Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2103 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-17
• Released on: 2006-01-05
• Original language: English
• 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

Too self-conscious, no depth
Just when I was beginning to think that the PC trend for favouring minority writers - disabled black communist lesbians for example - had gone a bit overboard, I was powerfully reminded why the tide had turned against white middle-aged, upper middle-class literary prize-winning male academics. Atonement was excellent and original, Enduring Love meaty and compelling; Saturday, though well-written and very readable, is as has been noted ad nauseam, a pretentious lifestyle novel, very full of its own pedigree ('John Grammaticus', for heaven's sake) - oozing well heeled self-satisfaction at every turn. Sure there's nothing wrong with class, but this is so self-consciously attuned to the lifestyle must-haves of 'people like us' that the characters lack all integrity. They are straight out of the Sunday supplement, down to the coffee and probiotic yogurt. This makes the 9-11 backdrop seem rather fashionably employed, and the treatment of the character of Baxter questionable. Glibly asserting that 'Some of the worst wrecks have been privately educated' does not address the issue here: it doesn't matter how fortunate or unfortunate the characters portrayed, if they're real people brought to life for us with some recognition of their lives' myriad associations and complexities. Perowne and his family are too much the kind of people marketing companies dangle before us to aspire to; as for Baxter and co, sadly McEwan reveals a much poorer understanding of social class than he has acquired of neurosurgery. There is also an undercurrent of emasculation, as though on some level Perowne/McEwan would love to be brave enough to fight for a cause, but in this world the serious business of male supremacy is fought to the death on the squash court. McEwan could be brilliant, but if this is what fame and fortune has done for him, bring on the Outsiders, I say.

the nineeleveniraqwar novel
'Ian? This is the marketing department, for God's sake write a nine eleven novel!'. But the authour has little to say on the subject beyond school boy observations that moslim women wear veils and that post Sadam Iraq (at the time of writing) couldn't be expected to be any worse than the then status quo. However the book is beautifully written and its characters are fully formed by McEwans perfect prose. Yes, they're the predicatable metropolitain, extended middle-class nuclear family, but in MacEwan's hands they come to life fully and have a detailed and interesting back story which completes and explains their reactions to the events in the narrative. Events which are partly given by circumstance, but also by accident of neurology, a subject he tackles with clarity whilst not detracting from its obvious complexity. En route we learn a lot about how to play the blues, play squash (the infamous 15 pages) and even the development of the cordless kettle. In the hands of a lesser writer these would appear padding for the non-nine-eleven novel, but in MacEwan's hands every word adds to his reader's understanding of the characters. Be warned, the story line struck me as being of secondary importance to the people that inhabited it, and the ending felt rather improbable. Without giving too much away, one moral of the narrative might be 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. Something we all agree with but which can be difficult to show convincingly in fiction given the backdrop of our times - both at home and abroad.

A bad kebab
I binned this book after the first few dozen pages. They were totally leaden. The author seemed to have swallowed a medical dictionary, whose contents were then regurgitated like a bad kebab supper. More of an endurance test than a novel, this was the second McEwan offering to bore me rigid. There won't be a third.