Saturday catalogues the local only in order to focus on the global.įor the day on which we take account of Henry is Saturday 15 February 2003. Yet, while the novel is clearly an attempt to set down the textures of everyday life - close reading could improve your cooking, your squash game and even tip you off about what sort of kettle to buy - McEwan has larger concerns than, say, Nicholson Baker in the close auditing of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. It's a measure of the level of incident in Henry's day - and the meticulous close-stitching of McEwan's work as a word-surgeon - that, before his Mercedes S500 reaches the Westway, en route to his mother, he has already witnessed a potential terrorist attack, discussed the Iraq war with his son, made love with his wife, come close to murder on a central London street, lost a game of squash and shopped for a fish stew. I had assumed that this was the beginning of the novel but it turns out to be page 152 of a book of less than 300 pages. What he has done is Saturday, which resembles Amsterdam in sardonically examining the interior life of the contemporary middle classes but departs starkly from the century-long focus of Atonement by taking place over 24 hours, on what is supposed to be the day off of Henry Perowne, a noted London neurosurgeon.Ī recent edition of Granta carried an extract from Saturday, in which Perowne drives out of Oxford in the morning to visit his brain-hazed mother.
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