3.5 stars or 7/10. Pretty good
This was a well written book, as always by Ian McEwan, and there was a lot to like. As the title suggests, the book is contained within one eventful day in the busy life of a middle-aged neurosurgeon living in Central London. Set soon after the events of September 11, England is preparing to invade Iraq, sparking massive anti-war protests in London. This book captures the mood of those times very well, and the protagonists ambivalence about the war on terror, as well as his vague feeling of discontent with the world mirrors the anxiety of the first world who live in fear of a terrorist attack. A chance encounter with a young thug in the street (who reminds me a little of Pinky from Graham Greene's Brighton Rock) becomes violent, and sets in course a chain of events that threatens his loved ones, whole existence and way of life, which is in essence an allegory for the greater world events playing out at the same time
McEwan has done his research, and gets the medical details right, with realistic descriptions of surgical, anaesthetics and emergency procedures and culture
The main flaw in this book for me was the resolution. It builds and builds to what is looking like a spectacular fall for our character, but we are left with, at the end of the day (Saturday), what feels like an incomplete story
Still, an engrossing and well crafted book. Recommended

This wasn’t my favorite Ian McEwan. Admittedly there were very valid points in some of the negative reviews. But I’m partial regarding to McEwan--his mesmerizing prose, particularly his superb interpretation of music (e.g. jazz/blues in this book and modern classical in Amsterdam) woke up all my senses.

Oh dear this was a real struggle. To be fair, 2 stars is a little generous.

McEwan, spent so much time describing the minutiae of pretty much every scene. At first, I was absorbed but as I persisted throughout the book - it became wearing. A game of squash (yes squash) was described shot by shot over a half a dozen pages. Too much Ian!

This is McEwan (one of my favourites) at his tangential best. A tedious effort.

2 Stars

I hated this book. He's a great writer but this was pure bullshit. The best doctor in London married to the best lawyer in London, their kids a world class guitarist and a world class poet, the grandfather a world class poet too and even the goddamn grandmother was a channel swimmer. Isn't there one damn slacker in the whole group? Just one fat daughter who dated a criminal amputee and worked at the 7-11? please? I believed this book for a fast 2.5 seconds. Every punch is pulled. I wanted the crap beaten out of that doctor, not fast talking his say out of it. No permanent damage anywhere. I'd have given it one star but for the writing itself.

There were few pleasures for me in this quite ridiculous story but it did confirm my view that McEuan's novels are indeed as absurd as I had suspected after reading Enduring Love. I found the sections about neurosurgery interesting and well researched and the writing was elegant enough to encourage me to finish it even though I was tired of the continual air of menace that hung over the story from the beginning.

I'm still a little circumspect towards McEwan since my last experience, but fortunately I didn't find Saturday as objectionable. There were certainly still contrived plot elements, unrealistic characters, and very awkward passages, but nothing as egregious as Amsterdam. What I enjoy about McEwan's writing is his exploration of fear. He doesn't shy away from placing his characters in genuinely terrifying situations.

The main weakness of Saturday is the lack of focus in the composition. There is constant and unnecessary digression into backstory and medical detail, which frequently disrupts the flow of the work, interrupting even critical moments of tension or action. McEwan seems at times to be unsure of the type of novel he is writing. The novel tries to be both literary and thrilling, but the abrupt changes in voice and tone are awkward.

But the novel is fundamentally a parable, and it really works best when interpreted as such. The privileged status of the Perownes, and the terrifying threats they face to their safety, act as obvious analogues for the West itself. Through this analogy, the novel explores some interesting ideas about culpability; the blamelessness of the underlying causes that compel people to violence. The novel takes a sympathetic and optimistic view of the problems of terrorism, and seems to indicate that compassion and tolerance, not hatred and revenge, are the ways to move forward.

Though the ideas that Saturday explores are no longer timely, they are still relevant. And though the execution was lacking, I thought the overall concept was sound, and I found myself enjoying many parts of this novel.

Ah yes, the pleasure of finishing a novel close to my heart. It’s hit or miss with McEwan for me, however he has proved again to be one of my favourite authors.

