McEwan's key strategy is to pit reason against chaos and art against arbitrariness as he orchestrates thorny moral dilemmas and menacing situations. This is the structure underlying his Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam (1998), his best-selling Atonement 2002), and this tightly focused, high-performance, stream-of-consciousness drama about one day in the life of a sanguine London neurosurgeon. Henry Perowne is a good man. He loves to perform delicate operations while listening to classical music, and he adores his smart lawyer wife, adventurous poet daughter, and gentle musician son. For him this particular Saturday in February 2003 is a day full of promise, even though he's had a strange night and London is gearing up for an immense protest march against the impending war in Iraq, and even though he gets into a frightening altercation with a twitchy thug named Baxter, a confrontation he escapes by diagnosing his attacker's degenerative condition. It's been said that what makes literature so enthralling is its devotion to detail and its digressions. McEwan is a master of both, and consequently the reader reads this embroiling tale with two minds: one luxuriating in Henry's piquant ruminations on everything from the dysfunctions of the brain to evolution, Iraq, and society's retreat from "big ideas"; the other cued to suspense: how will Baxter exact his revenge? McEwan is as provocative, transporting, and brilliant as ever as he considers both our vulnerability and our strength, particularly our ability to create sanctuary in a violent world. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Dazzling.... Powerful.... McEwan has shown how we ... live today.” —The New York Times
“Finely wrought and shimmering with intelligence.” —The New York Times Book Review
“McEwan is supremely gifted.... Saturday is a tightly wound tour de force.” —The Washington Post Book World
“This extraordinary book is not a political novel. It is a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics.” —The Nation
“Saturday is an exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained. It is undoubtedly McEwan’s best.” —The Spectator
“Read the last 100 pages at one sitting–the pace and the thrill allow it.... Exhilarating.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Virtuosic.... Brilliantly macabre and suspenseful.... [A] fine novel.” —The Wall Street Journal
“McEwan is in the first tier of novelists writing in English today.... He has achieved a complete mastery of his craft.” —The New York Observer
“This is McEwan at the height of his powers.... More audacious than Atonement.” —The Baltimore Sun
“In Saturday, the marvelously gifted Ian McEwan turns a single day into nearly twenty-four hours emblematic of an entire era.” —Chicago Tribune
“One of the most powerful pieces of post—9/11 fiction yet published.” —The New York Times
“Complex, suspenseful.... This novel ... reinforces Ian McEwan’s status as the supreme novelist of his generation.” —The Sunday Times (London)
“Engrossing.... A thoughtful, measured and mature look at our world today.... [McEwan’s] skill at weaving together suspense, psychological depth and beautiful prose makes him among Britain’s best.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A major event.... Saturday proceeds serenely into very different territory where the most secure existence is ringed by sinister possibilities.” —Time
“Thoroughly fascinating.... For sheer intelligence and skill, it’s hard to beat Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Impeccable.... Beautifully crafted.... Fluid, richly textured.... Engrossing.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Read this book.... On the level of the sentence, McEwan is smart, witty and insightful.... His writing astounds..... Saturday is almost too good to bear.” —The Times-Picayune
“Utterly enthralling.... Stunningly orderly and harmonious.” —The Seattle Times
“Magnificently imagined.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A brilliant work.... Astoundingly enjoyable.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“McEwan’s special achievement ... is not only to give his narrative ... near-hallucinatory clarity and verisimilitude, but also to make you realize that the world of his novel is our world. It’s a book of poignant insight into the temper of the times.... And it’s something rare and precious: a wise book.” —San Jose Mercury News
“Hypnotic.... Exquisitely detailed, rich and suspenseful, literate and surprisingly explosive.” —The Miami Herald
“McEwan’s sentences are perfect, and his novels are always powerful and intelligent.” —People
“Sober yet scintillating.... Lucidly shows us that civilization and culture and the life of the mind, fragile as they seemingly are, nonetheless have a resilience that can outlast barbarism.” —Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
“A magnificent new novel that captures both the comforts and the anxieties of the world we live in right now.” —Vogue
“The distinctive achievement of McEwan’s work has been to marry literary seriousness and ambition with a pace and momentum more commonly associated with genre fiction. He is the master clockmaker of novelists, piecing together cogs and wheels of his plots with unerring meticulousness.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Marvelous.... A magical book.... McEwan shows again the quiet brilliance of his prose and his insights.” —Detroit Free Press
“Captivating. . . . The prose is so precise and evocative the reader can ‘see’ the scenes unfolding. . . . [McEwan] is at the top of his game.” —The Denver Post
From the Back Cover
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. "From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Ian McEwan is the author of nine novels, including Amsterdam, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1998, and of Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the WHSmith Literary Award.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It’s not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He’s never done such a thing before, but he isn’t alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed – he always sleeps naked – feeling his full height, aware of his wife’s patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty. He has no idea what he’s doing out of bed: he has no need to relieve himself, nor is he disturbed by a dream or some element of the day before, or even by the state of the world. It’s as if, standing there in the darkness, he’s materialised out of nothing, fully formed, unencumbered. He doesn’t feel tired, despite the hour or his recent labours, nor is his conscience troubled by any recent case. In fact, he’s alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated. With no decision made, no motivation at all, he begins to move towards the nearest of the three bedroom windows and experiences such ease and lightness in his tread that he suspects at once he’s dreaming or sleepwalking. If it is the case, he’ll be disappointed. Dreams don’t interest him; that this should be real is a richer possibility. And he’s entirely himself, he is certain of it, and he knows that sleep is behind him: to know the difference between it and waking, to know the boundaries, is the essence of sanity.
