Saturday - Ian McEwan

 I read Atonement when the book and movie were big news and thought very little of it.   It struck me as trivial, a little bit seedy, and overly judgmental.   It put me off reading any more McEwen until I came across Saturday, which is a wholly different kettle of fish.

Saturday is very simply a day in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, who lives in some style in a London square close by the Post Office Tower.   His day begins with sleeplessness.   He looks out of the bedroom window and sees a plane, its engine on fire, heading towards Heathrow.   This is February 2003, eighteen months after the attack on New York's Twin Towers and on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.   Indeed, an anti-war demonstration is due to take place not far from Henry's square later in the day.   So when Henry sees the burning plane his thoughts inevitably turn to Terror.   Should he phone the emergency services?   Surely they already know....?   Henry goes downstairs to watch the news on TV.   Ultimately the plane lands, no one dies, it's something and nothing and Henry considers himself justified.

He goes off to his Saturday morning squash game and gets involved in a road rage incident which does have considerable consequences later in the day.

What makes this a brilliant book is the depth which Atonement so patently lacked.   Here we become immersed in the Perowne family who, as it happens, will be gathered together on this special Saturday.   They are elite (the house is inherited from Mrs Perowne's late mother, who also owned the French chateau in which the widower, the famous poet John Grammaticus usually resides) but they are also made interesting.   Where McEwen ventures into the extraordinary is in his descriptions of Henry's work - McEwen gives detailed acknowledgement of the help he received from actual neurosurgeons.  Without this level of detail I wonder if the final story twist would be believeable.   I suspect we have to be convinced that only Henry can do what he is called upon to do.   In my case I was already stunned and sold because Henry met his wife Rosalind when she went blind as I did and had an earlier version of the same neurosurgery I had twelve years ago.   With the same positive result, I'm pleased to say.

Lost Light - Michael Connolly

Lost Light (2003) sits bang in the middle of the "Harry" Hieronymus Bosch series. Harry has walked out of LAPD after twenty-odd years and registered as a private investigator. His first case, however, is one he has carried away with him.

Back in the late Nineties Harry was assigned to a movie unit using $2 million in real money for a particular shot. The shoot was raided, obviously by someone with inside knowledge. Harry shot one of the raiders but never found the body. Later, Harry found the body of a woman from the production unit who also logged the money at the bank. Later still, two cops investigating the robbery were shot in a bar. One died, the other wishes he had; he's been left in a wheelchair, totally paralysed. He is another element of Harry's motivation for putting things right.


No sooner has he opened the old file than pressure is on him to leave well alone. His former partner, Kiz, now with the chief's office, warns him off. The FBI warn him, too. Turns out one of their own has disappeared, presumed dead, whilst working the case. The same agent, it appears, contacted Dorsey, the cop killed in the bar, just before she disappeared and he died. Something about one of the stolen bills turning up where it shouldn't.


Already, in just a couple of paras, we have a story so deep and tangled that for me it was reminiscent of Connolly's early and best work. Back in the Nineties, I bought each of his books as it came out in paperback. I gave up before the Bosch series really got going because I thought Connolly had become marooned in his formula. Clearly 9/11 was a shot in the arm for him. Writing about the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers and the dark shadows of the War on Terror give us some of the very best sections of a very good book.


The denouement is as tangled as the premise. I will say no more than that - except, perhaps, to mention a revelation about Harry's personal life that I never saw coming. First rate reading by a master of his craft. Highly recommended.