I had never read Ian McEwan. I still haven’t – but I listened to the unabridged version of his new book.

I will attempt to write a review which does not spoil the book – but perhaps whets your appetite. McEwan writes beautifully, exploring serious topics.

Saturday is about the brain, aggression (violence), the decision to invade Iraq, mortality, being a doctor, love, the contrast between science and art, reality and fantasy. Saturday describes one day in the life of a neurosurgeon – Henry Perowne. Through his eyes, thoughts and conversations we explore these issues (and more) in depth.

I first considered listening to Saturday because of a brief note in my favorite mystery blog – Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. I then saw this quote in the NY Times review of the book – One Day In the Life

When British journalists complain — as they often do — about the ”elitism” of contemporary British literature, the honorable exception they often cite is the fiction of Ian McEwan. The distinctive achievement of McEwan’s work has been to marry literary seriousness and ambition with a pace and momentum more commonly associated with genre fiction.

That quote grabbed me. While I mostly read (and listen) to crime fiction, I do like the occasional “serious” fiction. I read Jonathan Lethem avidly. I loved “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime”. Then I discovered that the book described the day in the life of a physician (albeit a neurosurgeon). I was planning to do a lot of driving – and wanted a book to listen to. I made a good decision.

This paragraph from the review does a wonderful job of describing Perowne

Unlike Joyce’s Bloom, whose precedent his daylong interior odyssey is surely intended to invoke — or Bellow’s Herzog, whose thoughts on what it is ”to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass,” provide this book’s epigraph — Perowne is not a lyrical thinker. He is a pragmatist, a ”professional reductionist,” a man whose preference for verifiable fact leaves him immune not only to the consolations of religion but, more significantly for McEwan’s purpose, to the pleasures of fiction. Perowne is bothered — irritated — by stories. They are at once too artificially precise, he feels, and not precise enough. They are always proposing faked-up watershed moments, yet they are incapable of delivering answers. Magical realism, with its reckless, childish inventions, is particularly loathsome to him. His daughter, Daisy, keeps prescribing him reading lists in hope of curing his philistinism, but so far, not even Tolstoy and Flaubert have managed to seduce him:

For those intrigued by one review – I offer another – this from the Guardian – When Saturday comes

In every sentence of this, McEwan inhabits Perowne’s restless intelligence with uncanny plausibility. The surgeon is something of a renaissance man, as alive to the nuances of his son’s blues guitar playing and the intricacies of Saddam Hussein’s torture techniques as to the day-to-day miracles of neurobiology. Perowne’s one blind spot is with literature, the passion of his daughter, and McEwan has some private fun with the surgeon’s preference for ‘having the world explained’ than having it reinvented by magical realists, including, in one reference, McEwan himself.

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. In some ways, Perowne is a new kind of character for McEwan. The coldness that has blown through many of his creations is balanced here by something more affecting. Perowne inhabits many of the possibilities of life, the robust achievements of civilisation; though he shares the author’s well-known predilection for flesh and blood (displayed most memorably in McEwan’s seven-page description of the hacking apart of a corpse in The Innocent), he uses that fascination to positive effect. He is a man who met his beloved wife when helping to save her sight on the operating table.

So I strongly recommend this book for those so inclined. Preference for literature varies highly. My father often tells me: de gustibus non est disputandum. I found this day very tasty and thought provoking.

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