Saturday is certainly a unique novel. 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 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.
His day begins early, as he wakes up around 4:30 a.m. and coincidentally watches a burning plane fly along the skyline and, presumably, crash. 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. 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.
When he wakes up again, he leaves for his standing weekly game of squash with his American anesthetist, Jay Strauss. On the way, the protest forces him to take a detour, where he collides with the car of a neurologically diseased thug named Baxter. This hostile confrontation comes up again later, after Henry loses the game to Strauss, visits his mother, and watches Theo's band's dress rehearsal. That evening, Baxter breaks into Perowne's house and threatens his family, forcing them to unite in opposition to this intruder. Eventually, after Daisy reads him poetry and Henry fools him with a fake scientific study, Henry and Theo succeed in throwing Baxter down the stairs, fracturing his skull. Henry is called into work to perform the operation on Baxter, and the novel ends with Henry getting back in bed with his wife, a little over 24 hours since the novel began.
McEwan's writing abilities are on full display in this intellectual novel as the reader experiences every thought running through the mind of Perowne throughout the day. It's truly a remarkable feat to articulately and poetically describe a man's conflicting thought processes in a way that convinces a reader of their authenticity. McEwan takes large-scale problems, such as the anti-war protests of 2003 and the effects of Huntington's Disease, and weaves them into the everyday life of a relatively normal man, exploring the import of such theoretical problems on the actual life of a human being, rather than merely as abstract concepts. At times it may seem like McEwan is simply showing off; it's not just any author who can turn twenty-four hours into a dense, intellectually engaging three-hundred-page novel.
The everyman qualities of Henry have come under criticism, as people argue that an intelligent, successful, happily married neurosurgeon with a family and a great career is difficult to relate to. Reading the novel, however, reveals that McEwan's character portrait of Perowne is a frank, honest one: a man, always feeling a bit behind the times and heavily self-criticizing, dealing with the consequences of his mistakes and the uncertainty that accompanies any kind of conflict. Henry is far from a perfect character, and his flaws are highly relatable to a qualified reader of McEwan's fiction.
