Saturday 1ST Edition Us: Ian Mcewan: Amazon.com: Books Saturday 1ST Edition Us Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Next Editorial Reviews Saturday is a novel by Ian McEwan set in Fitzrovia, London, on Saturday, 15 February 2003, during a large demonstration against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The protagonist, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon, has planned a series of chores and pleasures culminating in a family dinner in the evening. As he goes about his day he ponders the meaning of the protest and the problems that inspired it, however, the day is disrupted by an encounter with a violent, troubled man. To understand his character's world-view, McEwan spent time with a neurosurgeon. The novel explores one's engagement with the modern world and the meaning of existence in it.

The main character, though outwardly successful, still struggles to understand meaning in his life, exploring personal satisfaction in the post-modern, developed world. Though intelligent and well read, Perowne feels he has little influence over political events. The book, published in February 2005 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and in April in the United States, was critically and commercially successful. Critics noted McEwan's elegant prose, careful dissection of daily life, and interwoven themes. It won the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Anti-war protests do make a difference Anti-war protests do make a difference Published Sat 19 Mar 2005 Issue No. 1943 Recently I read Ian McEwan’s new novel Saturday, which is set in London on 15 February 2003, the day of the great march against the war in Iraq. The fact that McEwan uses 15 February as a framing device is an illustration of how deeply the anti-war movement has rooted itself in public consciousness in Britain. The anti-war demonstrations in Britain have been part of a larger global movement.

The French political scientist Dominique Reynié has estimated that, between 3 January and 12 April 2003, some 36 million people took part in nearly 3,000 protests around the world against the Iraq war. This Saturday, 19 March, we have another great demonstration to mark the second anniversary of the outbreak of the war, which will contribute to a global day of protest against the occupation of Iraq. But the fact that it is now two years since the Anglo-American invaders stormed into Iraq has led many people to question the point of the protests. Millions marched, they say, yet the war happened, the occupation continues, and the perpetrators George Bush and Tony Blair are still in office. The conclusion drawn from this argument varies. Some decide that mass action is ineffective and lapse into the apathy that is increasingly the majority party in Western liberal democracies. Others argue that the problem lies in big demonstrations. Much more effective are direct actions that disrupt the running of the country. I find this latter argument unconvincing. The point of the anti-war movement around the world is to put direct pressure on national governments not to participate in Bush’s imperial project.

To achieve this objective requires showing that very large numbers of people are strongly opposed to the war on terrorism, even though their views lack representation in the official political system. Scattered, localised direct actions do not provide the necessary visibility. Large numbers of people marching through the capital do. The big national demonstrations are also important in sustaining the momentum of the movement. Activist coalitions wither at the roots unless, in addition to local activities, they have to organise reasonably frequent large events that offer a reaffirmation of their strength. Participation The anti-war movements that abandoned the streets after the fall of Baghdad have found it hard to campaign against the occupation. Of course, we didn’t stop the war. Ultimately this was because the bulk of Labour MPs lacked the guts to stand up to an authoritarian, imperialist prime minister, as we saw once again last week when the House of Commons voted repeatedly for the anti-terror law demanded by Blair. But not demonstrating wouldn’t have made it easier to address this problem. On the contrary, abandoning the streets would make it easier for Labour MPs to crawl to the whips and would demoralise and isolate those opposed to the war.

Given that the Commons voted with Blair, the only way to have stopped British participation in the war — and in turn possibly the entire assault on Iraq — would have been large scale strike action. This happened on a limited scale in Italy during the invasion of Iraq and in Greece more extensively during the Nato campaign against Serbia in 1999. But being able to mount this higher form of direct action requires a mass movement capable of reaching deep into British society. The Stop the War Coalition is one of the beginnings of this, precisely because it has been so strongly committed to mobilising large numbers of people. Both the capitulation of the Labour backbenchers and the absence of large scale strike action against the war are symptoms of the same problem. This is the fact that the organised working class in Britain remains dominated by Labourism, which binds it to the Blair government. Addressing this problem requires the development of a political alternative that can begin to challenge Labourism from the left. Far from being in conflict with the big anti-war marches, this project is all about giving a political voice to those who took to the streets against the war, only to be ignored by Blair and his toadies.

Article information Iraq war marchers ‘vindicated’ a decade on – Ian McEwan – Channel 4 News Share on Twitter The prize-winning author, who set his 2005 novel Saturday on the day of the first protests, explained how the decision to go to war, despite protests that saw around two million people take to the streets on 15 February 2003, was still influencing foreign policy decisions a decade on, writes Kunal Dutta. The ghosts of Iraq, he says, are evident in the British response to uprisings in Syria and the bloodbath in Mali. “The legacy of Iraq is that sometimes there are things we could do which we no longer can.” Describing the anti-Iraq march as a “celebration of English eccentricity”, he recalls how his own stance on military intervention shifted as he grew suspicious of US intentions. Elaborate dreams In the far-reaching interview, Mr McEwan recounted a night in the run-up to the Iraq invasion that he spent “tossing and turning”, finalising a “peace plan” that he wanted to present to the then prime minister, Tony Blair.

“My idea was that [Blair] should move all his troops out of Kuwait and move them all to Afghanistan before the Taliban resurge there. “I thought ‘I know the solution’. I can get half an hour with Tony Blair and put to him my peace plan.” This could, indeed, have come to pass. Mr Blair is a known fan of McEwan’s, and even once admitted to having pictures of the author at his former Downing Street home. Yet he thought better of it the next morning. “In the cold light of day I thought ‘how on earth did I think I was going to get half an hour with Tony Blair?’ What kind of pomposity was that? “What were the chances of him even beginning to listen? Plus the army would hate him forever if he had pulled back. No-one ever pulls back an army.” Iraq’s legacy today Today the ghosts of Iraq still influence policy. Mr McEwan feels “disappointed” that the Syria uprising did not elicit a greater “humanitarian effort” but believes that the legacy of Iraq made any sort of intervention impossible.

