From squash courts to neurosurgery: talking about Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Our October Book Club meeting took us into the world of Ian McEwan’s Saturday — his 12^th novel, published in 2004, coming between Atonement and On Chesil Beach. Tony Brown introduced us to this densely detailed and thought-provoking book, reminding us that its publication date is significant: it is set on the day of the huge anti-Iraq War demonstration in London on Saturday, 15 February 2003 but was published before the London bombings of 7 July 2005. This gap gives the novel a peculiar resonance: it captures a moment of anxiety and uncertainty, before that sense of unease hardened into something darker.

The story follows Henry Perowne, a highly skilled consultant neurosurgeon, through the course of that one day. What might sound like a quiet domestic day unfolds into something much more dramatic. His morning begins early, when he wakes to see a plane in apparent distress passing over London — a moment that feels like a premonition of disaster. From there, his day includes: a road accident on his way to play squash, which brings him face to face with a volatile young man named Baxter; a highly competitive squash match that reveals as much about Henry’s personality as his athletic ability; a series of encounters with his family — his wife Rosalind, his father-in-law, and his two grown children, Theo (a musician) and Daisy (a poet), who is returning home from abroad; some shopping and cooking in preparation for a family dinner; and finally, a hostile home invasion that forces Henry into an ethical and emotional crisis — one that ends, improbably but dramatically, with him performing an emergency brain operation on his attacker.

Ian McEwan apparently spent two years shadowing a London neurosurgeon (I hope intermittently!) in order to get the medical details right. The result is a novel filled with intricate surgical description — some readers found this fascinating, others perhaps a bit too detailed.

We discussed several of the novel’s central themes: personal, medical, and national morality; the unforeseen consequences of snap decisions; and the tension between rationality and emotional truth. McEwan seems to be asking how a man devoted to reason and science copes when faced with violence, chaos, and fear — both in his own home and in the world around him.

Reactions around the table were mixed. Many found the novel absorbing and intelligent, admiring its pace and technical precision. Others, though, felt it was over-engineered — too much brain, not enough heart. Tony drew our attention to the review by the Irish novelist John Banville in which he called Saturday “a dismayingly bad book” — an extreme view, but one that captures the frustration some readers feel with McEwan’s meticulously controlled prose.

If I may add a personal opinion, I’ve never warmed to Ian McEwan as an author. I find his writing emotionally cool and often over-clever. In Saturday, for instance, I felt that while he has clearly done his research into neurosurgery, he doesn’t always get the spirit of it right. Henry Perowne’s quick diagnosis of early Huntington’s disease in Baxter — purely from physical signs — struck me as pretty unlikely, as the early signs can be identical to many other degenerative neurological conditions.

Worse still, Henry uses that diagnosis as a weapon in their confrontation — hardly a model of medical ethics (but perhaps in keeping with his rather arrogant personality). Later, it would have been seriously unethical for him to have operated on Baxter, partly because he is personally involved and partly because, by that stage, he has had far too much to drink! It’s dramatic, yes, but stretches credibility.

A similar reservation applies to McEwan’s later novel, The Children Act. While he captures the legal procedures beautifully, my sister — who happens to be a barrister in the family courts — says that a judge would never act in the way the heroine does.

Saturday is gripping and thought-provoking, and there’s no doubt McEwan is a master craftsman. But as ever, the book divided opinion — which, of course, makes it an excellent one for Book Club. Whether you admire or resist McEwan’s cool intelligence, there’s plenty in Saturday to debate, dissect and disagree about.