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Saturday, Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape
Reviewed by Peter Watt (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Saturday starts early for introspective neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. In the darkness before the London dawn he sees, what? A meteor, a comet; no, it's a burning plane.

The image conjures post 9/11 visions of apocalypse, unsettling this generally contented man looking forward to his day off and, that evening, a family reunion.

Perowne is an acute observer of life. He loves his wife, he's proud of his adult children, he's happy with his career, but he is less certain of the grim trends in global politics and is ambivalent about the war against Iraq: Saturday happens to be the day of a huge march protesting against Britain's involvement. Threading his way through the protesters for a squash game, Perowne is involved in a minor car accident, which turns into a brief but ugly confrontation with a small-time thug, Miller, whom Perowne detects is gravely ill.

Perowne's day has many hours to run, but any reader of McEwan will know that it is doomed to go from bad to worse. We will meet Miller again, and it won't be pretty.

McEwan is a master at creating suspense out of the mundane, seamlessly turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. In another writer's hands, Perowne would soon be distorted into a save-the-day cartoon hero, still standing at the explosive end. But McEwan's characters are always "in character", their predicaments are believable and the outcomes are unexaggerated.

Where in other genres we are forced to suspend disbelief from the outset, with McEwan the tension is greater for the fact that his stories are so grounded in predictable behaviour. There is a chilling sense of inevitable doom, never more so than in his brilliant last novel, Atonement.

For much of Perowne's Saturday, not a lot happens. We see the world through the neurosurgeon's eyes (no novel can have explored the brain surgeon's craft in such expert detail); his relationships with his difficult father-in-law, his demented and dying mother; reflections on his own life.

Sounds pedestrian, and yet Saturday is unputdownable. McEwan draws you to the climax with ease – no tricks, no pyrotechnics.
Saturday may not be McEwan's best book but he doesn't disappoint, and it's still better than just about anything else that will make it into print this year.