Found this at the neighborhood Salvation Army thrift store, and since I’d read several glowing reviews when it came out in ’05, I decided to take the plunge and read a contemporary novel by one of literature’s big names. Right off the bat I can’t recall when a novel has ever filled me with more resentment that Ian McEwan’s Saturday did. Some other reviewer referred to its “medical porn” (the protagonist is a brain surgeon) but the real porn has to do with wealth and cultural entitlement, which the hero and his family has in ludicrous abundance. As a reader, I tend to be a bit thick, but about halfway through I was wondering whether McEwan had written a brilliant parody of some sort. Get a load of these characters:

Henry Perowne: 48, highly-regarded neurosurgeon, diligent, hard-working, highly-skilled, far too busy to know much of anything about the arts, but far too generous in spirit to be a philistine. The deal is that he is too gainfully employed, too useful to the world, to let much leak in around the rubber seals of his life’s substantial hatches. Saturday is his day off, and there is a big old protest about the impending invasion of Iraq going on outside his house, so he gets time to maunder about terrorists and politics and getting older and stuff. He wakes up too early and happens to see from his window a plane go down in flames towards Heathrow. Throughout the book bits of newscasts follow this story – are they terrorists? Muslim or Christian? This gives the book, I guess, an undercurrent of contemporary fear but it always feels rather tacked-on. The story piddles out eventually, which is how such things go, so I applaud McEwan’s tact here.

Real drama is provided when Perowne crashes his Mercedes into three thugs in a BMW – they are about to beat him up when the good doctor correctly diagnosis the head thug (Baxter) with Huntington’s Chorea, which defuses the situation and humiliates the head thug. Then he plays a very detailed game of squash at the club with his anesthesiologist. He loses, but just barely, and mostly because the anesthesiologist cheats at the end, and because he is still upset by the mugging. Spoiler alert: the thugs come back later in the book…

Perown does not appear to be particularly handsome, thank God – his hands don’t look very surgeony – but even his ordinariness is couched in the usual novel hero terms: he is tall, rangy tall, not pear-shaped tall. His hair is thinning, but only thinning. He is beginning to go soft around the middle, but just a little. His joints ache, but just a tad.

Rosalind: Perowen’s wife, who he met 25 years before in the ER when she had an emergency operation to remove a (benign) pituitary tumor while she was in law school. Perowne was a resident (or whatever they’re called in the UK -- I notice his staff referred to him as “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”) and although he did not himself perform the heroic surgery, he got to swab her mouth with alcohol before and remove the stitches from inside her lip afterwards (pituitary surgery goes in through the nose – brilliantly described by McEwan, as were all the medical porn parts). Rosalind is tiny, almost child-sized, with a remarkable abundance of hair and saucer-sized green eyes. Yep, I’m not making that up. After brain surgery, she sat up in her bed, surrounded by heavy law tomes, her gargantuan wad of luxuriant chestnut (or honeysuckle or moonbeam I forget which) hair fanned out around her in a heavenly nimbus. Now, she is also a brilliant lawyer for a big newspaper (throughout the Saturday of the book, she is in some “emergency meeting at High Court”…on a Saturday, which is rather remarkable, I’d think). Whatever she does, it’s important and high-powered and McEwan gives a bit of clumsy set-up about how she loves to win cases but most loves it when her arguments nudge the legal system, and thus the world, a little closer to an ideal of truth and justice. Little of this slashing ambition is glimpsed in the novel, however. She’s a bit of a cipher, a perfect one to be sure, serving to show that Perowne, after years of marriage, still adores her, and wants to make love to only her, a fact he is self-conscious about, and yet faintly smug about as well. Oh yeah, like all toothsome, lithesome fictional females, she sleeps like a child, making a tiny bump under the sheets – no drool or sprawl. Despite all the description lavished on her to make her smart and powerful, she is the flattest of the characters, barely passing through with a whisper, even when she is actually in the scene (including when she is having sex). With a few tweaks, she could have been transformed into an unusually placid housecat, except for the having sex part (which I should mention, happens briefly, but tenderly, as soon as she wakes up, tactfully avoiding the problem of two people in their mid-forties having sex the very first thing in the morning, full bladders and foul breath being two hazards that come to mind…but then perhaps I reveal my own dismal deterioration by bringing this up). Despite their two children (see below), there is very little evidence that Perowne or his wife have ever really been parents, but in England perhaps that sort of thing is taken care of by the hired help. But there’s no hired help either – Perowne goes to the fishmongers and cooks up in considerable detail the monkfish (which cost as much as Perown’s first car, so we are told) and prawns and skate’s skeletons (for the stock) and other expensive stuff taken from our dying seas (Perowne reflects on this dying sea situation while paying up at the fishmonger’s). The fish stew is food porn of course – lots of culinary detail as set up for a really expensive, exquisite meal, hand-prepared by exceptional people who can be expected to fret some about global warming and terrorism. Perowne brings up wine from the cellar. There are two bottles of champagne in the ‘fridge.

