"The actual, not the magical..."

Brain surgeon Henry Perowne, in Ian McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, has, under his daughter Daisy's direction,

read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary...
    They had the virtue, at least, of representing a recognisable physical reality; which could not be said for the so-called magical realists she opted to study in her final year. What were these authors of reputation doing—grown men and women of the twentieth century—granting supernatural powers to their characters? He never made it all the way through a single one of those irksome confections. And written for adults, not children. In more than one, heroes and heroines were born with or sprouted wings—a symbol, in Daisy's term, of their liminality; naturally, learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration. Others were granted a magical sense of smell, or tumbled unharmed out of high-flying aircraft. One visionary [in McEwan's own novel A Child in Time] saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him.
    A man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain—consciousness, no less. It isn't an article of faith with him, he knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs. If that's worthy of awe, it also deserves curiosity; the actual, not the magical, should be the challenge. This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible. [pp. 95-97]