Ian McEwan, Saturday

I have been reading Ian MsEwan's work for many years and I feel that this is his greatest achievement to date. I can thoroughly recommend the book.

The dry writing style makes it initially hard to empathise with the characters and their plight. Once used to the style and slow pace the story turns out to be gripping and meaningful. The use of words is excellent. Ian McEwan is an accomplished writer, and Saturday can be enjoyed for its literary accomplishment alone. The plot unfolds with chilling certainty and dread. The characters are gradually exposed, and the emotional distance within the family is well illustrated. There is a richness within its sparsity that manages to provide plenty of food for thought.

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.