hen British journalists complain — as they often do — about the ”elitism” of contemporary British literature, the honorable exception they often cite is the fiction of Ian McEwan. The distinctive achievement of McEwan’s work has been to marry literary seriousness and ambition with a pace and momentum more commonly associated with genre fiction. He is the master clockmaker of novelists, piecing together the cogs and wheels of his plots with unerring meticulousness. Even as the menacing, predatory mood of his novels tends to engender anxiety, the reliability of their craftsmanship — the relentlessness of their forward motion — instills confidence. The result, for the reader, is a sort of serene tension. That ticktock resonating through the paragraphs is the countdown to some horrible disaster, certainly, but also the sound of a perfectly calibrated machine working just as it should.

In ”Saturday,” McEwan’s new novel, these characteristic virtues of structural elegance and coherence are on prominent display — not least in the Aristotelian discipline with which he has confined the temporal span of his story to a single day. The day in question, bookended by two symmetrical episodes of lovemaking, belongs to a British neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. Perowne is a fortunate man. In addition to his worthy, fulfilling job and the panoply of upper-middle-class privileges it pays for, he is blessed with a joyous domestic life. He has two successful, attractive children — 23-year-old Daisy, who is about to publish her first collection of poetry, and 18-year-old Theo, a prodigiously talented blues musician. He also has a lovely, capable wife, Rosalind, with whom, after nearly a quarter-century of marriage, he remains deeply in love.

This multitude of blessings, coupled with his confidence in the certainty of scientific progress, gives rise to a contentment that verges perilously on complacency. In another time and place, Perowne would almost certainly be a smug man. But it is his fate to live in the early 21st century — in the ”baffled and fearful” days following 9/11 and leading up to the current war in Iraq — and neither his embarrassment of riches, nor his general inclination to optimism, can protect him from the darkness of his times.

In the opening pages of ”Saturday,” we find Perowne awake before dawn, gazing out from his bedroom window. As he surveys the jumbled rooftops of nighttime London, he is filled with a gratifying sense of the order of things. ”Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece — millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work.” But then he sees something strange on the horizon — a meteor, perhaps, or a comet. As it comes nearer, he realizes it is an airliner on fire — hurtling through the night sky in the direction of Heathrow. Might it be another terrorist catastrophe? In an instant, his illusion of intellectual mastery over his surroundings is shattered and the euphoric visions of civic cooperation are replaced by dreadful imaginings of panic and death.

Over the course of the ensuing day, Perowne’s intermittent glimpses of this airplane drama as it unfolds on soundless television screens around London will emerge as the novel’s leitmotif — a persistent reminder of the fragmented, irreducibly ambiguous form in which the world presents itself to modern urban citizenry. Now, as Perowne stares from his window, he wonders if he ought to do something, call the emergency services, perhaps. It is an idle thought — there is nothing useful to be done — but the passivity of his spectator’s role troubles him. ”His crime was to stand in the safety of his bedroom, wrapped in a woollen dressing gown, without moving or making a sound, half dreaming as he watched people die.”

Perowne is not a religious man. For him, religious faith ”amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance.” Yet his bewildered sense of culpability and helplessness as he watches the fiery plane go past suggests a not dissimilar confusion. Problems of reference — problems, that is, of how to negotiate the relationship between the private self and the outer world — may not, it seems, be the exclusive preserve of the religiously minded, but rather the inescapable burden of being a modern human.

As Perowne proceeds through the pleasures and chores of his day off — sex with his wife, a squash game with a colleague, a visit to his mother in a rest home, preparations for a family dinner — this tension between the personal and the public realms persists. Like 13-year-old Briony in McEwan’s previous novel, ”Atonement” — suddenly aware that ”the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense” — Perowne is caught between the vividness of interiority (the clarity of his private, sensuous pleasures) and the confusing demands of what lies outside.

