Saturday chronicles the events of February 15, 2003, through the eyes of Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon living in London. Henry awakens inexplicably in the pre-dawn hours and mechanically heads to the window in time to see a bright object streaking through the sky. As it comes closer, it becomes evident that the object is a plane on fire, blazing towards Heathrow, and, with the post-9/11 consciousness that infuses the book, his mind leaps towards terrorism as an explanation. Because protests against the impending war with Iraq are being held in the city that day, issues of violence loom above the heads of the characters, and weave a quiet threat throughout the entire book. In this moment, Henry contemplates the reality and the fate of those on board, and the sudden alterations in life that will end it.

For the airplane is only a symbol of the chaos that can shatter the securities of life, just as Henry’s middle-class life and moral conscientousness put him forward as an everyman. We follow Henry through the course of his day–he snuggles with his beloved and loving wife, Rosalind, he drives to a squash match, getting into a minor car accident and altercation with a thug on the way, he competes fiercly in the squash game, and he visits his mother in her nursing home before finally returning to his own home for a family gathering. But the topic of the book itself is not these events, but the philosophy that surrounds daily life; we see this day largely through the thoughts that occur to Henry during the day, as he contemplates everything from the specifics of neurosurgery, to his opinions on the possibility of war in Iraq, to the sudden intrusion of violence into his own life.

Because Henry’s status as an ‘everyman’ comes not from his life, whose foundations are almost too idyllic to be accounted normal, but from his response to the world–at once desiring a greater connectivity and failing to break free of the kind of complacency that often inundates the modern middle-class. His two artistic children–his daughter is a poet and his son is a blues musician–make him aware of the limitations of his scientific intellect. Again, he is simultaneously aware of his deficiencies but stubborn in his distaste both for religious explanations or for artistic literature. Though he saves the lives of the people upon which he operates, he knows can only fathom the complexities of their brains, not their minds. He wishes for a “coherent world, everything fitting at last,” but what he discovers is disconnection as well as connection, and the collision of arbitrary forces and fate.

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