Saturday by Ian McEwanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
McEwan's novel was a fascinating story, told in an excellent and gripping way. At times I found it much too wordy and grew annoyed with his apparent rambling about Henry Perowne's family. It was hard to see what was the point of the book’s plot for quite a few pages: sleeplessness, a plane crash, family problems, or what? Perowne seems to have it all: a top professional in medicine, a happy marriage, and so on. But for me the pages and pages of intricate details about his life grew tedious for a while. And then the game of squash after a particularly unpleasant incident seemed quite unrealistic.
Another large part of this novel that I thought was very difficult to accept was the repeated sections about medical procedures, both surgical and theoretical. It felt like padding. Was it there in order to show how much research had been done by the author? If it was to suit Henry’s mental reasoning over the car incident, with Baxter and his cronies that had occurred earlier in the street, then it did not work for me.
However, well into the second half of the novel things became intense, absorbing and very frightening. I could not stop turning the pages to find out what was going to happen next! Brilliant! The ending was still a little disappointing and I was unable to feel that I cared very much about Henry Perowne and his highly privileged family,
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