As a wealthy professional, he is better equipped than most to fend off the threatening cacophony of the two billion voices. His day is spent shuttling from one privileged, embattled sanctuary to another: his handsome house, bristling with locks and panic buttons, his cream-upholstered silver Mercedes, his squash court, his surgery. But McEwan is not interested here in satirizing yuppie solipsism. The truest sanctuary we see Perowne find in the course of his 24 hours is not in the sumptuous refuges themselves, but in the human relationships that they house. His moments of intimate communion with other people — whether achieved in the transcendent harmonies of music or the ”biological hyperspace” of lovemaking or the balletic collaborations of a surgical operation — occasion some of the novel’s most elegant and acute prose. In lieu of any larger social cohesion, McEwan suggests, such private joys, carved out from the clamorous world, are what must sustain us. They are our fleeting glimpses of utopia; the ancient ideals of caritas and community lived in microcosm.

The world is always at the door, however, hammering to be let in, and the ”right” that Perowne postulates, to be left in peace — ”to forget, to obliterate a whole universe of public phenomena” — is under constant attack. While driving to a squash game in the padded privacy of his Mercedes, Perowne is forced by an antiwar march to make a detour from his usual route and becomes involved in a minor car accident. The three young men in the other car demand immediate compensation. When Perowne refuses to pay up, violence seems inevitable. But he has been closely observing the leader of the trio, a thug named Baxter, and he is pretty sure he has spotted in him the early symptoms of a degenerative illness called Huntington’s disease. By confronting him with this diagnosis, he creates a distraction that allows him to escape without injury. As he drives away, his relief is undercut by misgivings. He doubts the morality of using his medical authority as a stun gun, even in an act of self-defense. And his uneasiness proves well founded, for this encounter has set in motion a train of events that will result, by the end of the novel, in a much more serious threat to him and his family.

Even without such literal intrusions on his privacy, Perowne’s right to forget is constantly being assailed by the promptings of his own ethical imagination. His son, Theo, protected by the self-absorption of youth, manages to shut out the large, grim stuff of world affairs through his ability to ”think small” — concentrating on the short-range pleasures offered by an upcoming snowboarding trip or a new girlfriend. Perowne’s mother, too, is afforded a kind of serenity by old age and senility. But for an able, sentient adult like Perowne, empathetic engagement with the world — and all the moral confusion that such engagement entails — is not really a choice. He cannot help seeing things from the viewpoints of others: his children, his mother and his Iraqi patient, whose stories of torture in one of Saddam’s prisons have persuaded him that the invasion of Iraq is probably a good idea. Empathy, once granted admission, has a way of multiplying its demands. While buying the ingredients for a fish stew he plans to make for supper, Perowne ponders the latest scientific research indicating that fish have a higher degree of capacity for pain than has previously been assumed. ”This,” he thinks, ”is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish.” If empathy is the antidote to cruelty, the essence of what it is to be human, how far to extend it? To fish? To foxes? To jihadists who wish you dead?

Unlike Joyce’s Bloom, whose precedent his daylong interior odyssey is surely intended to invoke — or Bellow’s Herzog, whose thoughts on what it is ”to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass,” provide this book’s epigraph — Perowne is not a lyrical thinker. He is a pragmatist, a ”professional reductionist,” a man whose preference for verifiable fact leaves him immune not only to the consolations of religion but, more significantly for McEwan’s purpose, to the pleasures of fiction. Perowne is bothered — irritated — by stories. They are at once too artificially precise, he feels, and not precise enough. They are always proposing faked-up watershed moments, yet they are incapable of delivering answers. Magical realism, with its reckless, childish inventions, is particularly loathsome to him. His daughter, Daisy, keeps prescribing him reading lists in hope of curing his philistinism, but so far, not even Tolstoy and Flaubert have managed to seduce him:

”In fact, under Daisy’s direction, Henry has read the whole of ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘Madame Bovary,’ two acknowledged masterpieces. 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 19th-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.”

In giving us a protagonist so steadfastly hostile to the charms of his own art, McEwan signals a return to some of the questions about the purpose and value of literature that he posed in ”Atonement.” Here, though, the contemporary setting lends the questions a new moral urgency. ”The times are strange enough. Why make things up?” Perowne asks. Which is to say, in a world that can present us with the phantasmagorical spectacle of 9/11, what has fiction to offer? Like Adorno, famously announcing that ”after Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric,” or the many writers who, in the wake of 9/11, expressed anxiety about the relevance of their work, Perowne suspects that making up stories — fretting about mots justes while buildings burn — is not just an unnecessary occupation but a frivolous one.

