Saturday follows a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon living and working in the Fitzrovia area of London. It takes place on Saturday 15 February 2003 and follows him from his unnaturally early awakening before dawn to sunrise the day after. It's the day London was filled with thousands of anti-war protestors . Perowne is against war, but he is not entirely for the protest as he feels that the war against Iraq may be the lesser of the two evils (the other being to leave President Saddam Hussein in power). These thoughts are brought to the boil in an interesting argument between him and his daughter Daisy. That's in chapter four, and it's the tipping point between hearing the voices of the characters - particuarly Daisy - and that of the author.

This argument is only one of the concluding strands of the multi-layered plot. There's also an incident involving a flaming Russian plane and a minor car accident - with Perowne directly involved in the latter. The car accident turns nasty and there's violence. It is later on, after meditating on the day's events, that the novel's message begins to fall into place. The unusually early waking to the sight of the blazing plane; the attempts throughout the day to avoid the anti-war demonstrators; and becoming involved in his own personal conflicts with Baxter - the man who crashed into him - and his daughter over the right to protest, show a writer who is clearly worried about the implications of society's prosperity in a post-destruction-of-New-York's-Twin-Towers Western culture. This is clearly epitomised by the metaphor for Perowne's stage of life: the accrual of work and pleasure before the quiet Sunday of retirement.

Saturday's narrative cleverly reflects Perowne's surgical meticulousness. An example is when, in a typically medically detached state, he visits his mother in a retirement home, suffering from multi-infarct dementia. It allows the reader to live and breathe Perowne's world with ease. The reader is transported into his surroundings so accurately and effortlessly that, when the assorted conflicts begin, it is difficult to maintain any laid-back escapism. At times there may be both disgust at the minutae of various operations and graphic details of violence which erupt within the story, and a simultaneous envy of the man's healthy, contented lifestyle. Frequent, cinematic dipping between high tension and calm is a feature of Saturday, distributed in heaped spoonfuls. Not one for the faint-hearted.

The writings of Ian McEwan (1948-) can't really be taken lightly. He's an international literature heavyweight, having won the 1998 Booker Prize (for Amsterdam); the 1999 Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg; the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and in 2005 he became the first recipient of the The Stellfox Prize and Residency for Literary Excellence, granted by Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA. he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded a CBE in 2000; in 2008 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London, where he was formerly an English literature teacher. Atonement, perhaps his most well-known work (thanks to the successful film adaptation in 2007), was named best novel of 2002 by Time Magazine. And he seems to have accomplished all of this by being downright grisly.

(c) Ollie Hester 2009

reviewed 4 March 2009 / Brighton

NOTES - Saturday by Ian McEwan (1948); first published in 2005. In print and available from eg Waterstone, Amazon. Examples of editions: London - Jonathan Cape - 2005 - 279 p - ISBN: 0224072994. Author websites - www.ianmcewan.com

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012

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