All this takes place against the backdrop of the buildup to the Iraq war in 2003. Literature winds up playing a surprisingly important role in that crisis, but so does the work that brings Perowne, a confirmed atheist and lover of the material world, so much satisfaction.

He uses his expertise to escape a confrontation, but the incident hangs over the rest of his day - playing squash, visiting his elderly mother, listening to his son play in a blues band, whipping up a seafood stew - and results in a terrifying intrusion into his contented life. On his way to a squash game, and anticipating a family dinner party that will bring Daisy back home after a few months abroad, Perowne gets into a fender bender with a petty hoodlum in whom he recognizes the early signs of a degenerative nerve disease. And where 'Atonement's' narrator Briony Tallis is a published author, Perowne not only doesn't write books, he can barely bring himself to read them, though he tries for the sake of his daughter Daisy, a poet about to publish her first volume of verse. Instead of a twisty, self-devouring meditation on lies, guilt and literature, 'Saturday' is a smooth, seamless creation depicting one day in the life of Henry Perowne, neurosurgeon, Londoner and happy man. 'Saturday' is about as different from his 2001 bestseller, 'Atonement,' as you can imagine.

There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.With his 12th novel, 'Saturday,' Ian McEwan has reached a position that most writers dream of and few ever attain: His books are both automatic bestsellers and critically revered. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You-you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. (And the abrupt, nasty street confrontation in that book has a lot in common with the irruption of the oafish Cantabile in Humboldt’s Gift.) What other American novelist has had such a direct and startling influence on non-Americans who are young enough to be his children? The answer is to be found somewhere in the rest of the excerpt with which I began, as its narrator hits rock bottom and begins to soar upward:Īs megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. Ian McEwan’s most successful and daring novel, Saturday, pays homage to a Bellovian inspiration. James Wood co-taught a class with him at Harvard. Martin Amis had an almost father-son relationship with him (and it can’t be said that this was for lack of a literary parent). In a recent essay, one of our finer critics, Lee Siegel, asks what is it with Bellow and a number of non-American writers.

Ian mcewan 2005