Daisy: Perowne’s daughter, 23, and a poet living, apparently, off the family fortune (as all poets should be allowed to do). She is about to have her first book (of poems!) published by a prestigious firm (Faber & Faber or some such). As a poet exactly twice this character’s age, she filled me with sputtering rage at her success. But then McEwan felt obliged to provide us with bits of her verse. God, I love it when novelists take a whack at poetry: it’s just like prose except that you keep in the oven for an extra six hours (several actual bits (naughty bits) of Daisy’s verse are actually those of Craig Raines, acknowledged in the book). Rosalind has had a ton of lovers, so her father surmises from her poetry (one of which is about laundering the wet-spots out of the sheets after a lover has departed – a poem, of course, which won the Newdigate Prize, Oxford’s very prestigious undergrad prize). She is feisty and stubborn and constantly abrades her father for not being “cultural” enough – at age 14 she insisted on reading “The Metamorphosis” to her parents. Yeah, one of those girls. We all know one…oh, wait, no I don’t. Anyway, in young adulthood, she constantly bombards her father with books to expand his horizons, including, oddly, a biography of Charles Darwin…the good (great, fantastic, saintly) doctor doesn’t have enough time to read them because he has a job, but he is very good natured about the whole situation. According to information supplied by the author, these two engage in on-going fierce arguments and debates about life and culture, but the evidence provided is sketchy and not particularly convincing. She is of course petite and elfin and beautiful and etc.

Theo: Perowne’s son, 18, a preternaturally brilliant blues guitarist. He dropped out of school and within minutes he “accidentally” jammed with, I think Ron Wood and met Clapton (through a “master class”) and takes lessons from Jack Bruce who introduced him to Long John Baldry…Ry Crooder sent him a mash note from the audience on the back of a soggy beer coaster. I couldn’t believe how McEwan piled it on for Theo – to the extent that again, I suspected a pastiche, a joke. Theo, not surprisingly, is even more insufferable than his sister and even less plausible. I mean the kid is good, real good. At this tender age, he has mastered all of blues guitars many nuances, is an acknowledged maestro. Needless to say he is languorous and blandly “cool” in rich kid ways – trips to Brazil and wherever, and when he cooks his lunch, he whips up vegetables and figs and yoghurt in a bowl. Just like all the teenage boys I’ve ever met. He did drop out of school, which caused his parents some distress, and provides a hopeful moment for this reader that the Perowne family was going to descend into the plausible, but his success (remember, he is 18!) as a musician – a blues musician – is such that his parents are now really really darned proud of him… His strong guitarist’s forearms are employed heroically at the end of the book.

John Grammaticus: Perowne’s 70ish father-in-law. He is a drunk, which is very ably described by McEwan. However, he is also an embittered poet, famous, but not as famous (which is a big problem) as Andrew Motion, Heaney, etc. He lives in a French chateau somewhere in Imaginary Rich People France and has many lovers. Drunk, he provides the only comic relief in the book and he’s not very funny. His name comes from Shakespeare’s presumed source for Hamlet, Saxo Grammaticus, a medieval chronicler of Danish history. This name is shameless authorial preening for which McEwan should be fined stiffly. Anyway, Grammaticus turns Daisy on to poetry and is directly responsible for turning her into an insufferable, pretentious artiste. Later they have a falling out when he harshly criticizes her washing-the-sheets Newdigate prize poem. Perowne observes all of this mildly, gently reproaching himself for not being himself more inspirational to his daughter. He is the only actual defective human being in the Perowne family, but at the end he acts heroically and selflessly and so on.

Baxter: the head thug with Huntington’s Disease. He is described as looking somewhat simian. But of course. Of course. But intelligent though. Just disadvantaged. Of course. Of course.

Overall, I must say this is the most implausible and irritating cast of characters I have ever encountered in a non-genre novel. Stephen King, Philip K. Dick – anybody – would have bent all of them just a little. O but maybe such gods walk through this world, surgeons and federal reserve chairmen and district court judges and their spouses and children. But what a humorless lot – maybe one of the strategies of highly effective people is to discard humor. Perhaps it takes up too much time. The one American character, the cheating anesthesiologist is pointed out as being, like all Americans are, straight-shooting son-of-a-gun with a kind of hinted at potential for hilarity…and yet when you actually encounter him, he is nothing of the sort, really. Even drunk poet Grammaticus never gets funny when in his cups. The book’s other poet is no better – Daisy is throughout a humorless pain in the ass. But then novelists tend to do poets as ineptly as they do actual poems. Perhaps it is the lack of humour that creates such a film of implausibility over everything. The scenes where the characters interact (as opposed to where Perowne thinks deep thoughts internally) are very stiff (except the scenes in the hospital, which are by far the best, most plausible parts of the book). Daisy has been gone a long time, and is coming home that afternoon – Perowne, we are told, is very anxious to see her. When they meet, though, although McEwan skillfully explains the awkwardness of such reunions, never manages to capture anything particularly realistic in the dialog that would embody such awkwardness. It is novelist’s awkwardness, not human interaction awkwardness. The dialog is stiff as a soap opera’s most of the time…