“The legacy of Iraq is that sometimes there are things we could do which we no longer can.” Nowhere was this more evident, he argues, than Britain assistance France in Mali . “I think it would be political suicide for Cameron to send in ground troops. Britain has seen so many coffins come back from war and there’s such scepticism. I think when the French pull out, that will be our cue to do so.” A decade on, al-Qaeda, he says, has been consigned to “pinpricks of nastiness” but is no longer “the struggle of our time”. “I remember getting a lot of stick five or six years ago saying something disobliging about jihadists. There were voices, particularly on the left, that thought anyone who criticised Islamism was really criticising Islam and therefore racist. “Well, those voices have gone quiet because the local atrocities committed by Islamists whether in Pakistan or Mali is so self-evidently vile.” Shifting stances Mr McEwan was one the few voices that originally supported military intervention in Iraq. Much of that, he said, stemmed back to the Salman Rushdie affair, during which time he met many Iranian and Iraqi exiles living under Saddam Hussein.

He was profoundly moved by The Republic of Fear, written by Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, and when the case for war was first presented in late 2002, McEwan says he was “tempted to that camp” by the views of close friends Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen. But it was the aftermath of the invasion and the chaos of “American self-interest” that forced him to reconsider. “I can remember seeing an American soldier climbing on top of Saddam’s statue to plant an American flag and I can remember thinking that symbolically was the unravelling of everything.” Political challenges Mr McEwan, who voted for the Liberal Democrats in the last election, said Labour leader Ed Miliband was growing “into the job” and that he had his “fingers crossed” for him. Depicting a country of “great inequity” in which elite businesses were profiteering, he has called for the end of coalition politics. “Let’s either have a Tory government or let Ed Miliband try something different,” he says.

Necessary evils While he condemns the tax arrangements of big businesses such as Starbucks , he argues other global firms like Google and Amazon had become a necessity of modern life and changed the world for the better. Independent bookshops may be feeling the effect of the digital revolution, but he did not see an end to paper matter. “There’s something about the mass presence of books, the way one is drawn to them; the story they tell – it’s impossible to replace. “Rather than bookshelves, you could just have one ipad or a Kindle in a house but it would tell you nothing.” A self-confessed e-reader, he says that the digital word is a natural evolution. “I don’t think [the form] matters. What really matters is still the sentences, the structures of the book, the information it contains or the pleasures it can afford you.” “I don’t mind that half my books were in digital form. What matters is what someone sitting down with a book of mine might get from it. What they pay for it isn’t so important.

If they got it for nothing and loved it then that would be fine by me.” Ian McEwan: misery of attack on Iran would be beyond belief | News | The Guardian Guardian Open Weekend Ian McEwan: misery of attack on Iran would be beyond belief Author says regime is 'looking very wobbly,' but that an attack would reunite the country behind its leaders Ian McEwan in conversation with Ian Katz at the Guardian Open Weekend. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris Guardian Open Weekend Ian McEwan: misery of attack on Iran would be beyond belief Author says regime is 'looking very wobbly,' but that an attack would reunite the country behind its leaders Sunday 25 March 2012 11.56 EDT First published on Sunday 25 March 2012 11.56 EDT Close This article is 4 years old Ian McEwan , the writer whose 2005 novel Saturday was widely interpreted as making the case for military intervention in Iraq, said on Sunday any attack on Iran with the aim of destroying its nuclear capability would end in disaster.

Speaking at the Guardian's Open Weekend festival , McEwan said: "I belong to that very large cohort who think it would be absolutely disastrous to attack Iran ... I think the mischief and misery and unintended consequences of an attack on Iran would be beyond belief." McEwan's Saturday is set on 15 February 2003, the day of a huge anti-war demonstration in London. He said the debate over intervention in Iran mirrored the arguments over Iraq in 2003, but said that readers were wrong to attribute to him the pro-war views of Saturday's neurosurgeon hero, Henry Perowne. In fact, McEwan said, his views on Iraq were a combination of Perowne's and those of his anti-war daughter, Daisy. Although he sympathised initially with arguments that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power, he became "deeply convinced" that the Bush administration was not capable of running the country following a conflict. As the invasion loomed, McEwan said he spent a "white night of complete sleeplessness" hatching a plan to personally persuade Tony Blair to move 10,000 British troops from Kuwait to Afghanistan.

He planned to ask his publisher, Gail Rebuck, to set up a meeting with the prime minister through her husband, Blair's pollster Phillip Gould, but thought better of it in the morning. McEwan said the Iranian regime was now "looking very wobbly" with "real splits between Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader Khamenei" – but any attack on the country would "bind the country back together behind the theocracy". He also rejected Israeli claims that if military action were not taken against the Iranian nuclear programme within months, Tehran's weapons capability would be secreted away underground in facilities where it could no longer be knocked out. "I wish that Israel had never embarked on [its own nuclear weapons programme] because it was inevitable that one or other of the powers in the region would follow … [but] There is a massive feeling of resentment against the [Iranian] regime, within the population and it's quite a sophisticated population, to drive them to the other side would be a disaster. During the interview, with the Guardian's deputy editor, Ian Katz, the novelist also said: • The British education system is limiting children in forcing them to choose between humanities or scientific studies at an early age.

He said the American GRE test for postgraduate entrants produced more rounded students. • When he was introduced to Tony Blair at a Tate Modern function, "the prime minister got hold of my hand in that intense way politicians have, not letting it go, and said: 'I'm a great admirer of your work. We have a couple of your pictures hanging in Downing Street.'" He included the anecdote in Saturday. • His son had to study his novel Enduring Love for A-level. McEwan had given him "some key points" but he still got a low mark – "I think quite wrongly. His tutor thought the stalker carried the authorial moral centre. Whereas I thought he was a complete madman." McEwan also revealed that he wrote notes for his novels initially in longhand, in ringbound green notebooks, working on a table he built himself in the 90s. "Black ink always. Pressing medium hard," he joked.

• This article was amended on 26 March 2012 to make clear that the GRE is for postgraduate entrance saturday novel : definition of saturday novel and synonyms of saturday novel (English) 57559845 Saturday is a novel by Ian McEwan set in Fitzrovia , London, on Saturday, 15 February 2003, during a large demonstration against the 2003 invasion of Iraq . The protagonist, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon , has planned a series of chores and pleasures culminating in a family dinner in the evening. As he goes about his day he ponders the meaning of the protest and the problems that inspired it, however, the day is disrupted by an encounter with a violent, troubled man. To understand his character's world-view, McEwan spent time with a neurosurgeon. The novel explores one's engagement with the modern world and the meaning of existence in it. The main character, though outwardly successful, still struggles to understand meaning in his life, exploring personal satisfaction in the post-modern, developed world.

