After the crash, Perowne visits his son, Theo, in the kitchen and talks with him before retiring back to bed and making love with his wife. This event, mentions of which recur throughout the novel, comes to represent both the uncertainty of the real nature of events and the culture's tendency to suspect nefarious activity where there might not be any. and coincidentally watches a burning plane fly along the skyline and, presumably, crash. His day begins early, as he wakes up around 4:30 a.m. Written from the limited perspective of Perowne himself, the reader essentially hears, feels, and sees what Perowne does, even experiencing his thought processes as he goes about his day. Its three hundred pages chronicle only a single day in the life of Henry Perowne, neurosurgeon, on his very eventful day off from work. Written by people who wish to remain anonymous We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. “Another source of dismay, one for which, admittedly, Ian McEwan cannot be held wholly accountable, is the ecstatic reception which Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
This would be of little consequence outside the book-chat columns were it not for the arrogance which Saturday displays. In this new book, however, he has stumbled badly. Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. It affords no pleasure to say these things. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong if Tony Blair-who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity-were to appoint a committee to produce a ‘novel for our time,’ the result would surely be something like this. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks’ home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew.
The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.
The numerous set pieces-brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.-are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. “Something of the kind seems to have happened here.
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