BookEnds

I recently finished reading “Saturday” by Ian McEwan, an author whose books never cease to amaze me. He has a very precise, detailed style of prose that can adapt itself to any subject — he mastered the big sweeping wartime epic with “Atonement” and captured the essence of British journalism with cruel accuracy in “Amsterdam”. With “Saturday,” he manages to consolidate an
astonishing array of themes and events into a concise and easily paced novel.

Henry Perowne is a neurosurgeon who wakes early on a Saturday morning to the sight of a plane heading in a fiery wreck across the London sky. This would be a horrific vision in any circumstance, but this particular Saturday is February 15, 2003 and the sight brings to his mind a terribly familiar jumble of possibilities — a violent tussle in the cockpit, a furtive shoe bomber sneaking aboard, a blurry, triumphant video of Al-Quaeda claiming credit. This is life in our post-9/11 world and McEwan examines its
implications with perceptive clarity and crisp description.

The entire novel, taking place over the span of just one day, touches on the imminent invasion of Iraq, the morality of the war itself and the edgy, nerve-wracked pulse of a globe still reeling from the unimaginable events only two years before. McEwan skillfully mixes such vast, apocalyptic considerations about the brink of global conflict with the comfortingly mundane occurrences of an ordinary day. As Perowne goes through the normal errands of his Saturday — playing a game of squash, visiting his ailing mother, watching his son’s guitar rehearsal — the practiced calm of his life collides violently with chaos and he finds himself confronting the world in ways he never expected. The reader won’t expect them either and the book that begins slowly becomes a surprisingly thrilling ride through the last pages.

We’re entering the season of beach reads and with the tantalizing prospect of quiet thrillers like “Saturday” comes the faint sense of guilt as we recall all the books we’ve resolved to read and haven’t yet. At least that’s what happens to me when I turn to my ever-growing list of imperishably classic or striking novels that I still haven’t read and realize that perhaps I’ve been neglecting my bedside reading. For me, the list includes cultural whoppers like “Anna Karenina”, “Crime and Punishment”, “The Magic
Mountain” and “A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man,” as well as some newer stuff I’ve discovered from the New York Times Book Review. I’m not sure I’ve quite got the stomach yet for something as grim as “Crime and Punishment” and I may need to keep detailed notes on the myriad of Russian counts and nobles from “Anna Karenina,” not something I’ve quite got time for yet.
Instead, I’m going ease into summer reading with something that both assuages my literary guilt and offers a nice mini-vacation to kick off the season: “A Room With a View” by E.M. Forster. It’s a classic and, at the moment, I could really use a nice holiday in Florence.

And for fellow bookworms out there: what books have you been eyeing lately but haven’t gotten around to reading yet?