Ian McEwan: Saturday

Early one Saturday morning, Henry Perowne, gifted neurosurgeon, contented husband and father, wakes and is drawn to his windows. "With no decision made, no motivation at all, he begins to move towards the nearest of the three bedroom windows and experiences such ease and lightness in his tread that he suspects at once he's dreaming or sleepwalking."

From his window he can see a London street in February, "the city in its icy white light, the skeletal trees in the square, and 30ft below, the black arrowhead railings like a row of spears". There can be seen, too, "... a Regency facade, a reconstruction, a pastiche — wartime Fitzrovia took some hits from the Luftwaffe — and right behind is the Post Office Tower, municipal and seedy by day, but by night, half-concealed and decently illuminated, a valiant memorial to more optimistic days.

"And now, what days are these?"

These are the days when a man looks out of his bedroom window in the hours before dawn and sees a plane on fire, falling through the sky. Henry Perowne hears this: "Above the usual deep and airy roar, is a straining, choking, banshee sound growing in volume both a scream and a sustained shout, an impure, dirty noise that suggests unsustainable mechanical effort beyond the capacity of hardened steel, spiralling upwards to an end point, irresponsibly rising and rising like the accompaniment to a terrible fairground ride. Something is about to give."

Because this is a McEwan novel, of course, something is about to give. We, with Henry, are watching over a waking city on a day where thousands of people are getting up to paint their placards and harness their grief and anger for a march against the invasion which is about to happen in Iraq.

Henry will not be attending; he has a full day on this one Saturday across which McEwan tracks the small chores and pleasures of a busy man on his day off. Today Henry will drive across town to play his usual game of squash with a colleague — although this game turns out to be something much more savage and brutal than their usual game.

Henry has to go to the fishmonger to buy ingredients for the fish stew he makes for occasions. This occasion is to mark the return of his poet daughter from six months in France; to mark the imminent publication of her first book of poems; and to mark what will hopefully be a successful reunion of his daughter and her grandfather, the drunk poet jealous of his granddaughter's success while his wanes.

Henry is busy today, but busy in the way of a man happy with his lot. He is a man who has not wanted for money for a long time and who has never wanted to sleep with any woman other than his wife. He is the man who likes to cook his fish stew — he is a surgeon who does delicate work but he is a rough sort of cook. But he accepts this and today, as he cooks, he will think this stew might turn out to be one of his very best.

The thing Henry will not be doing on this Saturday is attending the anti-war march. He feels ambivalent about the coming war, about whether ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein might or might not be worth invading a country for. But these are not days for the sort of reasonable on-the-one-hand this, on-the-other that debate that Henry might like to carry out.

On this Saturday, his natural inclination to observe and diagnose fails him. In a street almost empty because the city is at protest, he has a minor crash with a car full of three men angry about things other than war.

Well, Henry has had his warning early on this Saturday and the day will turn much darker.

But before we come to this foretold event, we spend the day with Henry, a man who examines his lot with a sharp intelligence that may not save him. He does not, after all, understand literature, although he tries. He is not a man without flaws although, endearingly, it is not one of his flaws to pretend that he is.

Is his ambivalence one of those flaws? I thought so, once I had put down the book. I thought that it had invaded Saturday. That this was a flaw. Then for days after I thought about Henry and his day and concluded that it is — how clever — supposed to do just this. And that Saturday is, instead, a beautifully wrought feat of long-lingering narrative genius that probably only McEwan could have carried off.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.

* Jonathan Cape, $59.95