Day tripper

In 24 hours, doctor, husband, and father Henry encounters more than one kind of violence

March 20, 2005

Saturday
By Ian McEwan
Doubleday, 289 pp., $26

Ian McEwan, winner of the 1998 Booker Prize for his novel ''Amsterdam," wields his pen as if it were a scalpel, creating precision sentences, carving out graceful passages of transcendent prose, and, upon occasion, endowing his characters with razor-sharp intelligence. No wonder then that the central character of ''Saturday," McEwan's latest offering, is a London neurosurgeon of exceptional intuition and skill. Henry Perowne is also that rarity in modern fiction: an essentially happy man. Excited by his work, still in love with his wife of more than two decades, and slightly baffled by but enormously proud of the achievements of his grown children, Daisy and Theo, Perowne lives a rich and rewarding city life, taking pleasure in good food, music, wine, and sport. It is only lately, since 9/11, that Perowne has begun to understand that his comfortable world is in jeopardy. Awaking at dawn on a Saturday in February 2003, when thousands will take to the streets in London for Britain's biggest-ever peace demonstration against the impending war in Iraq, Perowne perceives a palpable threat to his family and his way of life.

The day begins ominously. Perowne is summoned from his bed by what appears to be a waking dream, a kind of surreal observation: a plane, heading into Heathrow, is flying low over the trees and will almost certainly crash. He is too far away to see or hear the explosion, and he begins to wonder if he has been the only one to observe this bizarre phenomenon. Putting on his dressing gown, Perowne descends to the kitchen, where Theo has just returned from his evening out. Perowne turns on the television but at first finds no mention of the event; hours later, he will hear that the plane safely crash-landed and that its occupants, two supposedly radical Islamic pilots, have been taken into custody. A copy of the Koran has been found in the cockpit. A suicide mission gone wrong? A demonstration of terrorist power on a day when it seems that all of London is agitating against the war?

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