Saturday

This is the story of one day, Saturday, in the life of Henry Perowne, neurosurgeon, a well-drawn, convincing character. The story would not have worked on any other day of the week, because Saturday is the day filled with plans that can't be fitted into the working week: a squash game, a protest march, a visit to mother. The author does a fine job of letting the reader inside Perowne's head to see how he considers life in close-up. A description of his squash game might have been dull but instead it was interesting to see how the game developed and compared with the events of the day.

McEwan's story dips into many topics: politics, literature, music, war, surgery, family relationships, aging, and morality. It was a thought-provoking show more story that I enjoyed, especially the ending, where the topic of morality played a part. However, it is McEwan's beautiful prose that is the real draw for me: his words pour onto the paper like honey. But why do I always think he writes with the Booker prize in mind? show less

Saturday more consistently put me to sleep than any other book that didn't have the words "Calculus" or "Philosophy" on the cover. Forced to backtrack every day my brain conked out, I read the beginning part where the protagonist Henry wakes up five or six times.

This is not as damning as it sounds because in the time us mere mortals hit the alarm clock or breathe or wiggle our toes or consider our oatmeal or the shadow of a dream or clean underwear or whether we remembered to water the plants yesterday or what to remember to grab on the way out... Well (as Ian McEwan portrays it) whilst we do that; super-awesome, toweringly-intelligent, dead-sexy neurosurgeons are having three pages of thoughts about their fit muscles or architecture or show more the aging of their wives or the Iraq War or something (I mentioned the "zzz"-s, right?).

So I totally started skipping around the rest of the book. And while there was more about how this awesome extended to his perfect family, and some minor melodrama resembling the Easy-Bake version of a conflict... well, nothing caught my attention.

Maybe McEwan's descriptive style isn't for me? (But I got through Lord of the Rings!) Maybe stream-of-consciousness isn't my speed? (And liked Mrs. Dalloway.) Mayhaps I've got an touch of unconscious class resentment? (And The Age of Innocence.) Too deep? Too soon? Too male?

Tangelos if I know. If we all did, there wouldn't be insomnia, would there?

At any rate, I've put aside Saturday in the back of one of my book cupboards, waiting to see if it ages into its flavor. I'll probably have another go one of those nights when I've had way too much coffee. show less

This is an absolute tour de force of writing....*5...and yet, I didnt love it - even as I was thinking "how can anyone write that brilliantly"
Neorosurgeon Henry Perowne, is an absolute success. Top of the tree professionall; a lovely lawyer wife and an AMAZING marriage; a poet father in law; and two wonderful children- a musician who's going places and a published poetess daughter.
Now...you're going to struggle to keep the reader rooting for such flawless individuals.
Covering a 24-hour period in his life: London-based Henry ruminates on the uncertain world he inhabits - war with Iraq imminent, civil unrest, the aging process..
A minor car crash brings him into contact with violent thug Baxter.....not merely a crim, but (as Henry's show more analytical eye soon deduces) in the first stages of a a neurological disorder.
While we dont LIKE Baxter, we (well, I) found him marginally more sympathetic than the well-heeled family..
McEwan writes minutely: the detailed descriptions of operations were more gripping than the blow by blow account of a squash game.
Look, the author's meditations on life strike to the heart. But the Perowne clan left me cold... show less

Cringeworthy I. Any description of surgery makes me cringe. I feel invaded and have almost no ability to disassociate things medical. I even scream or act out in some physical way when I recall stepping on a nail which happened sixty years ago. The central character of this book is a neurosurgeon and McEwan describes his life saving surgeries in details which I had difficulty getting through. Caveat emptor.

Cringeworthy II. The neurosurgeon's mother is in a nursing home and Saturday is his day to visit her. But she's barely there. Instead the whole time he describes to us the toll that aging takes on what was once an athletic body. His mother had been a competitive swimmer and was often running. No more. She has been reduced to the show more barest existence needing assistance with almost all daily activities. She's also been reduced to a small room of her own. He even describes how they held on to the home he grew up in and her things until believing she would return there was no longer feasible. Too close to home for me.

Cringeworthy III. There's more that made me uncomfortable. There's an extensive description of a home invasion involving a physical attack, a threat by the intruder to murder his wife and demanding his daughter disrobe under threat of slitting her mother's throat. Hard to take. Difficult to turn away from.

Now that I've warned you I need to let you know this may be McEwan's best book. I've read a dozen so far, even Amsterdam. Like Amsterdam this also raises some moral questions but at least this one has characters you will like. There are winners here. At first I thought a good subtitle for this book might be a day in the life of a neurosurgeon. Everything was taking place in a single day. Eventually I wondered whether this was McEwan's attempt to do a James Joyce. Fortunately this book is much shorter than Joyce's Ulysses. Like Ulysses, it moves slowly. The narrator is the central character, the neurosurgeon. He shares his thoughts and feelings and is constantly questioning his reality. The book will never become a movie. There is some dialog but the bulk of the story is the narrator talking to himself. We see his moods change as he responds to what is around him and how he interprets that.