Though intelligent and well read, Perowne feels he has little influence over political events. The book, published in February 2005 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and in April in the United States, was critically and commercially successful. Critics noted McEwan's elegant prose, careful dissection of daily life, and interwoven themes. It won the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Contents Ian McEwan Saturday is McEwan's ninth novel, coming between Atonement and On Chesil Beach , two novels of historical fiction. McEwan has said how he prefers to alternate between writing about the past and the present. [1] [2] While researching the book, McEwan spent two years work-shadowing Neil Kitchen, a neurosurgeon at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London. [1] [3] [4] Kitchen testified that McEwan did not flinch in the theatre, a common first reaction to surgery; "He sat in the corner, with his notebook and pencil". [1] He also had several medical doctors and surgeons review the book for accuracy, though few corrections were required to the surgical description.

[1] [4] Saturday was also proof-read by McEwan's longstanding circle of friends who review his manuscripts, Timothy Garton Ash , Craig Raine , and Galen Strawson . [1] There are elements of autobiography in Saturday: the protagonist lives in the same square in London that he does and is physically active in middle age. [1] Christopher Hitchens , a friend of McEwan's, noted how Perowne's wife, parents and children are the same as his. [5] McEwan's son, Greg, who like Theo played the guitar reasonably well in his youth, complained of one difference between them, "I definitely don't wear tight black jeans". [1] Excerpts were published in five different literary magazines, including the whole of chapter one in the New York Times Book Review , in late 2004 and early 2005. [6] The complete novel was published by the Jonathan Cape Imprint of Random House Books in February 2005 in London, New York, and Toronto; Dutch, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and Japanese translations followed.

[7] [8] Synopsis The book follows Henry Perowne, a middle-aged, successful surgeon. Five chapters chart his day and thoughts on Saturday the 15 February 2003, the day of the demonstration against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the largest in British history. Perowne's day begins in the early morning, when he sees a burning aeroplane streak across the sky. This casts a shadow over the rest of his day as reports on the television change and shift: is it an accident, or terrorism? En route to his weekly squash game, a traffic diversion reminds Perowne of the anti-war protests occurring that day. After being allowed through the diversion, he collides with another car, damaging its wing mirror. At first the driver, Baxter, tries to extort money from him. When Perowne refuses, Baxter and his two companions become aggressive. Noticing symptoms in Baxter's behaviour, Perowne quickly recognises the onset of Huntington's disease . Though he receives a punch in the sternum , Perowne manages to escape unharmed by distracting Baxter with discussions of his disease. Perowne then goes on to his squash match, still thinking about the incident.

He loses the long and contested game by a technicality in the final round. After lunch he buys some fish from a local fishmonger for dinner and visits his mother, suffering from vascular dementia , in a nursing home. After a visit to his son's rehearsal, Perowne returns home to cook dinner, the evening news again reminds him of the grander arc of events that surround his life. Daisy, his daughter, arrives home from Paris, and the two passionately debate the coming war in Iraq . His father-in-law arrives next. Daisy reconciles an earlier literary disagreement that led to a froideur with her maternal grandfather; remembering that it was he who had inspired her love of literature. Theo, his son, returns next. Rosalind, Perowne's wife, is the last to arrive home. As she enters Baxter and an accomplice force their way in armed with knives. Baxter punches the Grandfather, intimidates the family and orders Daisy to strip naked. When she does, Perowne notices that she is pregnant . Finding out she is a poet, Baxter asks her to recite a poem. Rather than one of her own, she recites Dover Beach , which affects Baxter emotionally, effectively disarming him.

Instead he becomes enthusiastic about Perowne's renewed talk about new treatment for Huntington's disease . His companion abandons him, and Baxter is overpowered by Perowne and Theo, and knocked unconscious after falling down the stairs. That night Perowne is summoned to the hospital for a successful emergency operation on Baxter. Saturday ends at around 5:15 a.m., after he has returned from the hospital and made love to his wife again. Themes Happiness McEwan's earlier work has explored the fragility of existence using a clinical perspective, [9] Hitchens even hails him a "chronicler of the physics of every-day life". [5] Saturday explores the feeling of fulfillment in Perowne: he is respected and respectable but not quite at ease, wondering about the luck that has him where he is and others homeless or in menial jobs. [5] The family is materially well-off, with a plush home and a Mercedes, but justifiably so—Perowne and his wife work hard. McEwan tells of his success rate and cool under pressure, though the trade off is clear, he and his wife work long hours and need to put their diaries side by side to find time to spend together.

[5] Perowne's composure and success mean the implied violence is in the background. His personal contentment, (at the top of his profession, and "an unashamed beneficiary of the fruits of late capitalism" [3] ) provides a hopeful side to the book, instead of the unhappiness in contemporary fiction. [2] McEwan's previous novels highlighted the fragility of modern fulfilled life, seemingly minor incidents dramatically upsetting existence. [9] Saturday returns to a theme in Atonement , which plotted the disruption of a lie to a middle-class family, and in The Child in Time , where a small child is kidnapped during a day's shopping. [10] This theme is continued in Saturday, a "tautly wound tour-de-force" set in a world where terrorism, war and politics make the news headlines, but the protagonist has to live out this life until he "collides with another fate". [2] In Saturday Perowne's medical knowledge captures the delicate state of humanity better than novelists' imaginations: his acquaintance with death and neurological perspective better capture human frailty.

[9] The protest against the Iraq War, in London , February 2003, forms a backdrop to the events of Saturday Political engagement The burning aeroplane in the book's opening, and the suspicions it immediately arouses, quickly introduces the problems of terrorism and international security. [5] The day's political demonstration and the ubiquity of news coverage of it provide background noise to Perowne's day, leading to him to ponder his relationship with these events. [11] Mr Hitchens pointed out that the novel is set on the "actual day the whole of bien-pensant Britain moved into the streets to jeer at George Bush and Tony Blair" and placed the novel as "unapologetically anchored as it is in the material world and its several discontents". [5] The Economist newspaper set the context as a "world where terrorism and war make headlines, but also filter into the smallest corners of people's lives." [2] McEwan said himself, "The march gathered not far from my house, and it bothered me that so many people seemed so thrilled to be there".

