Saturday (novel)
Encyclopedia
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. Hailed as an exemplar of post 11 September 2001 fiction, 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.
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.
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. 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". He also had several medical doctors and surgeons review the book for accuracy, though few corrections were required to the surgical description. Saturday was also proof-read by McEwan's longstanding circle of friends who review his manuscripts, Timothy Garton Ash
, Craig Raine
, and Galen Strawson
.
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. Christopher Hitchens
, a friend of McEwan's, noted how Perowne's wife, parents and children are the same as his. 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".
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. 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.
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.
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") provides a hopeful side to the book, instead of the unhappiness in contemporary fiction. McEwan's previous novels highlighted the fragility of modern fulfilled life, seemingly minor incidents dramatically upsetting existence. 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. 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". 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.
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". 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." 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". 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:
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.
and Madame Bovary
, but could not accept their artificiality, even though they dwelt on detail and ordinariness. The characterisation of Perowne as indisposed toward literature directly pits it against the scientific world-view in the struggle for explanation. Perowne explicitly ponders this question, "The times are strange enough. Why make things up?".
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. McEwan described his intention as wanting to "play with this idea, whether we need stories". 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."
Similarly he is irreligious, his work making him aware of the fragility of life and consciousness's reliance on the functioning brain. 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. 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.
characterised it as "unapologetically anchored as it is in the material world and its several discontents". "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.
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. 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. Saturday is in tune with its protagonist's literary tastes, "magical realism" it is not. 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, and Virginia Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway, of which Michiko Kakutani
described Saturday as an "up-to-the-moment, post-9/11 variation."
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. 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." 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."
on 15 April 2005, and Publishers Weekly
(4 April 2005) lists, Publishers Weekly listed it the next week also. A strong performance for literary fiction, Saturday sold over 250,000 copies on release, and signings were heavily attended. The paperback edition sold another quarter of a million.
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". 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." 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.
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. Tim Adams concurred in The Observer
calling the observation "wonderfully precise". 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. 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".
The "set-piece" construction of the book was noticed by many critics, Mrs Scurr praised it, describing a series of "vivid tableaux", 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." 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
. Christopher Hitchens said that McEwan delivered a "virtuoso description of the aerodynamics of a squash game" enjoyable even "to a sports hater like myself", Banville said he, as a literary man, had been bored by the same scene. Zoe Heller praised the tension in the climax as "vintage McEwan nightmare" but questioned the resolution as "faintly preposterous".
Dissenting, John Banville wrote a scathing review of the book for The New York Review of Books
. 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".
Saturday won the James Tait Black Prize for fiction; and was nominated on the long-list of the Man Booker Prize
in 2005.
, 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."
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....
set in Fitzrovia
Fitzrovia
Fitzrovia is a neighbourhood in central London, near London's West End lying partly in the London Borough of Camden and partly in the City of Westminster ; and situated between Marylebone and Bloomsbury and north of Soho. It is characterised by its mixed-use of residential, business, retail,...
, London, on Saturday, 15 February 2003, during a large demonstration
February 15, 2003 anti-war protest
The February 15, 2003 anti-war protest was a coordinated day of protests across the world expressing opposition to the then-imminent Iraq War. It was part of a series of protests and political events that had begun in 2002 and continued as the war took place....
against the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2003 invasion of Iraq
The 2003 invasion of Iraq , was the start of the conflict known as the Iraq War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days of major combat operations...
. 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
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
in the United Kingdom and in April in the United States, was critically and commercially successful. Hailed as an exemplar of post 11 September 2001 fiction, critics noted McEwan's elegant prose, careful dissection of daily life, and interwoven themes. It won the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
for fiction.
Composition and publication
Atonement (novel)
Atonement is a 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan.On a fateful day, a young girl makes a terrible mistake that has life-changing effects for many people...
and On Chesil Beach
On Chesil Beach
On Chesil Beach is a 2007 novel by the Booker Prize-winning British writer Ian McEwan. The novel was selected for the 2007 Booker Prize shortlist....
