Details
Synopsis
Ian McEwan's unusual novel takes place over the course of one day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne--a happy man and a decent one. On Saturday, February 15, 2003, in London, he goes about his business--shopping, interacting with his wife, enjoying the day. (George Bush is in London, and the streets are clogged with demonstrators against the Iraq war--a situation McEwan's hero confronts with a rather skeptical eye.) Henry meets up with a mugger named Baxter who, he immediately recognizes, has the degenerative disease Huntington's chorea. Later, when Henry is back home with his family, Baxter turns up again, and this time he is even more threatening. Without sentimentality or preachiness, McEwan provides a picture of a good man living in a complicated world, and of the small acts of kindness and judgment that make the small differences that add up in welcome but unexpected ways. Named one of the 10 Best Books of 2005 by the New York Times.
| Size | | Length: | 289 pages | | Height: | 7.8 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 6.4 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet."
Industry Reviews
"Comprised by an active awareness of his place in the world, of his love for family and work, and of the contingencies that make his life his own..., Henry's thoughts...envelop us in a total immersion experience. A sort of middle-class humanist manifesto: when you find yourself fortunate beyond all measure in a random universe, gratitude, generosity, and compassion are a decent response."
Kirkus (01/15/2005)
"The tension throughout the novel between science (Perowne's surgery) and art (his daughter is a poet; his son a musician) culminates in a synthesis of the two, and a grave, hopeful, meaningful, transcendent ending....[A] wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now."
Kirkus (01/31/2005)
"To a certain extent, McEwan has set out to write an extraordinary drama of ordinary life and opinions, set only inches beyond the real. Perhaps at the back of his mind was the model of John Updike's Rabbit novels, which tend to be set against well-known episodes of recent history....But old habits die hard, and the twenty-four hours that the author designs for Perowne are far from everyday....The real model for SATURDAY, it becomes clear, is MRS. DALLOWAY, also set over one London day. As in Virginia Woolf's novel, the juxtaposition of a wealthy insider and a desperate outsider creates a nasty and violent climax...."
Times Literary Supplement (02/11/2005)
"[D]azzling....From Henry's early-morning awakening, Mr. McEwan traces the trajectory of the remainder of his day....Mr. McEwan conjures these utterly banal events with a myriad of small, telling details and a reverence for their very ordinariness - ordinariness that is threatened by Baxter and all the larger forces of irrationality and brutality he embodies. At the same time, in charting Henry's emotional temperature, his perambulations from optimism to doubt to fear, Mr. McEwan provides the reader with a wonderfully acute psychological portrait of his hero....[W]ith this volume, Mr. McEwan has not only produced one of the most powerful pieces of post-9/11 fiction yet published, but also fulfilled that very primal mission of the novel: to show how we--a privileged few of us, anyway--live today."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (03/18/2005)
"Lucidity, control, a ratcheting down of horizons, an impatience with tricksterism, and a kind of mild incredulity in the face of the large personality, literary and otherwise: In Saturday, Perowne and McEwan are together aligned against the legacy of modernist razzle-dazzle....A cursory description of SATURDAY, its various set-pieces and themes, might make it sound like a sequel to MAO II. But in feeling, it is closer to George Eliot than to Don DeLillo. Against our hyper-modern preoccupations...there is a deep English affinity for antiquated practices of social continuity. This is why McEwan cannot be said to write 'contemporary literature,' a grisly oxymoron best left to his less-talented peers."
Slate - Stephen Metcalf (03/30/2005)
"McEwan is not only the greatest living writer in England; now that Bellow has stopped writing, and now that Roth's mastery of le mot juste has exploded into a brilliant but often undisciplined torrent of mots, McEwan is writing better English prose than anybody. The Nobel Prize committee could start making itself respectable by giving him the nod."
Nation - Lee Siegel (04/11/2005)
"[McEwan's] severely planed and rich sentences are supple, disciplined, natural--a rigorous dovetailing. There are moments of quietly satirical wit....But the prose is also capable of aeration, and London is caught in precise sensuous detail. Above all, the novel manages to inhabit the mind of a not immediately fascinating man...and move easily from that mind to general reflection and back, without ever losing narrative pressure."
New Republic - James Wood (04/18/2005)
"As the fluid, richly textured examination of one man's interior world over 24 hours, the book is impeccable."
Entertainment Weekly (04/08/2005)
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