a day in the life; In Ian McEwan's riveting latest, a wealthy neurosurgeon tries-and fails-to go about his business during an antiwar protest in London.(Saturday)(Book Review)

Byline: Taylor Antrim

Novelists take a risk in depicting global events of the day. Fiction can't compete with the news for timeliness, and the cultural present-our music, our fashion, even our political debates-is forever moving on. And yet here comes Ian McEwan with a magnificent new novel that captures both the comforts and the anxieties of the world we live in right now.

Set on a day in February 2003, in London, on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Saturday (Talese/Doubleday) offers eloquent and bracingly relevant meditations on fear- and, happily, hope-from a writer who has proved himself among the very best at work today. Many of his earlier novels (Black Dogs, Enduring Love, and 2002's bravura Atonement) showed the way life can be overturned by an encounter with the unexpected. Saturday is a continuation of this unnerving theme, and the novel's greatest pleasure is its taut wire of a plot-about which, by the way, the less said the better. But here's a preview: Two million people have gathered in London to protest the coming war in Iraq, and Henry Perowne, an affluent, 48-year-old neurosurgeon, plans to play a game of squash, run a few errands, and prepare dinner for his wife, father-in-law, and two grown children. Little does he know that his day, which begins before dawn and ends more than 24 hours later, will contain moments of calm, elation, melancholy, and terror. The latter sections are so excruciatingly tense, you'll emerge from them as if out of a tunnel, blinking at the light.