I kept reading because it was all skillfully put together – as ludicrous as they are, once set up McEwan keeps them in place and then runs them through a tight-paced plot. Sort of like a genre novel put together by an old pro – which made me wonder whether there is really such a thing as a non-experimental “literary” novel anymore, for the plot is astoundingly ridiculous. Let me demonstrate. I won’t run through the whole thing, but the climax of the book is riveting and giddily absurd (spoiler alert) – Baxter the Gangster and a henchman breaks into the house are on the brink of mayhem and have gone so far as to make Daisy the daughter take off all her clothes and are about to rape her, perhaps, when the main thug sees her book of poems (in proofs). Baxter pauses to pick up the book and forces her to read one. Stay with me here – I am not making this up – the thug is actually delaying his act of rapine to listen to a poem. Her grandfather, the drunk old poet, who has just had his nose broken by one of the thugs, wisely signals to his granddaughter to not read one of her own crappy sex poems, but rather to recite Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (which she has memorized, of course – we had earlier been told that she has memorized huge swatches of Shakespeare and Milton and so forth, like all the young poets do these days). Fortunately for the Perowne family, this classic Matthew Arnold poem is so moving to Baxter, that he lets down his guard in a virtual swoon of rapturous aesthetic bliss. He is disarmed by Perowne and his son and suffers a skull fracture in the scuffle.

Three guesses as to which neurosurgeon gets to do brain surgery on Poetry-Loving, Huntington’s Disease-addled Gangster Baxter and save his life…. Really, the book’s plot is that ridiculous.

Only in England: of the two thugs perpetrating the break-in, only one of them, Baxter, is armed – with a knife. Not some big bad Bowie knife, or commando knife with a built-in knuckle-duster hilt – rather, Baxter’s knife is described as being “an old-fashioned French kitchen knife, with an orange wooden handle and curved blade.” That’s it – one rather quaint knife. How nice. The other thug, unpromisingly named Nigel, apparently has no weapon at all, which means three grown men and two women are being held at bay by a French kitchen knife. An old-fashioned French kitchen knife, which, I should add, Baxter keeps taking in and out of his pocket, leading one to believe it was not a particularly sharp old-fashioned French kitchen knife. I am not saying I would be Superman in such a situation, but there was something very courtly about the exchange, for despite the disrobing and near-rape there was a poetry reading and a French kitchen knife (and why a French kitchen knife? What happened to the grand sword-making tradition of England, Willkinson Steel and all that?). As for the poem, this idea that music (or in this case poetry) can calm the savage beast is an old one, an ancient fantasy dreamed up by bards and troubadours and still making the rounds in contemporary novels. Dream on, poetasters! It would’ve been more plausible had the thugs made Theo play his blues guitar – then I could see them being impressed by art. But a Matthew Arnold recitation? This book is daft, Nigel.

But it isn’t all bad, just mostly so. McEwan can be quite good at pity summations of character’s interactions. Perhaps the only truly interesting pairing is Perowne and his father-in-law, the drunk poet Grammaticus. Here is McEwan deftly summing up their relationship:

“Perowne keeps his distance, and Grammaticus is happy with the arrangement, and looks straight through his son-in-law to his daughter, to his grandchildren. The two men are superficially friendly and at bottom bored by each other. Perowne can’t see how poetry – rather occasional work it appears, like grape picking – can occupy a whole working life, or how such an edifice of reputation and self-regard can rest on so little, or why one should believe a drunk poet is different from any other drunk; while Grammaticus – Perowne’s guess – regards him as one more tradesman, an uncultured and tedious medic, a class of men and women he distrusts more as his dependency on it grows with age.” (p. 201).

Despite the riveting, ridiculous plot, and moments of plausible description, Saturday is one of those novels that reinforces my tendency to avoid novels. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but God, what a piffle it is. Everything’s too easy (the doctor’s entire life) or too hard (the thug about to mug him just happens to have what is about the worst disease imaginable, Huntington’s) or too silly (the plot, “Dover Beach,” the old-fashioned French kitchen knife, etc.). Some months ago I was going to read McEwan’s Atonement, but riffling through its pages, I came across some bits of dialog that scared me off with their stiffness and implausibility. I plan on keeping away.

Per i primi due terzi del libro mi sono annoiato. Aspetti e aspetti ma non succede mai niente e speri quasi che al protagonista accada qualcosa di orrendo. L'ultima parte del libro è interessante ma non mi ha stupito. Il mio primo McEwan. Ma continuerò

McEwan is a talented writer.

