Ian McEwan’s Saturday is a compilation of beautiful sentences housed in a dramatically inert package. It captures a long day in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, one encompassing everything from London’s massive anti-Iraq war protests to preparing fish soup for a long-awaited family dinner.

Perowne is our rational narrator throughout, dissecting the day’s events much as he unknots the imperfect anatomies of his patients. Most of the pages are occupied with meditations on family: the passion he—almost with surprise—still bears for his wife, the pain of a mother lost to senility, the uncertainty of watching children pursue their own paths.

The war protests extend the novel’s focus, letting different characters voice the familiar arguments of the time. Here and in his home life, Perowne is swayed by all sides. His default mode is analysis—often overanalysis—which leaves him unable to commit to the certainties of those around him. His daughter, a poet, assigns him novels he’s constitutionally incapable of appreciating. She’s similarly blocked by his inability to unambiguously condemn the bombing that’s about to begin.

Perowne weighs her arguments, weighs his own, weighs the impact of his response to her, weighs why they’re even driven to fight at all. McEwan captures his thoughts in elegantly stacked paragraphs, immaculate lines of impeccable phrasing. But he also lets the title character fall into a passivity that robs the book of its narrative drive.

Perowne observes and remembers, clinically weighing everything he encounters during his day. Ambitiously, McEwan aims to establish his narrator as an avatar of reason. He’s trying to capture something mechanistic about science and surgery and express it as a worldview. But while each observation feels true-to-life, the cumulative weight seems inessential, especially when so much of the Perowne family’s life is defined by conspicuous privilege.

“Saturday” can be a hard read. The pages are rewarding, but they don’t call you back when they’re set aside. McEwan ultimately does overtake the navel-gazing with two wonderful scenes of conflict. The book even ends with a neat twist of salvation, mechanistic redemption from an unspiritual man. But it takes a lot of patience to get there, and the reward outweighs the effort only slightly.