This novel was a pleasure to listen to. It tells the events of one day in Henry Perowne’s life, Saturday, February 15, 2003 to be more exact. The day starts before dawn, when the narrator wakes up agitated. When he looks out the window, he sees a plane who seems to be on fire. From there, he starts thinking about 911 and its aftermath, how it changed his and other people’s sense of security. There will be some returning to that event during the day. Also, there will be a lot of discussion regarding the entering of troops in Iraq and the protests in London against it. Henry is a successful neurosurgeon, he has a wife he loves and two grown children with prospects for the future. He is content and does not want anything to change. However, the events of that day will question his safe existence in ways he could not have anticipated. When he has a small car accident, he meets Baxter, an aggressive young man who seems to be suffering from a disease. This encounter will have more meaning than initially expected.

McEwan is an excellent storyteller, he can go on and on about a subject that holds no interest to me, such as a squash game, and I listen to his words fascinated. Most of his books start quite quietly, you do not really understand what the point of the story is going to be at first. However, there is an air of menace and you expect that the ending will hit you in the head. And it does. Every damn time. The journey there can be more or less pleasant but something will happen, that is certain. I was not disappointed this time either.
I am not sure if I liked this so much because I sympathized with the main character. I could easily see myself in his shoes, I had many of his thoughts. Yes, I even got mad when I was losing a game of Squash, as he did. Not that I played long enough to start winning. Anyways, I was there, inside the story. Another aspect which attracted me were the similarities I was seeing between Baxter and Pinkie from Brighton Rock, a novel I read in December. When I was perusing other reviews, I saw that I was not the only one who spotted the resemblance but I was even more surprised that it happened to read those books so close together. Fionnuala, I always think of you when these coincidences happen.

Other books by McEwan:

Nutshell *****
On Chesil Beach*****
Amsterdam***
Machines Like Me ***
Lessons DNF

My Purple Scented Novel**** - short story

Eine etwas betuliche Übersetzung, die nicht immer elegant oder präzise erscheint, hat mir den Start in diesen Roman erschwert. Auch die mitunter aufblitzende Selbstgerechtigkeit des Protagonisten, eine Art Fishing for Compliments für seine Taten und Anschauungen, hat mich zu Beginn gestört.

Doch die Geschichte eines Tages im Leben des Neurochirurgen Henry Perowne entwickelt dann eine solche Dynamik, dass ich begeistert und gefesselt weiterlesen musste. Sowohl die besonderen, spannenden Umstände dieses einen Tages wie auch die Familienvorgeschichten ergeben eine wunderbare Erzählung, die ihre Energie gekonnt zwischen der persönlichen, beruflichen und politischen Ebene verteilt und mir schöne Lesestunden beschert hat.
McEwans (oder Perownes) islamkritische Überlegungen in diesem Buch befremden zunächst, lesen sich vor dem Hintergrund des möglichen Irakkriegs aber auch wie ein empörter Aufschrei gegen die Menschenrechtsverletzungen im Irak.
Die größte Stärke des Buchs liegt in meinen Augen in der detaillierten Behandlung des menschlichen Gehirns als Zentralthema. Es wird deutlich, dass das Hirn weder rein materiell noch rein ideell gefasst werden kann. Dieses ein Kilo schwere, wabbelige Organ ist das größte Wunder des Menschen, gerade weil es so fragil und auch so rätselhaft in seiner Funktionsweise ist. Irgendwo zwischen Operationstisch, Liebe und Kunstgenuss liegt das Geheimnis dieses Organs.

Wenngleich die elaborierte Erzählstimme eines wohlhabenden, gebildeten, einflussreichen, selbstsicheren Mannes ab und zu meine Nerven strapazierte, etwa wenn Perowne über Mitmenschen apodiktische (Vor-)Urteile trifft, und obwohl ich vermute, dass die Übersetzung dem Original nicht immer gerecht wird, muss ich betonen, dass Ian McEwen ein hervorragender Stilist ist. Seine Beschreibungen der Hirn-Ops gehen auch dem Leser unter die Haut, die Ektase beim Hören von Musik ist so begeisternd beschrieben wie die Schilderung der demenzkranken Mutter beklemmend.
2022 wird mit Sicherheit den einen oder anderen McEwan zeitigen. Den Zementgarten möchte ich gerne wiederentdecken.