Sentences like these

Sunrise—generally a rural event, in cities a mere abstraction—is still an hour and a half away. The city’s appetite for Saturday work is robust.

“how each/ rose grew on a shark-infested stem“


If I were called in/ To construct a religion/ I should make use of water.”

The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they’re innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence

But then there’s the indulgence:

The blue shorts are bleached by patches of sweat that won’t wash out. Over a grey T-shirt he puts on an old cashmere jumper with moth-holes across the chest. Over the shorts, a tracksuit bottom, fastened with chandler’s cord at the waist. The white socks of prickly stretch towelling with yellow and pink bands at the top have something of the nursery about them. Unboxing them releases a homely aroma of the laundry. The squash shoes have a sharp smell, blending the synthetic with the animal, that reminds him of the court,

— that’s Henry getting ready to play squash

For a vertiginous moment Henry feels himself bound to the other man, as though on a seesaw with him, pinned to an axis that could tip them into each other’s life.

—that’s Henry making eye contact with a bum

Baxter is entirely airborne, suspended in time, looking directly at Henry with an expression, not so much of terror, as dismay. And Henry thinks he sees in the wide brown eyes a sorrowful accusation of betrayal. He, Henry Perowne, possesses so much—the work, money, status, the home, above all, the family

—most indulgently, this is Henry noting the man who nearly killed his family as he plummets down the stairs

This self reflection, this analysis by paralysis is not just the character but in a whole cohort of what is considered serious literature, and it’s not good.

Not good because in a fraught moment of your life as you fight off an attacker, you aren’t measuring your life against his, your life path against his, your socio-economic path against his.

But the character is engaging, the writing precise, and it’s hard to be a naysayer when McEwan writes gems like these

“he’s a king, he’s vast, accommodating, immune, he’ll say yes to any plan that has kindness and warmth at its heart”

A wonderful encapsulation or what every man should desire.

This is my seventh from Ian McEwan. I feel like I am reading all his works in search of the greatness that I only seem to find in some of them (Atonement & Enduring Love so far). The others fall short in various lengths for varying reasons, but a few times now it has been primarily for the "So What?" exasperation the end of the novel left me with. That would be the case here.

Saturday is a day in the life (Yes, a Saturday) for renown neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. We follow him beginning in the very early hours where he awakens seemingly randomly in the middle of the night, coincidentally right on time to see a tragic flight into Heathrow. So, the synopsis hints at some significant event that completely alters his day. Let me say right now that this is misleading in that the event it refers to does not occur until about 3/4 way through, seems far less dramatic than the reader is led to believe, and- in one word- anticlimactic. Now where was I? Right, the tragic Heathrow plane. Which is one of many events that really mean, well, nothing. Maybe this is McEwan's point, that so many things we feel are so important are really things that amount to nothing a mere twenty four hours later. If so, well done. But I still was less than impressed with the novel.

Following his sighting in the early morning, Perowne's errands lead us to meet a few of his friends and/or neurosurgeon colleagues, his mother whom is losing her memory, his lawyer wife, his Blues playing musician son, his about to be published Poet daughter, & his father-in-law alcoholic Poet... Intertwined through this we follow Perowne as he prepares ingredients for dinner that night, social calls, gets into a car accident, etcetera. At the end of the day, his immediate family plus father-in-law are together for a sort of reunion dinner when Baxter, the man he was in the accident with (& did not take blame as Baxter felt he ought to have) invites himself over. Suffering from the incurable, terminal, degenerative Huntington's, he is a man in pain, even delusional at times, with nothing to lose. He begins threatening various members of Perowne's family, swaying between lucidity & true threat. He is eventually outnumbered by Henry and his son, who together throw Baxter down the stairs. Perowne then proceeds to, merely hours later, perform a highly complex neurosurgical procedure in order to save this man's life. The novel ends with Perowne about to convince his family not to press charges, as he feels Baxter is deserving of a few years of freedom before Huntington's takes him.

So, yes, Saturday does have some insightful messages for the reader. McEwan writes with prose that can completely immerse the reader. However, the way this amazing mastery of words was used did not satisfy me. At times it was more than enough; other times more detail would have been nice. A simple trip through an alley that results in the accident took twenty pages. The pacing was not there for me. Again, left with an anticlimactic, "So What" that translated into me wishing I had read something else.

(Book 2 from 1001 books) - Saturday, Ian McEwan

The book, published in February 2005 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and in April in the United States, was critically and commercially successful. Critics noted McEwan's elegant prose, careful dissection of daily life, and interwoven themes. It won the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It has been translated into eight languages.

Saturday (2005) is a novel by Ian McEwan set in Fitzrovia, London, on Saturday, 15 February 2003, as a large demonstration is taking place against the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq. The protagonist, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon, has planned a series of chores and pleasures culminating in a family dinner in the evening.

