A lot can happen in a day. For Ian McEwan, he took it as a challenge to explore the importance of living in a post-War on Terror world, where endless war has become the backbone of history and protagonist Henry Perowne's perfect life is about to be uplifted and changed. All it takes is a stroll through the park, one protest, surgery, and the news of a family pregnancy to fill his life with a lot to think about. While this sounds like it would make for a decent novel about the little things in life filling our hearts with meaning, McEwan isn't capable of making it into an essential novel. Instead, it's a meandering one that never gets to the big revelations that it thinks it should. It's fine as far as a day in the life stories goes, but those wanting something profound need look elsewhere.
McEwan's best gift to the novel is his obsession with the mundanity in Henry's life. This is especially true of his time as a surgeon. Whole chapters are written exploring the process by which he performs surgery, using big terms to help familiarize the audience with his life as he tries to keep people alive and healthy. There's even some internal look at Henry's emotions during these moments, though it remains largely clinical, forcing the man to view things more as a procedure instead of life. It's how the book treats everything, including a game of racquetball where every swing and bounce has been calculated as text in pages of paragraphs to make the reader feel like they're sitting there witnessing it. While it's interesting at first, those not interested in the particular jargon will grow weary of this approach, which pops up more often than not.
Considering that it's also a story about life following the War on Terror, it does have a lot of tapestries that should have a deeper meaning but doesn't. The politics discussed in the film, detailing terrorists who haven't been captured and President Bush's ineffectiveness in the war all create this portrait of concern for the future. How do you have optimism when you don't know the future? It's the type of contradiction that gives the book a little bit of insight, but otherwise, it's not that interesting. These passages consistently return, and they don't really bring anything new each time. While there are moments that seem inspired, McEwan is more obsessed with exploring the life of a perfect man. A man without flaws doesn't make for an interesting protagonist, and he never quite reaches the point where a man's insecurity with perfection becomes a bigger statement. It's good, but the story ends without much in the way of a conclusion other than presumably Sunday begins.
It's a decent concept that's not effective enough to make for a whole novel. Sure, there's room for a great short story, but the story is too slight to make anything of value with its material. It wants to be profound and show how sports, surgery, and protests all are a way of life now, and it does. Only it doesn't really feel like it wants to say much with it as the points become redundant by the end. They crop up often in ways that don't add much to the ongoing narrative, and it ends up being a bit of a slog of a read. There may be subtext worth enjoying, but this Saturday is nothing more than a walk in the park, observing a changing world. It's a scrapbook of a moment in history. The only wish was that it was about a more interesting moment.
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