Ian McEwan

I’ve spent quite a few hours in company with bad books lately, and started reading Saturday with not too great expectations. Now, after having finished it in a couple of days, I am still amazed. McEwan’s medical knowledge on the human brain is certainly impressive, but what makes it all breathtaking to me is his way of combining politics, natural sciences and arts in his negotiation on the meaning of life. Saturday puts the private man on the public scene in a brilliant way; the intimacy of lovers and families is connected to war and peace on a grand scale. Love and war, echoing the magnificent novels of the nineteenth century, compressed to the happenings of a day in the life of Henry Perowne. And this ‘compression’ - a life in a day - leads us on to another great English author – to Virginia Woolf. It is also possible to see Saturday as a comment on her novel Mrs. Dalloway. We find similarities in the dinner party preparations, the city walking, insanity and war, in how both authors show us the singular life and the larger world as interconnected – both fragile and exposed to threats.