Word: neurosurgeon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Saturday takes place on a single day, Feb. 15, 2003, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have filled the streets of London to protest the impending war in Iraq. Henry Perowne, the central character, is a prosperous and contented neurosurgeon. But his happiness is infringed by a persistent, low-intensity fear of a terrorist attack. The pros and cons of the Iraq invasion are among McEwan's concerns here; the son of a career officer in the British army, he says he was more opposed to the war than Perowne. "But I gave him my ambivalence about...
...safe to say this new book comes from a place close to home. Certainly the contented side of the neurosurgeon comes from the man who imagined him. At 56, McEwan swings up and down the stairs of his house with the ease of a man who still does his share of hiking, a passion of his. He has a Booker Prize for his 1998 novel Amsterdam, and several of his novels, including The Comfort of Strangers and Enduring Love, have beenturned into pretty good films. Moreover, judging from his descriptions of Perowne's marital bliss--"What a stroke of luck...
...Saturday, McEwan also befriended a London neurosurgeon, Neil Kitchen, and spent two years following him at the hospital, finally joining him in the operating room. What he learned is set down in long passages that describe in loving (and graphic) detail the procedures of brain surgery. Work itself is a form of heroism in this book. So is love. So is a dry-eyed realism about our fates. McEwan and Perowne are both fond of quoting Charles Darwin: "There is a grandeur in this view of life." There's a grandeur in Saturday...
Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon and CNN medical correspondent
Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon and CNN medical correspondent