Like most fiction this book requires some suspension of disbelief. Too many things wind up happening to him where even one of them would be somewhat difficult to believe. He has a minor car accident which he handles poorly but notices the person who he's interacting with likely has a genetic neurological condition which is both uncurable and will only get worse until death. Then that same person winds up invading the family gathering at the doctor's palatial home. And finally the doctor is called upon to operate on the same person who has severe brain damage having been thrown down steps by the doctor's son. He decides not to share with the people at the hospital that he has a relation with the patient which would normally mean he could not be the surgeon operating on the patient. His wife is concerned he might do something stupid. He performs the operation flawlessly. McEwan is clearly sending the message that these doctors are acting with godlike powers.

I recommend this book highly, but be forewarned, it may be a difficult read. show less

"Saturday", which I've recently listened to on audiobook, appears to have provoked some surprisingly vehement reactions.

It is flawed, certainly. For one thing, I couldn't understand why McEwan chose to go for a third person narration. The focus on one individual's day seems to lend itself naturally to a first person narration, and I can't recall an occasion when McEwan discloses anything that Henry Perowne doesn't already know or before he becomes aware of it.

The medical jargon which seems to have bothered other people would also have seemed much more natural if Henry had been relating his own story and the same goes for the focus on the squash game. Henry seems a serious man and this extends to his attitude to exercise and show more competition.

However, McEwan uses his scenario to make subtle, thoughtful points well, and not just to explore the author's own apparent ambivalence over the events taking place on his chosen day. The scientifically minded Henry, one of the most convincing characters McEwan has ever created, is contrasted nicely with is artistically inclined children and father-in-law and also with his Alzheimer's stricken mother, as well as the more obvious showdown with Baxter.

The ending is just a little bit too neat for my liking and lets the book down a bit too. All in all, mid-table McEwan. show less

Saturday, February 15, 2003 doesn't seem that long ago but when McEwan talks about the political situation I realized how much has happened since then. mrsgaskell has alread talked about the huge anti-war demonstration that took place in London that day while Dr. Henry Perowne was filling his Saturday with other events. Despite that outpouring of sentiment, Britain joined the war in Iraq (while Canada, France and other nations stayed away) which was declared on March 19. The provocations for entering Iraq were mostly bogus but it did result in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government. Of course, it can be debated if the replacement leaves the people of Iraq any better off. Nevertheless, Britain withdrew all combat troops earlier show more this year and the US troops are supposed to be out by 2011. Henry Perowne, like many other people at the time, has mixed feelings about the war but, probably because of an encounter with an Iraqi patient who filled him in on the situation in Iraq, tends to support the necessity for ousting Saddam Hussein. His children, on the other hand, are anti-war and this causes some conflict between father and his daughter, Daisy.

Mostly, though, Henry Perowne is blessed and recognizes this. He has a fulfilling job, a satisfying relationship with his wife and is very pleased with how his children turned out. There are some flies in the ointment, of course. He's getting older and the rigours of a squash game are starting to get to him. His mother has Alzheimer Disease and no longer recognizes him. His father-in-law drinks to excess and every encounter with him is problematic because of this. All of this pales when his home is invaded by a young tough that he encountered in a car accident earlier in the day. When the situation ends, the whole family is shaken and has to deal with the fallout. When Dr. Perowne is called in to operate on this same individual you can't help but wonder how you would react in the same situation.

McEwan is wonderful in his details. The descriptions of surgeries, the squash game, the visit to the nursing home and even the meal preparations are filled with vivid detail so that it felt like I was looking over Perowne's shoulder. Interestingly, McEwan works in a discussion about exactly this style of writing (at p. 67) in discussing Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary which Henry read at his daughter's insistence:
At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. These books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation.
I don't think I agree with that assessment but if that's McEwan's feeling about his own work then long live steady, workmanlike accumulation!

Later on that same page he discusses the magical realism genre that his daughter also made him read. I laughed out loud when I read this comment:
'No more magic midget drummers,' he pleaded with her by post, after setting out his tirade. 'Please, no more ghosts, angels, satans or metamorphoses. When anything can happen, nothing much matters. It's all kitsch to me.' Bravo! show less

Saturday is one day in the life of a successful London neurosurgeon. The novel opens with a sense of foreboding in a post-9/11 world. As Perowne moves through his day reflecting on his life and on the times, the suspense builds. His struggle to cope and his debate with himself over the approaching war in Iraq is real and is honest. I identified my own patterns of thought in his. The reader is effortlessly drawn into his life and his mental state and when the suspense finally breaks it is almost a relief. Although at one point I found myself almost wishing that it wouldn’t. When it is over, the sense of a profound change is palatable and reminded me of the feeling of seeing the first planes in the air after September 11th.