my summer holiday purchase in Calgary Alberta as a treat for me.

I enjoyed this read very much, a day in the life of Dr. Henry Perowne. Mind you I don't think one would be able to survive too many days just like this one. In addition to all the everyday thoughts and goings on; work, family, in-laws, friends, he manages to get in to a car accident with exactly the sort you wouldn't want, his family home is invaded by the ne'er do wells and the doctor has to make a presumably difficult decision.

I enjoyed meeting all of the characters and wouldn't mind having a car like the doctor's. :)

Waiting patiently on mrsgaskell's porch.

Sorry I missed you Pooker3! I was actually out looking for bargains at the Children's Hospital booksale.

Thank you so much for this book, and the door-to-door delivery! I'm really looking forward to it and I know gypsysmom is too. We have our book club meeting on Monday, so if this is chosen for September's selection I will probably wait to read it (getting forgetful :) ). Otherwise, I'll put it near the top of the TBR pile.

This is the second of McEwan’s books I’ve read; the first was Atonement. He writes beautifully and in minute descriptive detail. Although I preferred Atonement, this is an excellent book. The story starts very slowly but builds in dramatic intensity. Henry Perowne is a successful neurosurgeon and a happy man. He loves his lawyer wife Rosalind and is proud of his two grown children, Daisy, an about-to-be-published poet, and musician son, Theo. The events of the novel take place within a 24-hour period, a Saturday on which Henry wakes up unusually early. It’s also the day of a huge anti-war march in London and the ordinary events of Henry’s day are set against this backdrop. The day begins ominously but is followed by his regular squash game, a visit to his mother, shopping, and cooking. Although he is comfortable in his upper-middle class life, Henry is troubled by post-9/11 malaise and through the course of the day, he muses on life, his family, the world, and the imminent war with Iraq. His reflections tell us much about himself and his family, encompassing much more than one day. It’s a clever plot juxtaposing fear and terror on both a global scale and closer to home. I wish our book club had picked this as one of our selections; there would have been so much to discuss. I'll definitely be reading more by this author.

Thanks so much for sharing this book Pooker 3! I'll be passing it on to gypsysmom at our "Fringe party" tomorrow evening.

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Passed on to gypsysmom as planned. Enjoy!

I really cleaned up last night at our Fringe Festival Release Party. I released 6 books but I brought 5 other ones home with me. I'm really looking forward to this one, just as mrsgaskell predicted. Thanks mrsg and Pooker too.

Saturday, February 15, 2003 doesn't seem that long ago but when McEwan talks about the political situation I realized how much has happened since then. mrsgaskell has alread talked about the huge anti-war demonstration that took place in London that day while Dr. Henry Perowne was filling his Saturday with other events. Despite that outpouring of sentiment, Britain joined the war in Iraq (while Canada, France and other nations stayed away) which was declared on March 19. The provocations for entering Iraq were mostly bogus but it did result in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government. Of course, it can be debated if the replacement leaves the people of Iraq any better off. Nevertheless, Britain withdrew all combat troops earlier this year and the US troops are supposed to be out by 2011. Henry Perowne, like many other people at the time, has mixed feelings about the war but, probably because of an encounter with an Iraqi patient who filled him in on the situation in Iraq, tends to support the necessity for ousting Saddam Hussein. His children, on the other hand, are anti-war and this causes some conflict between father and his daughter, Daisy.

Mostly, though, Henry Perowne is blessed and recognizes this. He has a fulfilling job, a satisfying relationship with his wife and is very pleased with how his children turned out. There are some flies in the ointment, of course. He's getting older and the rigours of a squash game are starting to get to him. His mother has Alzheimer Disease and no longer recognizes him. His father-in-law drinks to excess and every encounter with him is problematic because of this. All of this pales when his home is invaded by a young tough that he encountered in a car accident earlier in the day. When the situation ends, the whole family is shaken and has to deal with the fallout. When Dr. Perowne is called in to operate on this same individual you can't help but wonder how you would react in the same situation.

McEwan is wonderful in his details. The descriptions of surgeries, the squash game, the visit to the nursing home and even the meal preparations are filled with vivid detail so that it felt like I was looking over Perowne's shoulder. Interestingly, McEwan works in a discussion about exactly this style of writing (at p. 67) in discussing Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary which Henry read at his daughter's insistence:
At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. These books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation.
I don't think I agree with that assessment but if that's McEwan's feeling about his own work then long live steady, workmanlike accumulation!

Later on that same page he discusses the magical realism genre that his daughter also made him read. I laughed out loud when I read this comment:
'No more magic midget drummers,' he pleaded with her by post, after setting out his tirade. 'Please, no more ghosts, angels, satans or metamorphoses. When anything can happen, nothing much matters. It's all kitsch to me.' Bravo!

I'll take this to the next meet-up and we'll see if anyone else in the group wants to read it. Thanks so much mrsgaskell and Pooker3.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I will take this book to the meet-up tonight. If no-one takes it home it will be on the bookshelf up in the loft.

This release is for the 2010 Never Judge a Book by its Cover release challenge - Week 2 (blue and green) and for the 2010 Keep Them Moving release challenge.

Picked up at tonight's meeting for my hubby. To be re-released once read.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

Enjoy!

Picked this one up at May's Bookcrossing meeting here in Winnipeg! Looking forward to reading it! :)