, two novels of historical fiction. McEwan has said how he prefers to alternate between writing about the past and the present.
While researching the book, McEwan spent two years work-shadowing Neil Kitchen, a neurosurgeon at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery is a neurological hospital in London, United Kingdom and part of the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust...
in Queen Square, London. 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". He also had several medical doctors and surgeons review the book for accuracy, though few corrections were required to the surgical description. Saturday was also proof-read by McEwan's longstanding circle of friends who review his manuscripts, Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash is a British historian, author and commentator. He is currently serving as Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe...
, Craig Raine
Craig Raine
Craig Raine is an English poet and critic born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England. Along with Christopher Reid, he is the best-known exponent of Martian poetry.-Life:...
, and Galen Strawson
Galen Strawson
Galen John Strawson is a British philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics , John Locke, David Hume and Kant. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford , from where he won a scholarship to Winchester College...
.
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. Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
, a friend of McEwan's, noted how Perowne's wife, parents and children are the same as his. 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".
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. The complete novel was published by the Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
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.
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
Squash (sport)
Squash is a high-speed racquet sport played by two players in a four-walled court with a small, hollow rubber ball...
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
Huntington's disease
Huntington's disease, chorea, or disorder , is a neurodegenerative genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and leads to cognitive decline and dementia. It typically becomes noticeable in middle age. HD is the most common genetic cause of abnormal involuntary writhing movements called chorea...
. 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
Father-in-law
A parent-in-law is a person who has a legal affinity with another by being the parent of the other's spouse. Many cultures and legal systems impose duties and responsibilities on persons connected by this relationship...
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
Pregnancy
Pregnancy refers to the fertilization and development of one or more offspring, known as a fetus or embryo, in a woman's uterus. In a pregnancy, there can be multiple gestations, as in the case of twins or triplets...
. Finding out she is a poet, Baxter asks her to recite a poem. Rather than one of her own, she recites Dover Beach
Dover Beach
"Dover Beach" is a short lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849...
, which affects Baxter emotionally, effectively disarming him. Instead he becomes enthusiastic about Perowne's renewed talk about new treatment for Huntington's disease
Huntington's disease
Huntington's disease, chorea, or disorder , is a neurodegenerative genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and leads to cognitive decline and dementia. It typically becomes noticeable in middle age. HD is the most common genetic cause of abnormal involuntary writhing movements called chorea...
. 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.
Happiness
McEwan's earlier work has explored the fragility of existence using a clinical perspective, Hitchens even hails him a "chronicler of the physics of every-day life". 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. 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.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") provides a hopeful side to the book, instead of the unhappiness in contemporary fiction. McEwan's previous novels highlighted the fragility of modern fulfilled life, seemingly minor incidents dramatically upsetting existence. Saturday returns to a theme in Atonement
Atonement (novel)
Atonement is a 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan.On a fateful day, a young girl makes a terrible mistake that has life-changing effects for many people...
, which plotted the disruption of a lie to a middle class family, and in The Child in Time
The Child in Time
The Child in Time is a novel by Ian McEwan. It won the Whitbread Novel Award for that year. The story concerns Stephen, an author of children's books, and his wife, two years after the kidnapping of their three-year-old daughter Kate.-Plot:...
, where a small child is kidnapped during a day's shopping. 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". 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.
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. 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. Mr HitchensChristopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
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". The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
newspaper set the context as a "world where terrorism and war make headlines, but also filter into the smallest corners of people's lives." 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". 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:
"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?"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.
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.
Rationalism
McEwan establishes Perowne as anchored in the real world. 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 KareninaAnna Karenina
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...
and Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...
, but could not accept their artificiality, even though they dwelt on detail and ordinariness. The characterisation of Perowne as indisposed toward literature directly pits it against the scientific world-view in the struggle for explanation. Perowne explicitly ponders this question, "The times are strange enough. Why make things up?".