An Extraordinary Day

An extraordinary day? When successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne looks out of the window of his London townhouse in the small hours of Saturday morning, he sees something far from ordinary. This turns out to have a simpler explanation than he thought, but coupled with the tension as Britain gears up for the Iraq invasion, it sets up a heightened awareness that colors all the normal events of the rest of his day—shopping, cooking, a squash game with a colleague, time spent with various members of his family—so that they become a kind of meditation on strength and appeasement, arrogance and responsibility, love and estrangement, cause and effect. The various threads of Perowne's day come together in a violent scene later that night in an authorial juggling feat such we have come to expect of McEwan, but which is nonethless satisfying on many different levels. All the same, the real joy of the book may not be in its extraordinary moments but in its ordinary ones.

I seldom find that McEwan's endings live up to the promise of his exposition and development; they tend towards melodrama as in Amsterdam, or literary legerdemain as in Atonement. There are elements of both here, though both are muted by comparison with his earlier books. At the same time, the author depends on the ending here more than in any other of his books that I have read, for the greater part of the novel is virtually plotless, and the separate events in it are connected more by the coincidence of following on each other in Perowne's datebook than by any chain of cause and effect; the ending is needed, therefore, to give everything else a larger meaning and focus. Perowne, among other things, is shown as an enthusiastic cook, and McEwan writes in much the same way. Each ingredient of the dish is prepared in turn and then set aside, to be combined in a feat of virtuosic flair at the very end. Even as we recognize his method (which perhaps shades our enthusiasm), we cannot help applaud his technique.

Besides, novels do not have to rely on roller-coaster rides of headlong events; they are also journeys into the mind. And Henry Perowne's mind, as McEwan reveals it, is more fascinating and multi-faceted than with any other of his characters. The world of medicine and science has featured in several other McEwan novels, but never with the wealth of detail given here, so that one sees through Perowne's eyes and shares his skills. McEwan's love of music, seen for example in Amsterdam, comes through in his pitch-perfect evocation not only of Perowne's classical sensitivities, but also the bond he shares with his blues-musician son, Theo. Perowne's bond with his elder child, Daisy, is equally close and equally tense: he argues with her about politics, she tries to introduce him to literature (she is a poet). These is a small false note here, however, in that a plot element turns upon Perowne's ignorance of a well-known poem (Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”), which seems inconceivable given the fineness of his tuning in other respects; but it is a small point, easily forgiven.

Clearly, this book was written in the shadow of 9/11. The question of violence and how to respond to it resonates throughout, and politics form the background to both the time and the story. Yet the focus of the book is personal and ethical rather than political, and this is McEwan's greatest strength. About a quarter way into the story, there is a description of a hard-fought squash game which qualifies as one of those extraordinary set-pieces one encounters in great novels. All the themes of the book are present in it, but they are brought down to human terms, and described with the precision of a surgeon and the eye of a sports writer. With writing like this, quibbles become irrelevant.

In the beginning, I didn't really know what I was getting into. Luckily for me, Saturday definitely flies by. It's a pretty short book but it's filled with a lot of characters and some action. In it, you will meet Henry Perowne. Don't ask me how to pronounce his last name because I will butcher it until the day I die.

He is a neurosurgeon who gets into an accident on his day off. From this little action, so much happens afterwards. It involves his entire family and it will eventually become a hot and confusing mess. Interestingly enough, it just proves how one thing can switch everything up. The small things tend to matter and I kind of liked how this one situation sort of blew up within the family.

Other than that, it was an okay book that had some boring moments. I kind of wish it was a bit longer because then those boring moments probably wouldn't be there. It could just me and my opinion though.

Having enjoyed other McEwan novels, this one was disappointing. It dragged, was pretentious- but beyond that it wasn't skillfully written. Wordy to the point of grandiose mood and plot points became unbelievable. Blech!

Enjoyed this much more than Atonement!