As he goes about his day, he ponders the meaning of the protest and the problems that inspired it; however, the day is disrupted by an encounter with a violent, troubled man. To understand his character's world-view, McEwan spent time with a neurosurgeon.

The novel explores one's engagement with the modern world and the meaning of existence in it. The main character, though outwardly successful, still struggles to understand meaning in his life, exploring personal satisfaction in the post-modern, developed world. Though intelligent and well read, Perowne feels he has little influence over political events.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه دسامبر سال2010میلادی

عنوان: شنبه؛ نویسنده: ایان (یان) مک ایوان (مک یوون)؛ مترجم: مصطفی مفیدی؛ تهران، نشر نیلوفر؛ سال1395؛ در374ص؛ شابک9789644486579؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده21م

نسخه انگلیسی کتاب را خواندم، داستانی در باره یورش «امریکا» به کشور «عراق» در سال2003میلادی است

کتاب شنبه، رمانی استادانه است، که داستانش در یکروز از ماه فوریه ی سال2003میلادی، رخ میدهد؛ «هنری پرون»، مردی خوشبخت است؛ یک جراح مغز و اعصاب موفق، که رابطه ی بسیار خوبی، با همسر، و فرزندانش دارد؛ «هنری»، از روز تعطیل خود در خانه ی بزرگش، در مرکز «لندن» لذت میبرد، و همان آرامشی را تجربه میکند، که در اتاق عمل بیمارستانها، هماره با او همراهست؛ گرچه جهان خارج از بیمارستان، خیلی آرام، و قابل پیش بینی نیست؛ جنگ با «عراق»، در پیش بوده، و از زمان حملات به «نیویورک»، و «واشنگتن»، در دو سال پیش، ناامیدی و بدبینی گسترده ای، جامعه را فراگرفته است؛ زندگی «پرون» در صبح همین شنبه ی ویژه، دگرگون و غیرعادی میشود؛ او در بامداد، پس از دیدن چیزی باور نکردنی در آسمان، به همراه همکارش، به بازی «اسکواش» روزانه ی خویش میرود، و تلاش میکند، تا از صدها هزار تظاهر کننده ی معترض به جنگ، دوری کند؛ رخدادی کوچک برای ماشین، او را وادار به رودررویی، با خلافکاری خرده پا، میکند؛ تشخیص پزشکی «پرون»، اینست که خلافکار از مشکلاتی ژرف، و پیچیده رنج میبرد، اما خلافکار باور دارد، که «پرون» او را کوچک شمرده، و همین، باعث به وجود آمدن پیامدهای باورنکردنی و خشونت آمیز میشود؛ «پرون»، در روزی که همانند هیچ کدام از روزهای پیشین عمرش نیست، باید برای زنده نگاه داشتن خانواده اش، همه ی مهارتهای خویش را به کار گیرد؛ و ...؛

نقل از متن: (وقتی هیچ عواقبی در کار نباشد، اشتباه کردن فقط یک انحراف کوچک است)؛

نقل از متن(مزیت خواب و بیدار بودن، کاوشی ایمن در حواشی ذهن است)؛

نقل از متن: (او دید که هیچ کس واقعا صاحب چیزی نیست؛ همه چیز، اجاره ای یا قرضی است؛ اموالمان بیشتر از ما زندگی میکنند و درنهایت، آنها را ترک خواهیم کرد)؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 16/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 15/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

'There is grandeur in this view of life...'

This eighth book in my current Ian McEwan binge is the one I have now purchased just after reading a digital copy. (All the others have been library copies.) The reason being that not only is this story of one day in the life of a neurosurgeon so brilliant and moving that it reduced me to a sweaty puddle, but reading a single line of McEwan's narrative lights a fire in my writer brain. He reminds me about full-sensory life and how to express it—color, heat/cold, smell, etc.—evoking the words of his thirteen-year-old Atonement protagonist, Briony Tallis, who claims that she can describe anything; McEwan can, in such original language that it’s mesmerizing. Also, in my ongoing study of his narrative—and I’m definitely reading as a student—with this book I began to see the minute parts: how he uses literal movement (journeys, panoramic views, even travel from room to room of a house) to convey what would otherwise be stagnant inner thoughts and dialogue. I’d been wondering why what drives me to abandon books (excessive inner dialogue) has the opposite effect on me with McEwan’s work, and I think the secret is movement. He has figured out how to create so much of it that what would otherwise feel inert vibrates on the ride. And the rhythm of the literal movement in journey, punctuated by background or informative narrative is impeccable; it never drags; it's as if a metronome is marking the edges between the different uses of narratives and he never goes beyond a reader's organic attention span, and slowly, fearlessly he builds the book, escalating from narrative to heart-pounding pure action.