[12] The characterisation of Perowne as an intelligent, self-aware man "..a habitual observer of his own moods' [who] is given to reveries about his mental processes" allows the author to explicitly set out this theme: [1] "It's an illusion to believe himself active in the story. Does he think he's changing something, watching news programmes, or lying on his back on the sofa on Sunday afternoon, reading more opinion columns of ungrounded certainties, more long articles about what really lies behind this or that development, or what is surely going to happen next, predictions forgotten as soon as they are read, well before events disprove them?" [13] Physically, Perowne is neither above nor outside the fray but at an angle to it; emotionally his own intelligence makes him apathetic, he can see both sides of the argument, and his beliefs are characterised by a series of hard choices rather than sure certainties. [5] [14] He is concerned for the fate of Iraqis; through his friendship with an exiled Iraqi professor he learned of the totalitarian side of Saddam Hussein's rule, but also takes seriously his children's concerns about the war.

He often plays devil's advocate, being dovish with this American friend, and hawkish with his daughter. [12] Rationalism McEwan establishes Perowne as anchored in the real world. [5] [15] Perowne expresses a distaste for some modern literature, puzzled by, even disdaining magical realism : "What were these authors of reputation doing — grown men and women of the twentieth century — granting supernatural powers to their characters?" Perowne earnestly tried to appreciate fiction, under instruction from his daughter he read both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary , but could not accept their artificiality, even though they dwelt on detail and ordinariness. [11] Perowne's dismissive attitude towards literature is directly contrasted with his scientific world-view in his struggle to comprehend the modern world. [11] Perowne explicitly ponders this question, "The times are strange enough. Why make things up?". [11] Perowne's world view is rebutted by his daughter, Daisy, a young poet.

In the book's climax in chapter four, while he struggles to remain calm offering medical solutions to Baxter's illness, she quotes Matthew Arnold 's poem Dover Beach , which calls for civilised values in the world, temporarily placating the assailant's violent mood. [3] McEwan described his intention as wanting to "play with this idea, whether we need stories". [16] Brian Bethune interpreted McEwan's approach to Perowne as "mercilessly [mocking] his own protagonist...But Perowne's blind spot [literature] is less an author's little joke than a plea for the saving grace of literature." [15] Similarly he is irreligious, his work making him aware of the fragility of life and consciousness's reliance on the functioning brain. [11] His morality is nuanced, weighing both sides of an issue. When leaving the confrontation with Baxter he questions his use of his medical knowledge, even though it was in self defense, and with genuine Hippocratic feeling. While shopping for his fish supper, he cites scientific research that shows greater consciousness in fish, and wonders whether he should stop eating them.

[11] An Iraqi professor he treated has told him of the brutality Saddam Hussein 's rule, but also takes seriously his children's concerns about the war. Genre and style Saturday is a "post 9/11" novel, dealing with the change in lifestyle faced by Westerners after the 11th of September attacks . As such, Christopher Hitchens characterised it as "unapologetically anchored as it is in the material world and its several discontents". [5] "Structurally, Saturday is a tightly wound tour de force of several strands", it is both a thriller which portrays a very attractive family, and an allegory of the world after 11 September 2001 which meditates on the fragility of life. [14] The book obeys the classical unities of place, time and action, following one man's day against the backdrop of a grander historical narrative - the anti-war protests happening in the city that same day. [9] The protagonist's errands are surrounded by the recurring leitmotif of hyper real, ever-present screens which report the progress of the plane and the march Perowne has earlier encountered.

[11] Saturday is in tune with its protagonist's literary tastes, "magical realism" it is not. [5] The 24-hour narrative led critics to compare the book to similar novels, especially Ulysses by James Joyce , which features a man crossing a city, [15] and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , of which Michiko Kakutani described Saturday as an "up-to-the-moment, post-9/11 variation." [10] The novel is narrated in the third person, limited point of view : the reader learns of events as Perowne does. Using the free indirect style the narrator inhabits Perowne, a neurosurgeon, who often thinks rationally, explaining phenomena using medical terminology.

[1] This allows McEwan to capture some of the "white noise that we almost forget as soon as we think it, unless we stop and write it down." [16] Hitchens highlighted how the author separates himself from his character with a "Runyonesque historical present ("He rises …" "He strides …") that solidifies the context and the actuality." [5] Reception Saturday was both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, a bestseller in Britain and America. It spent a week at No. 3 on both the New York Times Best Seller List on 15 April 2005, [17] and Publishers Weekly (4 April 2005) lists, Publishers Weekly listed it the next week also. [18] A strong performance for literary fiction, Saturday sold over 250,000 copies on release, and signings were heavily attended. [19] The paperback edition sold another quarter of a million. [20] Ruth Scurr reviewed the book in The Times, calling McEwan "[maybe] the best novelist in Britain and is certainly operating at the height of his formidable powers".

[9] She praised his examination of happiness in the 21st century, particularly from the point of view of a surgeon: "doctors see real lives fall to pieces in their consulting rooms or on their operating tables, day in, day out. Often they mend what is broken, and open the door to happiness again." [9] Mr Hitchens said the "sober yet scintillating pages of Saturday" confirmed the maturation of McEwan and displayed both his soft, humane, side and his hard, intellectual, scientific, side. [5] Reviewers celebrated McEwan's dissection of the quotidian and his talent for observation and description. Michiko Kakutani liked the "myriad of small, telling details and a reverence for their very ordinariness ", and the suspense created that threatens these. [10] Tim Adams concurred in The Observer calling the observation "wonderfully precise". [21] Mark Lawson in the Guardian, said McEwan's style had matured into "scrupulous, sensual rhythms" and noted the considered word choice that enables his work. Perowne, for example, is a convincing neurosurgeon by the end of the book.

[22] This attention to detail allowed McEwan to use all the tricks of fiction to generate "a growing sense of disquiet with the tiniest finger-flicks of detail". [14] The "set-piece" construction of the book was noticed by many critics, Mrs Scurr praised it, describing a series of "vivid tableaux", [9] but John Banville was less impressed, calling it an assembly of discrete set pieces, though he said the treatment of the car crash and its aftermath was "masterful", and Perowne's visit to his mother "in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force." [3] From the initial "dramatic overture" of the aircraft scence, there were "astonishing pages of description", sometimes "heart-stopping", though it was perhaps a touch too artful at times, according to Michael Dirda in The Washington Post . [14] Christopher Hitchens said that McEwan delivered a "virtuoso description of the aerodynamics of a squash game" enjoyable even "to a sports hater like myself", [5] Banville said he, as a literary man, had been bored by the same scene.

