Henry Perowne is middle aged, middle class and happily married. He lives in a great house, with a respected career [he's a neurosurgeon], newly grown up kids, and his health. Henry still has a few things to worry about though. Whether he really deserves his huge comfy new Mercedes is one. That he doesn't like the modern novels his daughter insists he read is another. But all in all, he can't complain.

Then he wakes up in the middle of the night and notices a red dot speeding through the London night sky outside his window. Fascinated, he imagines it must be a hi-jacked passenger plane hurtling toward certain disaster. In his mind he can see the carnage to come. The hundreds of deaths, the Islamic suicide bombers, the full story. He is surprised to turn on the 24 hour news and see no mention of the impending doom.

The grand drama of a terrorist attack on London turns out to be more mundane than he had hoped/feared. But it is, maybe, a foreshadowing of things maybe to come. Or a red herring to throw us off track. In the meantime Perowne has to get across London, through the huge planned anti-war protest, for a game of squash with his colleague from the hospital, before visiting his sick mother. Then tonight his up and coming poet daughter, teenage blues prodigy son and haughty poet father-in-law will gather under his roof, and his family will be complete. It looks like being a typical full but controlled day in his life, but as this is an Ian McEwan novel, things will not go exactly to plan. There is something unsettling lurking in the everyday.

Henry's Saturday soon goes astray. A car crash, a run in with some ne'er do wells, some more thrilling trips to the operating theatre, and more incidents it is best not to reveal all have to be got out of the way before the Perownes can sit down to their carefully prepared fish stew. McEwan treats the reader to some tinglingly tense set pieces, and the pace is carefully turned up towards the end.

All the time McEwan's prose is cool and incisive. His choice of a neurosurgeon narrator is fitting, and the story unfolds calmly, unfussily and professionally. The small, self contained world that Perowne thinks he lives in is skillfully built up, even the anti-war protests and Saddam weapons of mass destruction debate only impact on him in a passive, sardonic kind of way. When disaster does strike, it is not a huge world issue that disturbs the equilibrium, but a chance meeting with a tiny sequencing error. Which, if it can't be solved, can at least be contained.

There is a very middle aged kinda thing going on here. Perowne is content, then his world is threatened, and well it isn't giving too much away to say that things work out not too badly in the end. McEwan's early books, and especially his first collection of short stories, showed us a macabre world of pornography, incest, sado-masochism and infanticide. Not any more. He does take a verbal fascination with the ins and outs of neurosurgery and we go right into the operating theatre, and right inside the brains of some of the principals, but this is tame enough stuff. If Saturday is 'about' something it's about contentment. Which isn't as exciting as infanticide in fairness.

However McEwan is still a superb story teller, possibly the foremost English writer today. And I suppose he is middle aged himself, so maybe the infanticide phase is over. Saturday is a well plotted, and cleanly written look at a whole way of life that is getting middle aged. Our lives may be threatened by Islamic fundamentalism and/or Bush and Blair style big brother clampdowns, but probably not. What might mess everything up is more likely chance occurrence than a grand theme. Things will more than likely still be grand tomorrow though. Which is no harm really. And McEwan is still writing interesting books. So all is good for now.

first published on oxygen.ie