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An average day out "Saturday" deals with the minutiae of one day in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon living in London. Or, rather, not so much the minutiae because this is no ordinary day, it starting with Henry observing an aircraft in distress over London in the early hours of the morning. From then on, the mundane aspects of an everyday Saturday are punctuated by increasing numbers of disturbing events which disrupt Perowne and his family. McEwan perhaps deliberately chooses a family which is anything but ordinary: Perowne's wife is a lawyer, they live in a town house in an exclusive part of central London, his father-in-law is a famous poet now resident in France (where else?), his son is a talented jazz musician. Maybe McEwan wanted to point out that wealth cannot insulate anyone from the intrusions of the world outside, whether that be violence on the streets or the threat of terrorism. On the latter, there is time to debate the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War: the Saturday of the title is the day of the huge anti-war protest in London. McEwan, via his characters, deals with how complicated an issue it was, how such decisions are never black-and-white. I thought that McEwan pulled off two-thirds of the novel reasonably well, but unfortunately it then descended into the absurd. His control of the plot fell away, with the final dramatic scene and resolution both being so bad as to be laughable. No doubt, "Saturday" will be acclaimed on the basis of the author's reputation rather than its true worth. G Rodgers