There are only a few writers’ books that inspire me this way. If I read one piece in n  The Stories of John Cheevern, I’m fired up for whatever I’m working on. Same with a chapter of my thrice-read copy of John Williams’s n  Stonern. Percival Everett has recently joined this club, especially with his books n  I Am Not Sidney Poitiern and n  Erasuren. And, prior to finishing this book, my only question with McEwan was which of his literary symphonies to buy. n  Atonementn, n  On Chesil Beachn, and n  The Children Actn are probably better plots, and n  Nutshelln is a hilarious animal unlike any of his other literary offspring, but I've purchased Saturday for the inspiration impact of a single sentence or paragraph and its palpable pulsating humanity.

11/26/19 Update on reading a second time

It's still wonderful. However . . .

Because I knew what was coming later in the book, I made a special effort to visualize the minutely described house the neurosurgeon lives in; this is important information (and there is a reason for the detailed, almost transcendent fascination with life details, which you may or may not realize after you finish the book). During my first reading I was confused by the house layout.

Why?

Because I live in a brownstone apartment building in New York City. It is a walk-up and I live on the top floor. When you walk into my building, you are on the first floor, and you then must hike up four flights of stairs that everybody who has ever visited me has complained about, claiming I live in the stratosphere, and, after eying my dog and querying how many times a day I do this, responding "How on earth do you do this?" and "This must be the reason for your phenomenally good health but I could never in a million years live this way because the climb just about killed me."

But I am losing my point. My point is that there are five floors starting with the ground floor, which is also the first floor. Mr. McEwan calls the ground floor "the ground floor" where the front door to the neurosurgeon's house is, and subsequently there is a set of down stairs to a kitchen and maybe a library although I may have misplaced that (I really should draw this) and perhaps I'm wrong and the library is upstairs . . . which brings me to the first flight up (which, if the kitchen is downstairs, is actually the second flight) to what all sane people would call the second floor. But in this book it is sometimes is called the first floor. Followed by a floor, which by Mr. McE's logic would be the second floor, but is in fact the third floor where the master bedroom is. Or maybe the master is on the second floor, wherever that is, and the son's bedroom is on the real third floor.

As you can see, I am still confused about the architecture of the damned house. Suffice it to say the house has three floors . . . or maybe more, including the kitchen, which is finally identified on page 153 as the "basement kitchen!" In short, I really think there should be an architectural rendering included.

But now to the really important stuff: On a second reading, I'm even more moved by the perfection of having a neurosurgeon—who throughout the book makes seemingly random yet transcendent observations about why we humans do what we do and believe what we choose—live a whole-life human drama, complete with numinous glimpses of a Bigger Reality, in one day. (The post-9/11 pre-Iraq war tumultuous political environment makes this a timely book for the chaos and upset of right now.) And finally, I was truly devastated this time around, deeply understanding McEwan's point—that our only purpose is love as we struggle "here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night." ("Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, which is so well used in this magnificent book.)

Spoiler question to others who have read this book: Does Henry Perowne die at the end? The first time I read this book, I believed the final lines meant that he did: "There's always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there's only this. And at last, faintly, falling: this day is over." I believed that the bruise on Perowne's chest was a sign of something awful that kills him. This second time that I read the book, I think I was wrong. What do you think?

McEwan is one of my favourite authors and that is why this review is so painful for me, trust me. I put a lot of effort to like this book and understand it, to read between the lines, find a hidden meaning. But I failed to comprehend it. It’s meaningless and it frustrates me that I don’t know what message McEwan was trying to send.

Saturday is set in 2003, two years after the 9/11 attacks and in the middle of Iraq invasion. It presents a single day in narrator’s life. Harry has a well-paid job that he loves, perfect wife and two flawless children that he adores. Needless to say they live a comfortable life with a lot of benefits that higher class serves. The plot consists of endless descriptions of how awesome and successful characters are. Harry’s wife is a beautiful lawyer who has no negative traits, his son is a handsome and talented blues musician, and his beautiful daughter Daisy is a published poet; The only plot line I cared about was Daisy’s relationship with her grandfather, and even that was underdeveloped.

I can't believe I stumbled upon a McEwan book that I genuinely don't like. The writing is compelling, like always, but the plot is messy. The novel has as low start. I guess that with McEwan it’s either hit or a miss. Even when things actually happened, they were narrated along with the protagonist's distracting thoughts. This could’ve been easily a powerful short story. Sadly, there is nothing controversial or thought-provoking in this novel. It even has an americanised ending. I guess this is one of the reasons I’m not fond of the novel. The problem is that I’m just used to problematic topics in McEwan’s novels.

For 50 pages, the protagonist talks about how much he adores his wife, it was unbearable. His life is too perfect. Supposedly, Henry is most gifted brain surgeon of his generation who plays squash and owns an expensive car. How could I connect with the character that has a personality of a Barbie? There was no conflict, nothing that seeks resolution.

