‘Saturday’ detailed, suspenseful look at one day

In the shadow of our collective, post-9/11 frazzle, the looming menace that permeates Ian McEwan’s novels feels not only more immediate than ever but also as supremely assured as the Earth’s daily spin.

Once the planes flew into buildings and doomed thousands, we knew: We are not safe. We never really have been safe. Bad things now are what we must expect, and someday they will come.

So we are not surprised to meet, in McEwan’s hypnotic, Joycean new novel, “Saturday,” a sleepless neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne, who gazes out the window of his luxurious London house into the pre-dawn chill and sees something terrible.

Anticipating what should be the familiar course of his day – coffee, a squash game, a trip to the seafood market, tea with his mother at the nursing home and, by evening, a family reunion of sorts – he witnesses a foreshadowing scene that also signifies how much his world, and ours, has altered: A jet wobbles across the dark sky, streaking fire from one wing, bumping low over the city toward what Henry is sure will be tragedy.

“Airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed,” Henry thinks, assuming the plane’s distress to be the work of terrorists.

He finds out this is not the case. Still, Henry can’t stop seeking more news of the event. A familiar, worried gloom has wormed itself into his thinking, especially on this Saturday in early 2003 as Londoners gather to protest the looming Iraqi invasion.

And so Henry goes about his day with a post-millennial angst rumbling like a soundtrack in his brain. He makes love to his busy lawyer wife; relives discussions with his daughter Daisy, a poet on her way home from Paris with galleys of her first book; reflects on the prognoses of his patients; gets caught in traffic from the protest.

And then, on the way to his squash game, a minor car accident throws him into the path of the dangerous thug Baxter. The ugly aftermath of this encounter acts as a devastating reminder that sheer bad luck may threaten our peace of mind as effectively as a terrorist attack.

The story takes place over 24 hours, exquisitely detailed, rich and suspenseful, literate and surprisingly explosive.

It has become the norm for authors to portray London as a cesspit of racial unrest and poverty-induced crime, but in “Saturday” it is a historic place of wonder. McEwan is affectionate, tender even, going so far as to praise its traffic-clogged arteries, warming generously to evidence of its unabashed commerce:

“Such prosperity, whole emporia dedicated to cheeses, ribbons, Shaker furniture, is protection of a sort. This commercial well being is robust and will defend itself to the last. It isn’t rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all that it entails.”

“Saturday” also has something to say about literature’s place in the new world order.

Dogged Henry, whose profession allows him terrifyingly intimate access to the amazing mechanics of the brain, is skeptical about literature’s value, despite his daughter’s insistence on its relevance. And yet it is poetry’s ability to provoke overwhelming emotion that plays a part in salvaging what is to be rescued from this day.

So yes, we do breathe a different air these days. But as McEwan shows at day’s end, that doesn’t mean that all is lost.

“When anything can happen, everything matters,” he writes. And through his deeply nuanced depiction of worried but finally resolute Henry, we recognize the solace offered by life’s smaller moments through friends and family, work and leisure, food and drink.

Anything can happen, but we’re still human. “Saturday” is an evocative reminder of that reassuring fact.