McEwan seems to craft Henry as a kind of Western Everyman of the privileged variety. He is rational, capable, cultured, happy and good--he is more decent than most people, despite his upper-class complacency. He is faithful to his wife, whom he deeply loves, archly wondering at one point if his lack of interest in acquiring a younger mistress is the result of some kind of character defect. He deeply loves his children--McEwan's sympathetic inhabiting of Theo, Henry's teenage son, a blues guitarist, beautifully alive and tender, and his account of Theo's playing is, like his evocation of music in Amsterdam, as uncannily intuitive as his breathtaking descriptions of Henry operating on the brain. McEwan is not only the greatest living writer in England; now that Bellow has stopped writing, and now that Roth's mastery of le mot juste has exploded into a brilliant but often undisciplined torrent of mots, McEwan is writing better English prose than anybody. The Nobel Prize committee could start making itself respectable again by giving him the nod.

Given Henry's self-knowledge, his gifts and his humanity, you're tempted to identify his views with the narrator's. His reasons for supporting an Iraq invasion are conscientious, anguished, half-hearted and based mostly on accounts of Saddam Hussein's atrocities that he's heard from an Iraqi exile named Professor Taleb, one of Saddam's victims and Henry's patient (though Henry is something of a dove in reaction to the hawkish Strauss). Henry is an admirable man, and you smile when you learn that he has no intention of reading the unnamed fiction by Joseph Conrad his daughter has given him. Henry's salvation lies in his self-forgetful work ("work--the ultimate badge of health") the concrete unambiguity of surgery; in Heart of Darkness, the only sanctuary from nothingness is skeptical, decent Marlow's self-forgetful labors on the concrete unambiguity of his boat's engine.

But it would be a mistake to confuse Henry with the narrator, or with the novel's essential meaning, or with the author himself. McEwan always surrounds his main characters with a space of gentle irony; Atonement is where his detachment shows its hand. In Saturday, he meticulously qualifies Henry's perspective, first by giving Daisy's arguments against the war greater prescience, then by having Henry's intellectual outlook ride volatilely on his emotions. In the novel's opening pages Henry, spooked by the burning plane, recalls with alarm the British political scientist Fred Halliday's prediction (Saturday has numerous references to real people, so light-handedly done that the novel gains a type of fictional fourth dimension) that 9/11 began a world crisis that would "take a hundred years to resolve." Later, driving his new Mercedes, feeling confident and prosperous, Henry remembers a statement by the famous British immunologist, Peter Medawar, who also happened to be of Arab descent: "To deride the hopes of progress is the ultimate fatuity." Halliday's lugubrious forecast is nonsense, Henry reassures himself. But hours afterward, when he promises Baxter that treatment is available for his disease, a note of hope that is an echo of Medawar's "hopes of progress," Baxter reacts with contemptuous disbelief, and Henry thinks to himself that Baxter "is right to pick up on the fatuity, the feebleness of the idea." Not only does Henry abandon his optimism about progress--the reversal turns stunningly on the word "fatuity"--he tries to use the illusion of progress to trick a man whom society has left behind.

McEwan virtuosically molds theme out of the modulations of character in just this way. In the novel's concluding pages, he even sets Henry up for an upheaval after the book ends. He has Henry taking stock at home as Saturday is about to pass into Sunday, complacently predicting the future to himself, mapping out his life, and Rosalind's, his children's and his mother's. But he is building these certainties about the future at the end of a day when all of his fundamental certainties have been undermined. Like all plan-making human creatures, Henry is going to be surprised by the future, a boundary that defines the limits of anyone's perspective.

Casting doubt on the power of mind to organize reality must be why McEwan has chosen as the novel's epigraph a long passage from Saul Bellow's Herzog (aside from the odd fact that every British writer with an intellectual or emotional stake in America tries to lay claim to Bellow. He is their Plymouth Rock, or maybe their Rhodesia. Or maybe it's just that he won the Nobel Prize). McEwan, however, makes deep, authentic use of Bellow. Herzog is a novel about an intellectual who discovers the inefficacy and unreliability of ideas, a revelation that comes to him when he has a minor car accident while behind the wheel with his very young daughter sitting beside him. Saturday not only has an epiphanic car accident; McEwan has Henry reflecting in transparently Bellovian manner, and his novel is laced with echoes of Herzog. This is also perhaps a way of capturing the entwined fates of England and America at this historical moment. Or maybe this respectful McEwanizing of Bellow is McEwan's answer to Martin Amis's attempts to become Bellow.

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