"If Perowne were inclined to religious feeling..."

The action of Ian McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, takes place on February 15, 2003—post 9/11 and pre-invasion of Iraq. Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, after his very long Friday at work, awakes some hours before dawn, rises, and is surprised to find that

he doesn't feel tired, despite the hour or his recent labours, nor is his conscience troubled by any recent case. [p. 2]

Standing at the bedroom's

centre window, [he pulls] back the tall folding wooden shutters with care so as not to wake [his wife] Rosalind. [p. 2]

After several minutes at the window,

the elation is passing, and he's beginning to shiver...He turns from the window to reach behind him for a thick woolen dressing gown where it lies draped over a chair. Even as he turns, he's aware of some new element outside, in the square or in the trees, bright but colourless, smeared across his peripheral vision by the movement of his head. [p. 17]

After thinking first meteor, then comet, he moves to wake Rosalind to see it too:

He's moving toward the bed when he hears a low rumbling sound, gentle thunder gathering in volume, and stops to listen. It tells him everything. He looks back over his shoulder to the window for confirmation. Of course, a comet is so distant it's bound to appear stationary. Horrified, he returns to his position by the window. [p. 18-19]

His mind fills with memories and fantasies of being on board an airplane headed for a crash.

It's already almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again, the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed...The plane emerges from the trees, crosses a gap, and disappears behind the Post Office Tower. If Perowne were inclined to religious feeling, to supernatural explanations, he could play with the idea that he's been summoned; that having woken in an unusual state of mind, and gone to the window for no reason, he should acknowledge a hidden order, an external intelligence which wants to show or tell him something of significance. But a city of its nature cultivates insomniacs; it is itself a sleepless entity whose wires never stop singing; among so many millions there are bound to be people staring out of windows when normally they would be asleep. And not the same people every night. That it should be him and not someone else is an arbitrary matter. A simple anthropic principle is involved. The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis. [pp. 21-24]

Later, when the family are up, at last the news informs them:

It's a cargo plane, a Russian Tupolev on a run from Riga to Birmingham. As it passed well to the east of London a fire broke out in one of the engines....[pp. 51-52]