This "Reviews" section is not just for my books/plays but for any and all wise writing with good story lines, well-turned phrases and engaging characters. I sample a lot of fiction in search of a book I can read from cover to cover. Even the most ballyhooed books usually disappoint me after about fifty pages because I just don't care about the fate of the characters. Not so with the books I'll be commenting on.

Saturday by Ian McEwan

SATURDAY by Ian McEwan

Here's a book that does what I believe good literature should do - it instructs without getting preachy while getting the reader deeply involved with characters worthy of our interest.

McEwan takes us inside of the mind of a man who gets inside of brains. In this one Saturday in the life of Henry Perowne, a British neurosurgeon, by way of the good doctor's interior monologue, he shares his thoughts and emotions about our post 9-11 world. Identifying with a brain surgeon is about as high minded as you can go (even better than rocket scientists) so there is a sort of satisfaction in seeing the world as he does while he articulates his vision. To follow Perowne's rambling rational thinking is to partake of his wistful insights although he does take his scientific reductionism a bit far. "Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?"

When not resigning himself to biological determinism,or interacting with his wife, son, daughter or mother, Perowne's seems to spend his hours ruminatingabout the next terrorist attack. So how does a neurosurgeon deal with the reality of religious extremism and the horrors waiting to unfold? Saving lives puts political worries out of his mind while he's performing surgical procedures. But on this particular Saturday he happens to get out of bed before dawn and looking out his window, he sees a flaming aircraft approaching Heathrow Airport. After 9-11, his assumption is that another terrorist attack is in progress.

Okay, no spoilers now. I'll just say that this book becomes a richly satisfying philosophical meditation on chance, health, aging, family, love, war and peace, compassion, and the current state of the world with all its fanatics. The intermix of one man's Saturday routine activities with his thoughts and observations on life in our post 9-11 world puts a layer of immediacy onto the underlying suspense. And there's a wry humor in Perowne's skepticism and resignation. "He suspects he's becoming a dupe, the willing, febrile consumer of news fodder, speculation and all the crumbs the authorities let fall."

I grew up worrying about the big threat -- annihilation from nuclear warfare. We still have that threat. Here in California, we toss in anotherlooming worry -- our fear of the "Big One" (earthquake). But we've adapted to these remote fears; we shove those anxious thoughts to the back of the stress file. Not so with terrorism. Twenty-four hour a day newscasts and news websites keeps us up to the minute on suicide attacks and the bombing of innocent people. Terrorist acts happen with regularity somewhere in the world and we know a terrorist attack is coming here; we just don't know when.As with our protagonist, I wonder what major city will get hit next? And what will our response be?

Side note: Many years ago a college professor in comparative religions told our class during his last lecture that Russia was not the real threat to the U.S. or the world. Religious wars are what you will have to deal with in the future. There is no fight like the fight for one's worldview. Wise man.

I will warn the reader that there is a squash match in this bookthat went on too long for me (18 pages). A friend of mine who knows McEwan tells me he plays squash or tennis every afternoon and was recovering from a knee operation at the time he wrote this book, so evidently he was doing his best to relive his game while his knee was mending.

Also, some of the scenes of brain surgery might get to the squeamish. You feel as though you're peering over the surgeon's shoulder as he slices through the skull. Yet it is fascinating once you've made the leap over his shoulder and into Perowne's world. The details could go into a medical textbook.

When father and daughter debate whether their country should go to war against Iraq, they're raising issues that should have been thoroughly examined here in this country by those in power. Perowne and his daughter have the same goal - less destruction of human lives. But the issue they raise is how do we best go about it? Perowne is the biological determinist, the realist who has known too much of the past. "After the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century, after so much vile behavior, so many deaths, a queasy agnosticism has settled around these matters of justice and redistributed wealth."

Additional note: Perowne's chance meeting with Tony Blair hums with brilliant observations of how politicians must perform. You can picture so well the acting going on.

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