Saturday

Ian McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, follows a British neurosurgeon on a typical Saturday that in fact becomes extraordinary. I finished it last Saturday :)

I hate to admit this was the first of McEwan's books I've read, but it was. While I enjoyed it, I'm not going to rush out to pick up another title by the acclaimed author (whose Atonement was adapted to screen and is in theaters now).

Saturday is full of multi-layered characters, so richly drawn you feel you know them better than most people you know in your real life - and yet the description doesn't bog down the book.

Where I fault McEwan is plot - there wasn't much, frankly. (Yeah, I realize it's a book about a 24-hour period; how much did I expect, right?) It involves a plane crash, a traffic accident, a homecoming of sorts with his two grown children and cantankerous and eccentric father-in-law, and a nasty run in with a couple of thugs. I won't give away the ending, because to do so would spoil the reading...and it really is worth reading.

While I love the author's ruminations on how our minds work - tangled up in this book with the way the brain operates, and how it can be operated on - in a few instances, there's too much looking inward (and too little action) for my taste.

That said, McEwan can write. And he writes "up" to his readers - a compliment, I think, and a welcome change from the many MG/YA books I've devoured in the past year. By the time I reached page 36, the author had discussed neurosurgery (the removal of a pilocytic astrocytoma, among other cases), (the comet) Hale-Bopp, the psychology/philosophy of commercial plane travel, politics, and Schrodinger's cat.

It's heady stuff. Had he given me a bit more of a story, and I'd be hooked for good, lamenting the fact that McEwan has "only" given us 11 novels to date...