Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1786 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-17
• Released on: 2006-01-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The critical response to Saturday must be making Ian McEwan a very happy man (not that his virtually unassailable position as Britain's leading novelist has been in doubt). While contemporaries (and rivals) Martin Amis and Will Self have had much more hit-or-miss records recently, each new McEwan novel gleans a host of plaudits, and Atonement has been generally hailed as his masterpiece. Saturday may not enjoy quite such acclaim, but it's a remarkably accomplished piece of work, as richly drawn and characterised as anything he has written.

McEwan's protagonist is neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a man comfortably ensconced in an enviable upper middle class existence. His wife is a successful newspaper lawyer, his daughter Daisy a budding poet. But as he wakes one Saturday morning and witnesses a plane accident through his window, he is not yet aware that this is a harbinger of a sustained assault on all that he holds dear. It's a McEwan trademark to begin his novels with a striking or violent rupture of everyday existence, but this opening is a prelude to his most impressively sustained narrative yet. It's the publication day of Henry's daughter's poetry collection, but a chance encounter with a drunken trio emerging from a lap-dancing club ends violently, even as a march against the war in Iraq streams past nearby. And this encounter with the menacing Baxter, main antagonist of the group, is to have fateful consequences. As Saturday progresses, Henry is forced to examine every aspect of his life and beliefs, not least his attitude to the war.

Unlike many of his peers, McEwan is not content to reduce the issues of the war to simple opposition, in which Tony Blair is characterised as a war criminal. Henry has treated a victim of Saddam's brutality, and although a comic encounter with the Prime Minister himself is a highlight of the book, both Henry (and his creator) are obliged to consider the complex skein of the conflict from all sides. While there are missteps (the poetic daughter, Daisy, is thinly drawn), McEwan's invigorating and trenchant novel is an unmissable experience. --Barry Forshaw

The Guardian
'Pretty Fabulous'

The Word
'A masterpiece of suspense and contemporary reflection'

Customer Reviews

gipping by young reader
i read this at the age of 17 and even then found myself fully immersed in the ordinary routine of a londoner /neurosurgeon. there was nothing immense in the style of writting, nothing even brilliant however its the way the book forces u without forcing you to realise life and understand its qualities to be happy about what you have etc that was amazing. i
was finding myself tlaking about it with friends as if it was some film or soap i had been watching te detail is immense.
absolutley gripping.

Excruciating
I have read McEwan before, and I love the way he writes....Sunday through Friday! Saturday was hard for me to get through. He used excruciating detail, and the book just dragged. I decided to quit in the middle, but I hate to leave a book unfinished, so I forced myself to read to the end. Sorry, it just wasn't his best.

Saturday - Ian McEwan
Before seeing what other reviewers have written about this book, i thought i may be alone in thinking that this book is surely one of the most pretentious and not to mention laborious i have ever laid hands on. Apparently not.

The akward surgeon Perowne has stayed with me long after putting this book to bed, not because his exploits kept me riveted, but because of the amount of time and effort i ploughed into finishing this book.

I found the characters hard to get along with and i had little, if any sympathy for anything that they suffered, and, again, as mentioned by another reviewer, some moments are so pretentious (need i mention reciting dover beach to your attacker) they become laughable. The environment and people that Mcewan has created in this book seem to be a world away, behind the thick screen of London's elite upper middle class. This makes them hard to identify with for most of us, and makes the book even harder to stomach.

Although i seem to have poured scorn upon this title, it does have one or two redeeming features. The atmosphere captured with the crowds rallying in the heart of london is truly vivid, this however, is not enough to save this book from a serious case of self impotant failiure.