Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2159 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

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.
The akward surgeon Perowne has stayed with me so long, 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 a fellow reviewer, some moments are so pretentious (need i mention reciting dover beach to your attacker) they become laughable. The environment and the people in it that Mcewan has laid down in the 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.

A Riveting Read
Having just been lent a copy of Ian McEwan's more recent novel On Chesil Beach I decided that I should read Saturday first, as the copy my husband read was on our bookshelves. I have previously read and enjoyed, The Cement Garden, Enduring Love, Amsterdam and Atonement. The latter is still my favourite, although I highly recommend Saturday as a thought provoking read.
Saturday as the title suggests covers just one day, February 15th 2003 in the life of modern day Londoner Henry Perowne. A successful neurosurgeon living a comfortable middle class existence, happily married to Rosalind, a lawyer and two grown-up children Daisy a poet and Theo a musician. His day starts as he watches the dawn from his bedroom window and events as the day progresses cause him to examine his life and beliefs in detail. In fact detail to the extreme is something this story is full of along with lots of literary and musical references. The detail McEwan goes into on subjects as diverse as brain surgery and a squash match are riveting. The brain surgery details made me feel uncomfortable, as for the squash match I felt I was playing the game myself. He writes in such a realistic manner, the fifties housewives cleanliness and the old peoples homes descriptions were also parts where I actually felt I was there, memories of my own may be?
The story builds slowly to its dramatic climax with Henry spending his Saturday preparing for a family gathering. On the day the streets of London were filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors, which seemed to have a disconnected effect on everything that happened to Henry that day
I enjoyed this so much that I am going to start On Chesil Beach straight away!