The paradox, of course, is that even as Perowne denies the fundamental usefulness of fiction, his daylong preoccupations supply the matter for the novel we are reading. He is surely right: literature cannot give absolute answers, or furnish watertight explanations. What it can do, McEwan proposes, is capture the moral tangle of personal life and historical context that is our lived experience.

In the novel’s climactic scene, McEwan arranges for his protagonist to be given an explicit example of literature’s power. As night falls, Perowne is back once again in his well-appointed home, presiding over a family reunion. His son has returned from band practice. His daughter is just back from Paris. His aged father-in-law is also in town. But when his wife, Rosalind, arrives to complete the party, it is with violent invaders at her rear. The ensuing action is vintage McEwan nightmare. Knives are brandished. Noses are punched. Terrifying violations are threatened. And then, at the very moment of crisis, the recitation of a poem effects a miraculous transformation. Disaster is averted by the unlikely deus ex machina of a Victorian poet.

This, it is safe to say, is a faintly preposterous episode. Apart from the credibility-defying spectacle of the fiendish underclass tamed, even momentarily, by verse, there is the garish literalism with which the novel’s constituent ideas are made manifest. Here is civilized joy threatened by Caliban-like hordes. Here are the twin feelings of culpability and helplessness foreshadowed at the beginning of the book. Here is the conflict between hatred and sympathy for one’s enemy. Here, too, of course, is the transformative capacity of art.

McEwan is quite conscious, I suspect, of the burdens he has placed on our belief. Indeed, he underlines the excessive symmetries of this denouement by having Perowne remark upon the tidy way in which the scene assembles ”all the elements” of his day. Later, Perowne goes on to point up the almost magical quality of what has taken place: ”Could it happen, is it within the bounds of the real,” he wonders. Exaggerated tidiness and supernatural fancy, are, we recall, the very vices that inspire Perowne’s hostility to fiction.

In the final sequence of the novel, coherence and symmetry give way, once again, to moral ambiguity. Perowne commits an altruistic action that appears to be a perfect gesture of liberal forgiveness. But Perowne himself is not so sure. Perhaps, he muses, this is merely an attempt to reassert control over his enemy. Perhaps it is a means to assuage his middle-class guilt. It might even be interpreted as a kind of revenge. The novel ends on a complicated chord of restored tranquillity and persisting uncertainty.

If the earlier invasion scene deliberately plays up the artifices of storytelling that Perowne has disparaged, the uncertain aftermath embodies the other part of his complaint against fiction: its brazen inexactitude, its failure to ever fully resolve the complexities that it adumbrates. McEwan’s apparent purpose here is not a meek admission of literature’s crimes so much as a ludic defense of its virtues. Yes, the novel suggests, fiction is both fuzzy and disciplined, humanly messy and artificially neat — but it is in this fruitful contradiction that its peculiar redemptive power lies.

In ”Saturday,” as in all McEwan’s work, there is much to admire in the efficiency and clarity with which he marshals his themes. Here, though, his control over his material is too pronounced. The final chapters, with their literal enactment of the notion that the truest poetry is the most feigning, only reiterate what has already been amply, if implicitly, communicated in the course of the novel. And in doing so, they threaten to undermine the very literary immediacy that they champion. Overstatement is still overstatement, even when effected with a knowing wink to the reader.

In a recent interview, Cynthia Ozick spoke of some of the ideas underpinning her latest novel, ”Heir to the Glimmering World.” ”I think that if any reader can utter this as a thesis as I have just done, then the book fails,” she said. ”If the concept is going to be visible, you have written an essay. You have written a tract of some kind.” This, it would seem, is the difficulty presented by ”Saturday”: finely wrought and shimmering with intelligence though it is, it never quite fully submerges its thesis. Its concept is so high and prominent as to disallow the reader the distinctive novelistic pleasure of feeling, rather than coolly registering, the author’s intention. In other novels, McEwan has proved more than able at capturing the breathing warmth of life in fiction’s cold frame. Here, though, his symmetries seem to have gotten the better of him and his art comes perilously close to stifling life altogether.

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