An Extraordinary Day 
 An extraordinary day? When successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne looks out of the window of his London townhouse in the small hours of Saturday morning, he sees something far from ordinary. This turns out to have a simpler explanation than he thought, but coupled with the tension as Britain gears up for the Iraq invasion, it sets up a heightened awareness that colors all the normal events of the rest of his day--shopping, cooking, a squash game with a colleague, time spent with various members of his family--so that they become a kind of meditation on strength and appeasement, arrogance and responsibility, love and estrangement, cause and effect. The various threads of Perowne's day come together in a violent scene later that night in an authorial juggling feat such we have come to expect of McEwan, but which is nonethless satisfying on many different levels. All the same, the real joy of the book may not be in its extraordinary moments but in its ordinary ones. 
 I seldom find that McEwan's endings live up to the promise of his exposition and development; they tend towards melodrama as in Amsterdam, or literary legerdemain as in Atonement. There are elements of both here, though both are muted by comparison with his earlier books. At the same time, the author depends on the ending here more than in any other of his books that I have read, for the greater part of the novel is virtually plotless, and the separate events in it are connected more by the coincidence of following on each other in Perowne's datebook than by any chain of cause and effect; the ending is needed, therefore, to give everything else a larger meaning and focus. Perowne, among other things, is shown as an enthusiastic cook, and McEwan writes in much the same way. Each ingredient of the dish is prepared in turn and then set aside, to be combined in a feat of virtuosic flair at the very end. Even as we recognize his method (which perhaps shades our enthusiasm), we cannot help applaud his technique. 
 Besides, novels do not have to rely on roller-coaster rides of headlong events; they are also journeys into the mind. And Henry Perowne's mind, as McEwan reveals it, is more fascinating and multi-faceted than with any other of his characters. The world of medicine and science has featured in several other McEwan novels, but never with the wealth of detail given here, so that one sees through Perowne's eyes and shares his skills. McEwan's love of music, seen for example in Amsterdam, comes through in his pitch-perfect evocation not only of Perowne's classical sensitivities, but also the bond he shares with his blues-musician son, Theo. Perowne's bond with his elder child, Daisy, is equally close and equally tense: he argues with her about politics, she tries to introduce him to literature (she is a poet). These is a small false note here, however, in that a plot element turns upon Perowne's ignorance of a well-known poem (Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"), which seems inconceivable given the fineness of his tuning in other respects; but it is a small point, easily forgiven. 
 Clearly, this book was written in the shadow of 9/11. The question of violence and how to respond to it resonates throughout, and politics form the background to both the time and the story. Yet the focus of the book is personal and ethical rather than political, and this is McEwan's greatest strength. About a quarter way into the story, there is a description of a hard-fought squash game which qualifies as one of those extraordinary set-pieces one encounters in great novels. All the themes of the book are present in it, but they are brought down to human terms, and described with the precision of a surgeon and the eye of a sports writer. With writing like this, quibbles become irrelevant.