Amsterdam’da Düello’dan sonra oldukça zayıf geldi bu romanı. Basit bir konuya neden iliştirildiği anlaşılmayan Irak’a müdahale konusu sırıtıyor. Sanki Irak işgalini destekler bir tutum var. İlk on sayfası çok gereksiz nöroşirurji bilgileri ile dolu üstelik yoğun tıbbi terimlerle süslenmiş. Bir on sayfası squash maçını anlatıyor yine gereksiz ayrıntılarla. Sona doğru bir beyin ameliyatına da on sayfa ayrılmış. Hakkını yemeyelim tüm tıbbi deyim ve anlatımlar doğru, yazar bu konuda emek vermiş. Sonuçta akıcılığı olmayan basit bir hikayeyi sarıp sarmalayan ilgisiz yavan anlatımlarla kitap sonlanıyor.

"There's grandeur in this view of life."
I have always admired poets that turn the mundane into the extraordinary. Well, McEwan turns the extraordinary into the mundane. Major events occur on this Saturday in the life of Henry Perowne, and while there are tense moments of suspense for the reader, most of the book reads as if its subject were every single normal Saturday in the life of one neurosurgeon in London.
McEwan's descriptions of neurosurgery and Perowne's thoughts as reflected in the narrative, focalized on Perowne, are dry, purely descriptive, not at all illustrative, yet the narrative in between is purely illustrative, evocative, and poetic. It's interesting because a major theme in the book is the contrast between the realist and the artist. Perowne's thoughts are those of the neurosurgeon, but by interjecting a poetic view of that which surrounds Perowne, McEwan reminds us that there is art in life, whether we think it or not.
A reviewer from Esquire, cited on the back of the book, compares McEwan to Jane Austen because of McEwan's "psychological astuteness." I fail to see the connection between the two authors. Instead, McEwan reminds me of Virginia Woolfe, especially because like Mrs. Dalloway, Saturday covers the events of one day that seems banal even though major changes occur for the characters. In fact, with its flashbacks at the appropriate times, its emphasis on war, and its "zoom-in/zoom-out" narrative technique, Saturday is very much like Mrs. Dalloway, and if anyone is "psychologically astute," it's Virginia Woolfe. Even the stream of consciousness points to her understanding of the way our minds work, and because Saturday is mostly written in the present tense, it has the same immediacy to it, the same feeling of putting the reader in the character's place, as Woolfe's technique in Mrs. Dalloway has.
Obviously, I admire McEwan. Atonement is one of my favorite books. I admire his artistry and the care that he puts into his work, the subtle messages that he sends to his readers in subtle yet beautiful ways. I highly recommend this author, and I certainly recommend this book.

There’s something mesmerizing about Ian McEwan’s writing which results in my having a peculiar kind of blind spot when it comes to his stories. No matter how ordinary they are; no matter how unremarkable they appear at first sight, or how construed they clearly are, I am helplessly drawn into the universe of his prose. There’s some kind of stylistic vortex that just sucks me in.

As in many of his novels, the plot hinges on one event, though in this novel it might be two: first, the protagonist, Henry Perowne, sees a burning airplane in the middle of the night – a symbol, apparently, of the post 9/11 world that we live in. Second, he has a chance encounter with a dubious character which sets off a chain of events, although on a meta-level, that event in itself is somehow connected with the first (though it’s not entirely clear to me how), as are subsequent events.

Henry Perowne is a neurosurgeon at a London hospital. He lives on a leafy street in Fitzrovia, the part of London that houses Bloomsbury, which is surely no coincidence. McEwan himself lived there until a few years ago, and so did Virginia Woolf. Henry’s Saturday – which includes the viewing of the plane, the incident with the stranger, a squash game which we hear about in great detail, a family dinner, an operation, the minutiae of which we are likewise treated to – is somehow reminiscent of (possibly inspired by?) Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. D, too, stays within a few blocks of her own home as she meanders through the streets of London and records every little thing that she gazes at – all in just one day. She, too, is an upper-middle class Londoner, though Henry Perowne seems more satisfied with his lot in life than she does. His philosophizing meanderings, however, are as labyrinthine as hers but belong, of course, to a different era. (Another reviewer, though negative about the novel, has pointed out that McEwan’s character study seems inspired by Henry James, which is a good and plausible observation; McEwan’s influences, according to himself, include both Woolf and James. No doubt there are other references in the novel that I’ve failed to pick up on).

Few of McEwan’s novels are as earth-shattering as Atonement, my first and favourite of his novels, and on one level I wasn’t terribly interested in Henry Perowne’s perfect life and perfect family. And yet the novel has that certain je ne sais quoi that makes me stop and wonder about things both during and after the reading. Perhaps it is due to the way in which McEwan notices and portrays people and things in the world, the way in which he zooms in on and draws out little incidents in his near perfect prose. On the surface it is simply about a day in the life of Perowne, but it becomes emblematic of modern life (in the upper-middle classes) with its antagonists and protagonists, its small tragedies and heroic acts, its ugliness and its beauty, its fears and its hopes. I have to say, though, that especially the happier parts of these equations characterized Henry Perowne’s life. Unlike many reviewers in here, however, I didn’t have a problem with that; it was a slice of a life, and they come in all shapes and sizes.