[23] Zoe Heller praised the tension in the climax as "vintage McEwan nightmare" but questioned the resolution as "faintly preposterous". [11] Dissenting, John Banville wrote a scathing review of the book for The New York Review of Books . [3] He described Saturday as a the sort of thing that a committee directed to produce a 'novel of our time' would write, the politics were "banal"; the tone arrogant, self-satisfied and incompetent; the characters cardboard cut-outs. He felt McEwan strove too hard to display technical knowledge "and his ability to put that knowledge into good, clean prose". [3] Saturday won the James Tait Black Prize for fiction; [24] and was nominated on the long-list of the Man Booker Prize in 2005.

[25] Influence According to songwriter Neil Finn , the Crowded House song "People Are Like Suns", from Time on Earth (2007), begins with lyrics inspired by the beginning of Saturday, stating "...when I wrote it, I was reading Ian McEwan 's novel Saturday, which begins with a man on his balcony watching his plane go down, so the first lines borrow something from that image." [26] See also September 11, 2001 attacks in popular culture Notes ^ McEvoy, Dermot. (26 March 2007.) " The usual paperback suspects: Rachael Ray, movie tie-ins and the still-kicking sudoku ". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved on 4 February 2010. ^ Adams, Tim. (30 January 2005.) " When Saturday comes ". The Observer. Retrieved on 4 February 2010. ^ Lawson, Mark. (22 January 2005.) " Against the flow ". The Guardian. Retrieved on 4 February 2010.

^ "Squash" New York Review of Books Volume 52, Number 11 · 23 June 2005, Sutherland, John; Banville, John" ^ " Previous winners - fiction ". James Tait Black Prize website. Retrieved on 4 February 2010. ^ " Prize Archive 2005 ". The Man Booker Prize website. Retrieved on 4 February 2010. ^ " Crowded House ". (7 August 2007.) Uncut Magazine. Retrieved on 17 August 2007. External links Saturday by McEwan, Ian Reviews (0) From the pen of a master -- the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize--winning author of Atonement -- comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man -- a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children.

Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before.On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne's day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him -- with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive.From the Hardcover edition. Review this book (Want a chance to win $50 ?

Log-in or create an account first!) (You'll be automatically entered for a chance to win $50!) Saturday: Ian McEwan: Trade Paperback: 9781400076192: Powell's Books 2006 Morning News Tournament of Books Nominee Staff Pick This startling novel examines one very bad day in the life of a smart, happy surgeon. Henry's life looks very different from morning to night in this remarkable character study. McEwan is a genius! Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com Synopses & Reviews Publisher Comments From the pen of a master — the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement — comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off.

He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before. On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne’s day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne’s professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him — with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive. From the Hardcover edition. Review "In the predawn sky on a Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sees a plane with a wing afire streaking toward Heathrow. His first thought is terrorism  especially since this is the day of a public demonstration against the pending Iraq war.

Eventually, danger to Perowne and his family will come from another source, but the plane, like the balloon in the first scene of Enduring Love, turns out to be a harbinger of a world forever changed. Meanwhile, the reader follows Perowne through his day, mainly via an interior monologue. His cerebral peregrination records, in turn, the meticulous details of brain surgery, a car accident followed by a confrontation with a hoodlum, a far-from-routine squash game, a visit to Perowne's mother in a nursing home and a family reunion. It is during the latter event, at the end of the day, that the ominous pall that has hovered over the narrative explodes into violence, and Perowne's sense that the world has become 'a commuity of anxiety' plays out in suspense, delusion, heroism and reconciliation. 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.

If this novel is not as complex a work as McEwan's bestselling Atonement , it is nonetheless a wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review "An increasingly mellowed but no less gripping McEwan....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 Reviews Review "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." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Review "Saturday is a tightly wound tour de force of several strands  a Hitchcockian thriller, an allegory of the post-9/11 world, the portrait of a very attractive family, and a meditation on the fragility of life and all that we most value." Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Review "Few literary events are today met with as much enthusiasm as the publication of a McEwan novel.

Saturday, a brilliant and graceful hymn to the contented contemporary man, will be greeted with cheers." Anita Shreve , The Boston Globe Review "Saturday lives up to its own standards throughout. Its author's scrupulous application of his talent merits real gratitude from its readers. Saturday is distinguished by an intense literary imagination that is fundamentally scientific in its vision and its criteria." Marek Kohn , The Independent Review "One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, [Saturday] succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world." Mark Lawson, The Guardian Review "The man who could staunchly write, as the southern extremity of Manhattan was still awash in fire and stench, that in effect Amor vincit omnia here lucidly shows us that civilization and culture and the life of the mind, fragile as they seemingly are, nonetheless have a resilience that can outlast barbarism." Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly ( read the entire Atlantic Monthly review ) Review "There is no secret as to why Ian McEwan has gained such a large, intelligent and devoted readership.

In book after book, and now, especially in Saturday, he has gone directly against the grain of fashionable contemporary cynicism and proved that a novel can be topical without being either obvious or dogmatic, that a writer can derive aesthetic sense from confronting the world's concerns." Allen Barra, Salon.com ( read the entire Salon.com review ) Review "The imagination is blessed by its holder, just as the humanities humanize only those who are willing to be humanized. Ian McEwan's imagination is worth cherishing; Mohammed Atta's is not. It is just this tension that surfaces in his fine and affecting new novel, and which is never quite resolved." James Wood, The New Republic ( read the entire New Republic review ) Synopsis In his triumphant new novel, Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement, follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish. Henry Perowne  a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deeply in love with his wife and grown-up children  plans to play a game of squash, visit his elderly mother, and cook dinner for his family.

But after a minor traffic accident leads to an unsettling confrontation, Perowne must set aside his plans and summon a strength greater than he knew he had in order to preserve the life that is dear to him. About the Author Ian McEwan is the author of nine novels, including Amsterdam , for which he won the Booker Prize in 1998, and Atonement . Reading Group Guide 1. Henry Perowne has a loving, intelligent wife, two gifted, handsome children, a large, elegant house in central London, and a job that deeply satisfies him. He appears to be, in all ways, a successful and enviable individual. He is also thoughtful, ethical, and intelligent. Do these facts make him an agreeable protagonist? What are his flaws or his failings? 2. Why is the parable of Schrödingers cat [p. 18] so fitting an end to the first section of the novel? Why does Henry reject it as a thought experiment? How does the image of the cat in the box address the idea of disasters that occur outside the range of our own consciousness? 3. McEwan takes his epigraph from Saul Bellows novel Herzog, which was published in 1964.

