurosurgeon, and this week has been abnormally busy. When he wakes up in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday morning, he sees something that surprises him – a plane on fire headed for Heathrow. His reaction is much what you would expect in the post-911 world. Is it terrorism? This question drives him all day, never leaving his mind until he hears more and more on the news as to what exactly happened. That Saturday is the day of a public demonstration against the imminent Iraq War, and the demonstration ends up shaping his and his family’s life in an unexpected way. As a reader we follow Perowne throughout his day, fully immersed in this character, his feelings, and his surroundings. On the way to his weekly squash game, he has a car accident (caused in a small way by the demonstration) and is set upon by three hoodlums, and the attack contributes to the tone of the rest of Perowne’s day, culminating with the evening family dinner where his estranged father-in-law, daughter, son, and wife are pawns in a very scary reunion. What was supposed to be a day of gathering, ease, and rest ends up being an uneasy and stressful day, and you the reader feel that throughout the story. The dual nature of the story (Perowne’s scientific brain, his inability to truly give himself to the arts while his children are professional artists, a poet and a musician), pull together in this climax, tying nicely into the final scenes of the story. Where there was fear, anxiety, doubt, even Perowne finds some peace and truth in the classical music he favors while performing surgery on a patient in the novel’s closing scenes. (In a particularly serendipitous moment, Perowne is listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings at the end of a patient’s surgery.)

I really liked this book and am glad that I also have Atonement up there on the bookshelf to read. The places that Henry visits are richly drawn, the pace of the story builds consistently and rapidly to the end as you would expect. The characters are drawn rather well though Henry’s inner musings, although it becomes obvious that Henry’s thoughts and assumptions are not all truth. When I think of another “day in the life story,” that ever incomprehensible and yet highly revered Ulysses by James Joyce, I can’t help but say this one, Saturday, does it oh so much better. But that could be because I could read Saturday without 3 study guides. It could also be because I could relate ever so much to Henry and the world he lives in. Either way, Saturday is a very good book and worth the time, if only to remind ourselves that there is hope, that fear does not always win, and there is beauty in the world still.

Rating: 4 ½ Purrs