“…here as on a darkling plain”

Freud, I think, said once that the man’s main objective in life, the pursuit of happiness, is prevented by at least one of the following factors: his own body, the external world and the relationships with the others. Family, which could be his refuge and personal heaven is continuously threatened by a society that cannot permit isolation which would lead to its extinction.

This appears to be the theme of Saturday: the frailty of human happiness, permanently challenged by the roaring chaos of the world. And the key to this interpretation is offered by the quotes that open and end the novel: the first, from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, is Herzog’s image of a helpless mankind controlled by a master puppeteer that pulls infinite strings provided by science, politics, psychology and so on; the second, from Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, is the fragility of the couple who mistakes for friendship and security the aggressive indifference of the world:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In this wearisome world wakes up Henry Perowne on a Saturday morning, at dawn, with a curious mixture of euphoria and anxiety and a subconscious fear of punishment for the happiness he was granted by appeasing the two gods that society usually uses to keep the individuals in check: Ananke and Eros, that is, his work and his love. He has the perfect family, with a wife he is, after twenty years, still deeply in love with, and two amazing children (not so children anymore), beautiful and talented. He has a rewarding job, as a brilliant neurosurgeon, and a beautiful home he sometimes feels guilty about. Looking through the window, he has, at first, the same false impression of security in a perfect world world as the couple in Arnold’s poem. London (the leitmotiv of the City as an alluring trap reminded me of Henry Miller’s Paris) unfolds in front of his eyes in full agreement with the whole universe, with streetlamps that look like stars and bird shit that looks like snowflakes:

He sees the paving stone mica glistening in the pedestrianized square, pigeon excrement hardened by distance and cold into something almost beautiful, like a scattering of snow.

This quiet harmony is suddenly disturbed by the apparition of a plane in flames, which recalls the terrors of the modern society, from grim accidents to terrorist attacks (it is less than two years after 9/11). Whether the destruction of the aircraft was fortuitous or deliberate proves to be irrelevant, since it leads to the same conclusion, that there is no haven, no safe place in the entire world as Henry will become increasingly aware as Saturday progresses and the dreamlike image of the dawn becomes more and more nightmarish, culminating with the invasion of his privacy and the murder attempt of his entire family.

Many a critic observed that this book is different from what McEwan got us used with – maybe because it allures the reader with a certain sense of normality – no eerie characters or gory details here, but is it? Yes, the tension is more subtle in here, but the idea that the mankind is entitled only to a transitory happiness grows gradually, from an almost imperceptible uneasiness to a quiet despair.

To fight this aggressive intrusion, two weapons are provided, either by the hero or his family, and both prove partially ineffective: science and art.

The reductionism, of which Henry Perowne is a firm believer, is a philosophy relying on, so to speak, scientific fatalism: from this point of view almost everything in the human behaviour can be explained by the genetic biology. The hero is convinced that his moods are dictated by some “chemical accident while he slept”, and his fidelity is less fed by the love for his wife than by his character traits which programmed him to value stability and familiarity instead of sexual adventure, given that the entire human behaviour is recorded in the genes (“it’s down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules”). With the help of this knowledge he avoids an assault in the morning – by rapidly diagnosing a degenerative disease at one of the aggressors, Baxter, that is partially responsible for his actions and by promising professional help. The same knowledge will serve him a second time, in a more dramatic situation, when his entire family is in danger. However, both events reveal the limitations of the powers of the reason, and the washing Henry performs after operating on the same Baxter is a cathartic gesture – a last attempt to stop the invasion and destruction of his happiness:

He takes a shower to wash away the sweat of concentration and all traces of the hospital – he imagines fine bone dust from Baxter’s skull lodged in the pores of his forehead – and soaps himself vigorously.

The other way to hold out against the insanity of the world is art. Art can also serve as explanation and shield, with its illusion of beauty and universality, of a microcosm holding the macrocosm. Art can and will remove the knife from Rosalind’s throat, prevent the rape of Daisy and even provide hope for the criminal. Nevertheless Art is not that deus ex machina that brings the climax to an improbable denouement in “a faintly preposterous episode” as Zoe Heller, in her New York Times review seems to think. Art is only a form of expression, a transitory epiphany, an ephemeral acknowledgement that victim and assassin can catch together a glimpse of beauty:

Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live.

However, relief is once again short-lived and the powers of emotion, like those of reason, are temporary too, a desecrated revelation that will only delay the end. With the foreboding of a gruesome outcome, like a bomb waiting to fall (a foreboding of the author, too, when you think of the terrorist attacks in London 2005), an exhausted Henry reaches his bed at dawn, after a day long as a lifetime, holding his wife in an unconscious re-enacting of the androgyne being, just before the severing.