Review by Booklist Review
McEwan's key strategy is to pit reason against chaos and art against arbitrariness as he orchestrates thorny moral dilemmas and menacing situations. This is the structure underlying his Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam 0 (1998), his best-selling Atonement 0 2002), and this tightly focused, high-performance, stream-of-consciousness drama about one day in the life of a sanguine London neurosurgeon. Henry Perowne is a good man. He loves to perform delicate operations while listening to classical music, and he adores his smart lawyer wife, adventurous poet daughter, and gentle musician son. For him this particular Saturday in February 2003 is a day full of promise, even though he's had a strange night and London is gearing up for an immense protest march against the impending war in Iraq, and even though he gets into a frightening altercation with a twitchy thug named Baxter, a confrontation he escapes by diagnosing his attacker's degenerative condition. It's been said that what makes literature so enthralling is its devotion to detail and its digressions. McEwan is a master of both, and consequently the reader reads this embroiling tale with two minds: one luxuriating in Henry's piquant ruminations on everything from the dysfunctions of the brain to evolution, Iraq, and society's retreat from "big ideas"; the other cued to suspense: how will Baxter exact his revenge? McEwan is as provocative, transporting, and brilliant as ever as he considers both our vulnerability and our strength, particularly our ability to create sanctuary in a violent world. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the predawn sky on a Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sees a plane with a wing afire streaking toward Heathrow. His first thought is terrorism-especially since this is the day of a public demonstration against the pending Iraq war. Eventually, danger to Perowne and his family will come from another source, but the plane, like the balloon in the first scene of Enduring Love, turns out to be a harbinger of a world forever changed. Meanwhile, the reader follows Perowne through his day, mainly via an interior monologue. His cerebral peregrination records, in turn, the meticulous details of brain surgery, a car accident followed by a confrontation with a hoodlum, a far-from-routine squash game, a visit to Perowne's mother in a nursing home and a family reunion. It is during the latter event, at the end of the day, that the ominous pall that has hovered over the narrative explodes into violence, and Perowne's sense that the world has become "a commuity of anxiety" plays out in suspense, delusion, heroism and reconciliation. The tension throughout the novel between science (Perowne's surgery) and art (his daughter is a poet; his son a musician) culminates in a synthesis of the two, and a grave, hopeful, meaningful, transcendent ending. If this novel is not as complex a work as McEwan's bestselling Atonement, it is nonetheless a wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now. (Mar. 22) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Early one Saturday morning, neurosurgeon Henry Perowne watches a flaming aircraft descend over London-the fitting portent of a day when his life nearly goes up in smoke. Like the plane, Henry lands safely, but it's a tense (and brilliantly realized) ride. Henry's family is gathering to fete his eminent father-in-law, poet John Grammaticus, and he's looking forward to seeing daughter Daisy, fresh from Paris with a poetry book of her own. (Son Theo is a leading blues musician.) As he drives through a crowd protesting the imminent invasion of Iraq, Henry has a minor fender bender with an aggressive type named Baxter and makes the mistake of humiliating him by correctly noting that he suffers from Huntington's Disease. Naturally, Baxter seeks revenge, and when he and his cohorts invade Henry's house in a scene so painfully realized that it's almost unbearable to read, the family rises splendidly to the occasion. McEwan (Atonement) has done his job: the tension is palpable, the narrative tightly knit, and each character beautifully drawn-Henry's reflections on the value of music over literature and his muted stance in favor of invading Iraq make for thoughtfully contrary reading. Does McEwan give Henry a final act that some might find unbelievably noble? Maybe, but the author has earned it. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/04.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An increasingly mellowed but no less gripping McEwan (Atonement, 2002, etc.) portrays a single day in the life of a well-off upper-middle-class Londoner, blessed in every conceivable way. While crowds mass to protest the coming invasion of Iraq, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon at the top of his game, intelligent and self-aware, goes about a Saturday that's by turns mundane and marvelous. We follow his reflections on surgeries, so well detailed as to be med-porn; lazy lovemaking upon awakening, and restorative sex at the end of the day with smart, devoted, lawyer wife Rosalind (he notes his unusual luck in still wanting no one else); a sometimes savage squash game with friend and partner Jay; a sad visit to his senile mother; and shopping for dinner. A chance encounter with Baxter, an intelligent young thug, provides the small plot; Henry escapes a mugging when he recognizes early signs of Huntington's in the lad and takes control. That evening, at Henry's well-appointed townhouse, in the warm glow of gathered family--father-in-law John Grammaticus, towering poet turned to drink; son Theo, a gifted young blues guitarist; daughter Daisy, a poet visiting from Paris, newly published and newly pregnant--Baxter returns and holds Rosalind at knifepoint. Terrorized and terrified, the family, through their various strengths, overcome Baxter, who lands in the hospital requiring emergency surgery from the forgiving Henry. Comprised by an active awareness of his place in the world, of his love for family and work, and of the contingencies that make his life his own, and that make Baxter's life his own, Henry's thoughts--especially since they're informed also by a matter-of-fact understanding of the neurological processes that emerge as behavior and look like choice--envelop us in a total immersion experience. A sort of middle-class humanist manifesto: when you find yourself fortunate beyond all measure in a random universe, gratitude, generosity, and compassion are a decent response. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.