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
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
's poem Dover Beach
Dover Beach
"Dover Beach" is a short lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849...
, which calls for civilised values in the world, temporarily placating the assailant's violent mood. McEwan described his intention as wanting to "play with this idea, whether we need stories". Brian Bethune interpreted McEwan's approach to Perowne as "mercilessly
Similarly he is irreligious, his work making him aware of the fragility of life and consciousness's reliance on the functioning brain. 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. An Iraqi professor he treated has told him of the brutality Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003...
'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 HitchensChristopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
characterised it as "unapologetically anchored as it is in the material world and its several discontents". "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.
The book obeys the classical unities
Classical unities
The classical unities, Aristotelian unities or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics. In their neoclassical form they are as follows:...
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. 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. Saturday is in tune with its protagonist's literary tastes, "magical realism" it is not. The 24-hour narrative led critics to compare the book to similar novels, especially Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
by James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, which features a man crossing a city, and Virginia Woolf's
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
Mrs. Dalloway, of which Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani
is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times and is considered by many to be a leading literary critic in the United States.-Life and career:...
described Saturday as an "up-to-the-moment, post-9/11 variation."
The novel is narrated in the third person, limited point of view
Third-person limited narrative
The third-person limited is a narrative mode in which the reader experiences the story through the senses and thoughts of just one character. This is almost always the main character—e.g., Gabriel in James Joyce's "The Dead", the titular character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown",...
: the reader learns of events as Perowne does. Using the free indirect style
Free indirect speech
Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech...
the narrator inhabits Perowne, a neurosurgeon, who often thinks rationally, explaining phenomena using medical terminology. 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." 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."
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 ListNew York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
on 15 April 2005, and Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
(4 April 2005) lists, Publishers Weekly listed it the next week also. A strong performance for literary fiction, Saturday sold over 250,000 copies on release, and signings were heavily attended. The paperback edition sold another quarter of a million.
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". 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." 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.
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. Tim Adams concurred in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
calling the observation "wonderfully precise". 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. 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".
The "set-piece" construction of the book was noticed by many critics, Mrs Scurr praised it, describing a series of "vivid tableaux", but John Banville
John Banville
John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.Banville's breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011...
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." 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
Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda , a Fulbright Fellowship recipient, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic for the Washington Post.-Career:Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree, Dirda took a Ph.D. from Cornell University in comparative literature. In 1978 Dirda started writing for the...
in The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
. Christopher Hitchens said that McEwan delivered a "virtuoso description of the aerodynamics of a squash game" enjoyable even "to a sports hater like myself", Banville said he, as a literary man, had been bored by the same scene. Zoe Heller praised the tension in the climax as "vintage McEwan nightmare" but questioned the resolution as "faintly preposterous".
Dissenting, John Banville wrote a scathing review of the book for The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
. 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".
Saturday won the James Tait Black Prize for fiction; and was nominated on the long-list of the Man Booker Prize
Man Booker Prize
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...
in 2005.
Influence
According to songwriter Neil FinnNeil Finn
Neil Mullane Finn, OBE is a New Zealand Pop recording artist. Along with his brother Tim Finn, he was the co-frontman for Split Enz and is now frontman for Crowded House...
, the Crowded House
Crowded House
Crowded House are a rock band, formed in Melbourne, Australia and led by New Zealand singer-songwriter Neil Finn. Finn is the primary songwriter and creative director of the band, having led it through several incarnations, drawing members from New Zealand , Australia and the United States...
song "People Are Like Suns", from Time on Earth
Time on Earth
Time on Earth is the fifth studio album by the pop-rock band Crowded House. Tracks have been produced by both Ethan Johns and Steve Lillywhite and the album was released on 30 June 2007 in Australia, 2 July in the United Kingdom and 10 July in North America...
(2007), begins with lyrics inspired by the beginning of Saturday, stating "...when I wrote it, I was reading Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....
'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."