Product Description

Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat. Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne's professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him. Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne's celebrations of life's pleasures, his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne's earlier fears seem about to be realised.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5616 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

Thoughtful insights into a one man's life
As is the case with a number of McEwan novels, the plot itself is nothing to shout about. One man goes about his routine Saturday with a few strange events thrown in. There's a bit of drama with the Baxter character, but even that doesn't seem to amount to much. if it's drama you are after this isn't the novel for you. The strength of this book lies in the little characteristics of everyday life (ok, as everyday as you can get for a neurosurgeon living in a massive house in Central London!) that are described in painstaking, observant detail.
Some of the passages in the book made me stop and have a 'thoughtful moment' as I pondered the passages to myself.

I thought he dealt with the feelings of Henry to his Mother and also his daughter well, for me this was the strength of the book. I'd recommend this to someone who enjoys a read that is well written, not especially exciting, but a glimpse into the life of a supposed intellectual family and some good moments in the book.

Brilliant, improbable, uncool

Let's be clear: Ian McEwan is incapable of writing a bad English sentence. In `Saturday', as always, he gets under the skin of his characters with forensic brilliance and I can think of no other contemporary novelist who renders the texture of thought and consciousness with such nimble guile. There are ideas here that strike you with their elegant truth.

So much for form. As far as story goes, `Saturday' scores low. When McEwan writes about the solipsistic artistry of Henry's neuro-surgery or the sentimental tug his over-achieving offspring induce, his tone is frankly embarrassing. In fact, everything about the Perownes' lives is uncool, from the son's young-fogeyish talent for the blues to his daughter's straight-from-the-pages-of-the-Sunday-Times poetry career. `Saturday' further showcases the two chinks in McEwan's formidable armour: dialogue (one has to translate it to believe it) and sex (too much coy information). The final invasion of the family home is wholly improbable and where else, apart from in the pages of a middle-class fantasy, could a rabid thug be disarmed by the lyric beauty of a Matthew Arnold poem?!

I don't know how `Saturday' came into being but it feels like an amalgam of obsessions that had been knocking around the writer's head. Peace demonstrations, the moral complexities of the Iraq war, poetry, jazz and neuro-surgery read more like the
contents of a Sunday supplement than the stuff of real life. Still, we have to judge McEwan relatively - he's probably one of the top three British authors writing today. Hopefully he will set his own bar higher next time.

Saturday Lecture
What is it about Saturday that makes it something of a miss-hit? Written by one of our most talented writers and set in a 24 hour time frame with a hot contemporary political backdrop, it would appear that all the ingredients have been assembled for a thumping good read- so why does it miss-fire quite so badly? I found the distinction between the preachy Henry Perowne and the even more preachy Ian McEwan (masquerading as the third person narrator, but with name tag still firmly showing)difficult to discern. The story of a day in the life of a top neuro-surgeon with a successfull barrister wife and successfull poet daughter and an aspiring rock star son, was already preaching the maxim that money can buy you happiness and success difficult to swallow. This theme that intelligence = money = success = happiness was heightened by the protagonist Baxter who was, poor, uncouth, and poorly educated. Of all the people who were in London on that day preparing for the march (and the population was swelled by the thousands and thousands)Henry gets into a difficult confrontation in a 'deserted' car park with Baxter who just happens to have a neuro-logical condition which Henry, at the point of being thumped, diagnoses. What were the odds for that little coincidence? A first victory for intelligence. The victories mount up. When Baxter returns at the climax of the novel he is prevented from possibly killing Henry's wife when his daughter recites poetry to Baxter. He is so moved by the poem's beauty that the beast in him is tamed. If it had been 'Jabberwocky' the woman would have been sliced. To stop your self being mugged, stabbed or raped remember to leave the mace at home and take Milton or Wordsworth instead.

The narrator's strong opinions on everything from the impending Iraq war to the correct way to cook fish blur into Henry's stream-of-consciousness technique (which was done with far greater effect by Virginia Woolfe in Mrs Dalloway, another 24 hr slice of incidental life). Pages are devoted to the various lectures of life, none of which are particularly interesting or move the novel along, but serve only to highlight a level of intelligence that only about 2% of the population have, namely other brain-surgeons. The anti-climatic ending where Henry is called in to operate and therefore save the life of Baxter,with his god-like skills, just reaffirms all that has just been said.

All the clever people remain happy and devoted to one another, despite an unrealistic tiff between Daddy and daughter over the impending Iraqi war; and that they have just been held hostage; daughter forced to strip; grandfather smacked in the nose and wife held at knife point, they settle down to dinner and a bottle of wine, perfectly chilled. The barbarian uneducated hordes cannot disturb the lives of the rich and happy and poetic.

It failed to reach the short list for the Booker, which is a victory, but not for the Henry Perownes of our shared world.