We all know Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. More recently, there
was the excellent Mr. Phillips by John Lanchester. Now we can include the new
novel from Ian McEwan Saturday. Make no mistake, McEwan's book belongs right in the heart of the batting order of these literary all-stars – it is that good!

Henry Perowne (neurosurgeon, husband, father, son, son-in-law, athlete, cook – you know the demographic: upper-middleclass, urban professional) awakes one Saturday morning with a strange sense of euphoria. He stands naked at the window of his large estate home (inherited from his wife's family) on a fashionable square in London and contemplates his work, his wife, his upcoming day. A large plane emerges in the semi-dawn with a wing aflame as it makes a low descent over the city towards Heathrow. All at once we know we are in the post-9/11 world as Henry's thoughts immediately turn to hijacking, terror, and death. Below him crowds have begun to assemble for a mass march against British involvement in the Iraq war. This is all about today.

Perowne is a great character. He lives his work, and his thoughts and
observations are chock-a-block with medical details and scientific jargon (a
little more than necessary as far as I'm concerned.) Even on his Saturday, work is not far away. His wife too is off to her legal work where an important
hearing is to be held. They are the sorts of busy professionals who have to
schedule their Saturday's as much as they schedule their work. It is a busy day for them; Henry has his weekly game of squash followed by a visit to his
sequestered mother suffering from advanced dementia, then a stop at the fish
market for dinner things, a look in at his teenage son's blues club rehearsal,
and then back home to a family dinner for his college daughter arriving from
Paris and his alcoholic father-in-law of some fame in the world of poetry. Whew!

McEwan's skill is to interweave this very busy domestic day with Henry's
constant musings about the war, terrorism, evolution, poetry, music, sex,
marriage, and most especially his work – almost a calling. But there is an
edginess here too as McEwan brings up-front personal violence into the day when Henry's Mercedes is involved in an accident with three thugs departing a pub. It is Baxter, the leader of the thugs, who becomes the counterpoint to Henry's euphoria and appears in and out of his day and well into the night.

While it may be only a very tiny portion of the world which lives like the
Perowne's, it is a much more universal group which shares the fears and
ambivalence of Henry and his family as they try to navigate the daily joys and
sorrows of their lives in the context of a world alive with the tensions of war
and terror. McEwan has created in the voices of the characters in Saturday the voices of so many of us – whatever language we use.

Review by Bruce Jacobs, May 12, 2005