The list describes the conditions surrounding “what it means to be a man” in Herzogs America. How closely do these conditions still apply in the lives of Perowne and Baxter? Does McEwan, like Bellow, wish to remind his readers that “you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot”? Does Saturday depend upon the moral engagement of the reader? 4. On the storys opening page we are introduced to the main character as “Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon” [p. 1]. How does Henrys professional training shape the way he thinks about the world around him, and about himself? In his work, Henry experiences a kind of self-erasure: “Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. Hes been delivered into a pure present. . . . In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness” [p. 266]. How does his love of work shape his life? 5.

Saturday is unique in that it limits its time frame to a single day in recent history—February 15, 2003—a day that most readers will remember because of the massive anti-war demonstrations that took place. What is the effect of this straitened approach to time, and its attendant view of history-in-the-making? How, in light of world events since then, does it feel to look back to that day, before the war in Iraq began? 6. Clearly Baxter is a violent and deeply unstable man; is he also likeable in certain ways? How does Perownes view of Baxter from a neurological perspective change the readers relationship to him? 7. Just after September 11, 2001, Ian McEwan wrote an essay for the Guardian newspaper about the effect of watching those terrible, world-changing events on television. He wrote, “We remember what we have seen, and we daydream helplessly. Lately, most of us have inhabited the space between the terrible actuality and these daydreams. Waking before dawn, going about our business during the day, we fantasize ourselves into the events.

What if it was me?”* In Saturday, Henry awakens before dawn to the sight of a flaming aircraft and is unsettled by the threat this vision presents to his city, his family, and his way of life. In what ways does Saturday communicate this sense of living with an ongoing threat of a large-scale disaster? How do the characters in the novel cope with this somewhat abstracted sense of danger? *Read the Guardian essay: 8. During his visit to his mother, Henry acknowledges a belated appreciation of her way of thinking, which as a younger man he had thought trivial and unintelligent: “He had no business as a young man being condescending towards her. . . . Unlike in Daisys novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life” [p. 159]. How does Henry communicate with his mother, and what does his attitude toward her tell us about him? In what ways does Saturday embrace the conventions of fiction, such as “moments of precise reckoning,” and how does it deny them? Does it work in the chaotic, inconclusive style of real life, or does it in fact give us moments of resolution and reckoning, forgiveness and satisfying closure? 9.

In the first few pages of McEwans The Child in Time, a child is kidnapped during a visit to the supermarket and never seen again. In Enduring Love, the protagonists life changes irrevocably when he sees a man fall to his death from a hot-air balloon. At the outset of Saturday, the opening disaster appears to be coming from airborne terrorists attacking the city; the real danger comes from a revenge-seeking man who has been damaged by his own unlucky genetic fate. What effect, if any, does this unexpected shift from a public terror to a private one have on the story? 10. British critics have expressed a sense of disbelief that Henry would not recognize the lines of Matthew Arnolds poem “Dover Beach,”* one of the most famous poems in English literature. Yet Henry has pointed out repeatedly that he is impatient when reading literature. Is it ironic that Henry—a character, after all, in a literary work—is so resistant to the appeal of fiction and poetry? *Read the poem online at: 11. Why might McEwan have chosen “Dover Beach” as the poem that saves Daisy by appealing so powerfully to Baxter [pp. 228-30]? What does it mean to him?

What emotions does the poems speaker express? 12. McEwans choice to locate the narrative perspective within a single point of view (Henrys) focuses the reader on the subject of human consciousness. Stuck in traffic just before his collision with Baxter, Henry thinks, “A second can be a long time in introspection” [p. 80]. How does the description of Henrys introspection, which makes up a large part of the novel, affect its pace? If you have read other novels (like those of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, or James Joyce) that delve as closely as Saturday into the representation of human consciousness, how does McEwans approach differ? 13. Perowne takes a wry view of both the American President and the British Prime Minister. What is wrong, in Henrys opinion, with both of these men? What motivates them? What does Henry and Rosalinds brief meeting with Tony Blair expose about men in power? 14. Operating on Baxter, Perowne thinks, “Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brains fundamental secret will be laid open one day.

But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious? . . . He knows it will come, the secret will be revealed-over decades, as long as the scientists and the institutions remain in place, the explanations will refine themselves into an irrefutable truth about consciousness” [pp. 262—63]. Do you agree with Henrys faith in science? In terms of the problems presented in Saturday, what can science solve, and what can it not? 15. In Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, a wealthy society woman learns at a party she is hosting that a shell-shocked veteran of World War I has killed himself by jumping from a window. She feels guilty and ashamed that she hasnt shared his suffering and fears that her privileged life has cut her off from real empathy. Does Henrys decision to operate on Baxter reflect a similar sense of guilt or responsibility? Why does Henry not share Rosalinds desire for revenge? 16.

McEwan is interested in the contrast between the human capacity for empathy, which is strengthened by the act of reading fiction, and our capacity for violence against each other: “We are capable of acts of extraordinary destruction. I think its inherent. I think one of the great tasks of art is really to explore that. . . . I personally think the novel, above all forms in literature, is able to investigate human nature and try and understand those two sides, all those many, many sides of human nature.”* How does Saturday engage in this juxtaposition of violence with empathy? Which of the characters in the novel are most attuned to the experience of others? If you have read Atonement, are the two novels similar or different in their handling of the question of imaginative empathy? *Read the complete Frontline interview: 17. Saturday features several bravura passages of descriptive writing, such as the confrontation between Henry and Baxter [pp. 81-100], the squash game [pp. 104-118], and the surgical operation on Baxters brain [pp. 253-66]. What is the effect of these passages, and what do they tell us about McEwans style?

What sets McEwan apart from other contemporary writers of literary fiction? 18. Henry doesnt join the peace march because to do so would express a more uncomplicated view of events than he actually holds. He looks, with hindsight, at the ideologies of the previous century: “Now we think we do see, how do things stand? After the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century, after so much vile behaviour, so many deaths, a queasy agnosticism has settled around these matters of justice and redistributed wealth. No more big ideas. The world must improve, if at all, by tiny steps. People mostly take an existential view-having to sweep the streets for a living looks like simple bad luck. Its not a visionary age. The streets need to be clean. Let the unlucky enlist” [p. 74]. How would you characterize his moral point of view? 19. For Henry, both the fiery plane and the peace march invoke thoughts of terrorism: “London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. Rush hour will be a convenient time. . . . The authorities agree an attacks inevitable” [p. 286].