The bedroom is large and uncluttered. As he glides across it with almost comic facility, the prospect of the experience ending saddens him briefly, then the thought is gone. He is by the centre window, pulling back the tall folding wooden shutters with care so as not to wake Rosalind. In this he’s selfish as well as solicitous. He doesn’t wish to be asked what he’s about – what answer could he give, and why relinquish this moment in the attempt? He opens the second shutter, letting it concertina into the casement, and quietly raises the sash window. It is many feet taller than him, but it slides easily upwards, hoisted by its concealed lead counterweight. His skin tightens as the February air pours in around him, but he isn’t troubled by the cold. From the second floor he faces the night, the city in its icy white light, the skeletal trees in the square, and thirty feet below, the black arrowhead railings like a row of spears. There’s a degree or two of frost and the air is clear. The streetlamp glare hasn’t quite obliterated all the stars; above the Regency façade on the other side of the square hang remnants of constellations in the southern sky. That particular façade is a reconstruction, a pastiche – wartime Fitzrovia took some hits from the Luftwaffe – and right behind is the Post Office Tower, municipal and seedy by day, but at night, half-concealed and decently illuminated, a valiant memorial to more optimistic days.
And now, what days are these? Baffled and fearful, he mostly thinks when he takes time from his weekly round to consider. But he doesn’t feel that now. He leans forwards, pressing his weight onto his palms against the sill, exulting in the emptiness and clarity of the scene. His vision – always good – seems to have sharpened. He sees the paving stone mica glistening in the pedestrianised square, pigeon excrement hardened by distance and cold into something almost beautiful, like a scattering of snow. He likes the symmetry of black cast-iron posts and their even darker shadows, and the lattice of cobbled gutters. The overfull litter baskets suggest abundance rather than squalor; the vacant benches set around the circular gardens look benignly expectant of their daily traffic – cheerful lunchtime office crowds, the solemn, studious boys from the Indian hostel, lovers in quiet raptures or crisis, the crepuscular drug dealers, the ruined old lady with her wild, haunting calls. Go away! she’ll shout for hours at a time, and squawk harshly, sounding like some marsh bird or zoo creature.
Standing here, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of façades, scaffolding and pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece – millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work. And the Perownes’ own corner, a triumph of congruent proportion; the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden – an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.
An habitual observer of his own moods, he wonders about this sustained, distorting euphoria. Perhaps down at the molecular level there’s been a chemical accident while he slept – something like a spilled tray of drinks, prompting dopamine-like receptors to initiate a kindly cascade of intracellular events; or it’s the prospect of a Saturday, or the paradoxical consequence of extreme tiredness. It’s true, he finished the week in a state of unusual depletion. He came home to an empty house, and lay in the bath with a book, content to be talking to no one. It was his literate, too literate daughter Daisy who sent the biography of Darwin which in turn has something to do with a Conrad novel she wants him to read and which he has yet to start – seafaring, however morally fraught, doesn’t much interest him. For some years now she’s been addressing what she believes is his astounding ignorance, guiding his literary education, scolding him for poor taste and insensitivity. She has a point – straight from school to medical school to the slavish hours of a junior doctor, then the total absorption of neurosurgery training spliced with committed fatherhood – for fifteen years he barely touched a non-medical book at all. On the other hand, he thinks he’s seen enough death, fear, courage and suffering to supply half a dozen literatures. Still, he submits to her reading lists – they’re his means of remaining in touch as she grows away from her family into unknowable womanhood in a suburb of Paris; tonight she’ll be home for the first time in six months – another cause for euphoria.
SATURDAY, brilliantly and convincingly read by Steven Crossley, is the lengthy reflection of neurosurgeon Dr. Henry Perwone, a complex man who considers his life with his wife, two talented adult children, and an immensely successful medical career. After the life-altering terrorist attacks on 9/11, he asks himself, "What does it all mean?" Listeners will appreciate Crossley's subtle vocal shadings and the great care he gives to the spoken word. Those familiar with Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY will find that book's echo here. Ultimately, this account of personal reexamination is not only sobering but is perhaps a wake-up call for many of us--a reminder of the necessity of recasting what one has previously deemed important and secure. L.C. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
