Ian McEwan, Saturday Review

Overall Rating

McKewan is a serious literary novelist, of course, and he is creating art rather than telling stories. "Saturday" certainly has a plot which twists and suprises but the joy is in the writing, 'in the detail' as one of his characters says about another literary giant. I am strictly an amateur at literary criticism but much of his prose read to me like an extended poem. It's a book that has to be slowly savoured line by line. To read it at a pace would be like running around an art gallery and I often reread passages before moving on, just luxuriating in his wordplay.
The book also has something important to say about how our consciousness has been changed by 9/11 and is quite morally profound. His central character, the neurosurgeon, Perowne, is wonderfully drawn; and Perowne's relationship with is poet daughter is uncomfortably poignant for those of us with clever adult offspring.
I think that I have read all of McEwan's output over the last 15 years since I first discovered him through a paperback book club offer. I am still enthralled rereading earlier novels like 'The Comfort of Strangers' , or 'A Child in Time', for example, but with 'Saturday' we are witnessing a writer at the very top of the literary art.