One reviewer observed that in the four years that have passed since 9/11, “Security . . . has become the great obsession. . . . The prevailing public mood has come to resemble closely that of an Ian McEwan novel. Constant menace, punctuated with nightmarish atrocities; the insult of the worlds continuing normality: these are things we all understand very well” [Theo Tait, The Times Literary Supplement (London), February 9, 2005]. What is it like to read this novel in the wake not only of 9/11 but also of the July 2005 attacks on London? In what ways does it reflect the changes in your own life and consciousness? NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Dazzling. . . . Powerful. . . . McEwan has shown how we . . . live today.” —The New York Times The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your groups reading of Saturday, Ian McEwans highly acclaimed novel of urban life in the aftermath of 9/11.

4.5 4 Essay on Success in America - Perowne wakes early in the morning to look out Essay on Success in America Essay on Success in America - Perowne wakes early in the... SCHOOL View Full Document Henry Perowne is a successful neurosurgeon, married with two adult, also successful children and lives what seems to be a fortunate upper-middle class life. Ian McEwan's novel Saturday details the events of Henry Perowne's typical Saturday set on February 15, 2003. On this day, an anti-war demonstration against the invasion of Iraq is taking place. Perowne has a series of events planned throughout the day starting with a squash game and ending with dinner with his family to celebrate his daughter, Daisy's homecoming from Paris. In the review by W.R. Greer, A Day in the Life, it perfectly describes the theme of the novel. "Ian McEwan through Henry Perowne, examines the randomness that makes up a life, and the random events that can undo one. How does one live in a post 9/11 world? In the first pages of Saturday, the protagonist, Henry This preview has intentionally blurred sections.

Sign up to view the full version. View Full Document This is the end of the preview. Sign up to access the rest of the document. Unformatted text preview: Perowne wakes early in the morning to look out of his window at a fiery object in the sky. Not knowing if it is a meteor or a plane taken over by terrorists, Perowne idly stands there contemplating if he should call 911 or do something. He is in the comfort of his lavish home and choses to do nothing. There he is able to distance himself from what could be a tragedy happening. &quot;The horror of what he can't see. Catastrophe observed from a safe distance. Watching death on a large scale, but seeing no one die.&quot; (McEwan, 15) The second incident is Perowne's first encounter with Baxter. He is on his way to his squash game when he had to detour because of an anti-war demonstration. He gets in a minor accident with Baxter and two other guys. Perowne uses his medical knowledge to distract Baxter and avoid any confrontation.... St.

Louis CC HIST 133 - Spring 2011 "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug" a quot Essay on American Soldiers Saturday - Ian McEwan Saturday - Return to top of the page - Our Assessment: The NY Rev. of Books F Impressed -- though the American critics decidedly less enamored From the Reviews: "McEwan's novel ends with the hard-won virtues of forgiveness, familial love, and decency. It's not the grace found at the end of Atonement, but there's something moving in the fact that Henry always can be counted on to do the decent thing." - Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor "The highly textured but low-pitched prose, with its accretion of detail and its insistent use of the present tense, allows the submerged uncertainty of life after 9/11 to emerge not as an occasion for rhetorical or stylistic fireworks but as one of the many tonal strains, albeit an intense one, pervading a man�s daily experience." - Sam Munson, Commentary "This is a rich book, sensuous and thoughtful.

Occasionally, McEwan stacks his intellectual cards too neatly (.....) In general, however, McEwan has found in Saturday the right form to showcase his dazzling talents." - Caroline Moore, Daily Telegraph "Saturday is not a McEwan masterpiece: it is just a little too safe. But it is still hugely enjoyable for all that." - The Economist "(H)is least frightening book yet. The violent confrontation late in the narrative may be the silliest, most overwrought climax McEwan has ever cooked up. Rather than the manifestation of a dark, unknowable force -- or even just an angry, complicated man with a will of his own -- Baxter turns out to be the hapless puppet of a grotesque neurological condition that Perowne manages to diagnose at a glance." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly "None of this is in itself remarkable, but McEwan�s examination of the minute workings of conscience and personality is thrillingly shrewd. (...) In other hands this could become maddeningly flashy, a torrent of clever aperçus and topical graffiti. But McEwan�s style has long been skewed towards understatement; even when he�s itemising the details of a craniotomy.

In Saturday he is at his best -- thoughtful, eloquent, yet restrained. The novel has all the technical assurance of its predecessors, and suggests as well a newly political sensibility and a seductive, Joycean attention to the textures of normality." - Henry Hitchings, Financial Times "By recording with such loving care the elements of one rich Englishman's life, Saturday explores the question of to what extent it is possible to insulate yourself against the world's concerns. (...) One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, it succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world." - Mark Lawson, The Guardian "Ecce homo: in this middle-aged, middle-class, well-to-do white man, McEwan distils all that is good, decent and honourable about English society today." - Elena Seymenliyska, The Guardian "Among the novel's panoply of virtues is its acute and sensitive ear for the noise in the background of ordered urban life. (...) Its author's scrupulous application of his talent merits real gratitude from its readers.

Saturday is distinguished by an intense literary imagination that is fundamentally scientific in its vision and its criteria." - Marek Kohn, The Independent "Refreshing and engrossing, Saturday has a pleasing intimacy, dense with revelation, and is not at all encumbered by dogmatic argument. (...) McEwan's superb novel amply demonstrates how good fiction, by dramatising unwieldy and fraught ideas in a deeply personal narrative, can fashion the world into gobbets sometimes more digestible than factual reportage." - James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday "Saturday is a commentary on how politics gets invented from the stuff of emotion the way mind is created out of the brain. Read (and written) in the light of events following the Iraq invasion, this carefully ambiguous tale about the "brightly wrought illusion" of unstable selves amounts to a cool, temperate, humane protest against belligerent certainty. (...) This extraordinary book is not a political novel. It is a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics." - Lee Siegel, The Nation "Doch dem Leviathan der Politik hat McEwan in Saturday auf diese Weise zu viel an literarischen Werten geopfert.

