REVIEW | Saturday by Ian McEwan | Knopf/Random House.

Book jacket: Saturday by Ian McEwan, 2005.

A day in the life of a middle-class guy in the modern world? Total cliché, right?

Well, yes, but while the premise of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday is somewhat stale, the story is far from it.

Saturday’s hero Henry Perowne, a London neurosurgeon, husband and father, is a nice guy with a simple life. He’s content with his lot, happy with his wife, and proud papa to his two artistic children. (One is a poet, the other a musician.)

On Saturday, February 15, 2003 he wakes to witness a plane crash through his bedroom window.

The crash is the beginning of a 24 hour assault on Henry’s tepid little existence. It forces him to confront every aspect of his unexamined and unremarkable life – from his relationships with his family, to his feelings about his work and the culture of his city, to his attitude about the impending war with Iraq.

In reality, on February 15, 2003 demonstrations protesting the coming war took place all over the world, and London’s anti-war marches provide the tense backdrop to this story of unease in a post-9/11 world.

Don’t worry, Saturday isn’t a thinly veiled Bush bashing.

For one thing, being British, Tony Blair is McEwan’s real political target, but besides that, unlike the protagonists in so many judgemental war-themed novels, Henry is refreshingly uncertain about where he stands on the whole war issue. His uncertainty about what is right when it comes to Iraq is what makes this novel most appealing.

Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s leading novelists, and while Saturday is seemingly gimmicky, it’s important to note that he’s merely doing in a single day what most authors would draw out over a year or more. He’s telling the story of an everyday life, blown apart by doubt. The compressed chronology may be a bit hard to swallow, but this novel is ultimately more classic than cliché.

A version of this review of the Ian McEwan novel Saturday was published in Dose magazine, April 18, 2005 and appears below.

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Published in Dose, April 18, 2005.