Ein politischer Kommentar zur Zeit seit dem 11. September und auch den Bombenattentaten von London ist das Buch sehr wohl, doch als Roman ist es missglückt." - Uwe Pralle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung "McEwan ties a lead weight to his own carefully accumulated details with this invocation of the magical powers of poetry. For his accumulation has been splendid." - Max Watman, The New Criterion "But one will forgive much when prose is as good as this" - James Wood, The New Republic "In the foreground, there is personal violence; in the background, the implied violence of the war in Iraq. And yet -- unusually for McEwan -- Saturday is about feeling good rather than feeling bad. The novel addresses the idea that pleasure and happiness don't make good fictional subjects. (...) It would have taken the tiniest nod to the possibility of pretension to redeem Perowne into charm. For all his flaws, he is interesting, and the story, as ever with McEwan, is twisting and clever.

But only when the surgeon visits his mother do we glimpse a novel that is likeable as well as smart." - Sophie Harrison, New Statesman "McEwan is skeptical, sometimes brutally so, of this society: It has made us unfeeling, and unsure. But it has been his method, and even his genius, to accept its premises. In crafting grim, carefully structured novels in which characters receive their comeuppance -- but, at least in his recent work, never too, too much of it -- he has become the consummate professional novelist." - Keith Gessen, New York "Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. (...) Another source of dismay, one for which, admittedly, Ian McEwan cannot wholly be held accountable, is the ecstatic reception Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike.

Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this ?" - John Banville, The New York Review of Books "Saturday reads like an up-to-the-moment, post-9/11 variation on Woolf's classic 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. (...) 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." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "In Saturday, as in all McEwan's work, there is much to admire in the efficiency and clarity with which he marshals his themes.

Here, though, his control over his material is too pronounced." - Zoe Heller, The New York Times Book Review "(A) novel you can't help admiring and can't possibly love." - David Gates, Newsweek "His gift of observation, wonderfully precise, now comes thick and fast. There is next to nothing in this novel that feels forced; the author's mature attention illuminates equally everything it falls on. (...) One strand of the book's many arguments explores this debate between rationality and imagination. For all the author's occasionally irritating in-jokes, it is not clear which side comes out on top." - Tim Adams, The Observer "Saturday appears indebted to Mrs. Dalloway for its premise. Yet McEwan has claimed Saul Bellow as Muse, and this book is more akin to Seize the Day as well as those Bellovian fictions in which nasty urban realities intrude on an urbane man�s privileged existence." - Steven G. Kellman, Review of Contemporary Fiction "(A) magnificently imagined and surprisingly flawed work." - David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle "In Atonement, McEwan chose young characters whose life-changing experiences slowly resonated through wider events.

In Saturday he has turned it all around: a middle-aged hero resistant to change is set against the fate of millions. Perowne cannot hope to win. The writing is as sharp and vivid as ever; it is the raw material that is flawed." - Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday "Offsetting local and global menace, McEwan invites us to make other parallels -- not least between the surgical dissections of the neurologist and the layer by layer revelations of the novelist, so absorbed in probing his character�s hard-wired psyche and knotted skein of emotional threads." - Tom Adair, The Scotsman "McEwan is writing close to the news and to the facts: fiction has to take its place within a context of reality. Both are given equal weight, but there can be no doubt that this hyper-real novel is absolutely convincing on its own terms. The reader is able to coexist with the writer, in an identical time frame and with the same preoccupations. (...) Saturday is an exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained.

It is undoubtedly McEwan�s best." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator "McEwan's fiction has typically dwelt on worst-case scenarios (.....) In this novel, though, threats are never quite implemented. Perhaps this is a sign of artistic maturity, a response to the political situation, or both." - Lewis Jones, Sunday Telegraph "Saturday has its inert elements (...). But, written with superb exactness, complex, suspenseful, reflective and humane, this novel about an expert on the human brain by an expert on the human mind reinforces his status as the supreme novelist of his generation." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times "(A) book of great moral maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence -- chemical, biological, social and political -- threatening it. Everyone should read Saturday (.....) Artistically, morally and politically, he excels." - Ruth Scurr, The Times "It is all very impressive: McEwan gives lie to the view that novels can no longer encapsulate the present, and shows that being topical does not mean being merely gossipy. (...) Saturday is much less boring than it sounds.

It is executed with his customary skill, intelligence and seriousness: the structure is minutely planned; the individual scenes have a cinematic, brightly lit clarity; the prose is clean, sharp and watchful. And, inevitably, there is a constant undercurrent of menace to keep readers on their toes." - Theo Tait, Times Literary Supplement "His new novel, Saturday, can only be described as dull. (...) (C)ompared with Atonement, Amsterdam and Enduring Love, among others, Saturday is a chore to read, bogged down by McEwan's political musings and obvious medical research." - Deidre Donahue, USA Today "This is not a modest book, and it buckles under its immense ambitions. (...) The novel is most provocative as a philosophical inquiry into happiness -- though even in this capacity, it tends toward a defeated conservatism." - Dennis Lim, The Village Voice "At times its implied meanings may seem too explicit. This is a political novel finally, and one that appears to beat its drum a little hard at times. (...) Despite all its virtues, and these include some astonishing pages of description (...) Saturday still feels a little too artful, just a smidgen over-contrived.

Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of observing the dramatic unities of place, time and action: The intersection of the public and private takes on a disturbing neatness." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Das Problem mit glücklichen Menschen in der schöngeistigen Literatur ist nicht, daß sie so selten vorkommen, sondern daß sie, wenn sie vorkommen, ihren Kollegen aus den Kitschromanen so schrecklich ähnlich sehen. Nicht nur die Dialoge sind ärgerlich. Die ganze Konstruktion erweist sich spätestens beim zweiten Lesen als allzu durchsichtig, durch das Gebäude des Romans pfeift ein eiseskalter Wind. Es ist alles zu genau abgezirkelt.

Und genau deswegen kippt auch die Konstruktion immer wieder in die Kolportage." - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt "Es gibt ein ganzes Bündel von Gründen, Saturday zu loben: die sorgfältige Architektur, die Intelligenz der Beobachtungen, die elegant unauffällige Sprache (von Bernhard Robben glänzend übersetzt) und die geradezu aristotelische Einheit von Ort, Zeit und Handlung. Und doch bleibt ein Unbehagen. Es gleicht dem eines Varieté-Besuchers, der den verblüffenden Kunststücken eines Zauberkünstlers atemlos gefolgt ist, am Ende aber die Vorstellung mit leerem Kopf verlässt." - Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole.

We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. - Return to top of the page -

Question: What is the title of the novel by Ian McEwan set in February 2003 on the day of the demonstration against the invasion of Iraq?
Answer: 'SATURDAY'