The English Neoclassicists saw God as the master clock maker who wound up the world, stepped back and let it tick. He then wandered off somewhere, putting us on our own.

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Three hundred years later, Ian McEwan's new novel has an X-ray of an old-fashioned alarm clock on the cover.

Well, you can't judge a book by ... but certainly the illustration is a hint of what's inside. "Saturday" is a masterfully constructed piece of writing, to be sure, but much like the works of that tiny Neoclassicist Alexander Pope, it's more a piece of machinery than a fully realized work of art.

And what eventually keeps this well-oiled gizmo turning around and around is a Victorian poet. Go figure.

"Saturday" is positioned as a post-September 11 novel, written to examine the new world of uncertainty and terror, but the book really isn't about a changed society.

Instead it's about the adage that a man's house is his castle, in this case, a finely furnished 19th-century London townhouse with a silver Mercedes 500S in the garage.

The lord of the castle is Dr. Henry Perowne, 48, whose neurosurgery practice puts him among the aristocrats of medicine.

Deftly he cuts into brains, saving some lives, losing others in God-like fashion while Bach plays on the operating-room speaker.

McEwan excels at this sort of technical description, dropping a "pilocytic astrocytoma" here, a "radiofrequency thermocoagulation" there.

In this clockwork structure, he takes us inside the head of a neurosurgeon who is inside the head of his patients.

After a week's worth of sawing and sniping, Perowne awakes early on Saturday with his day laid out before him -- a game of squash with a colleague, then shopping for the dinner he'll prepare for his perfect family of wife Rosalind, daughter Daisy, son Theo and his father-in-law.

Rosalind is an expert lawyer and eager lover; Daisy is fast becoming a fine poet with a published book, and Theo is a talented blues guitarist with a New York gig looming.

All's right with the Perownes' world. Outside, however, a burning plane moves across the sky, a million march in London to protest the United States' impending invasion of Iraq, illegal activity goes on daily in the neighborhood park, and terrorists lurk in the shadows.

None of these larger disruptions threatens the Perownes, though; it's a punk named Baxter who intrudes on their idyllic life.

Waving a knife, he invades their home to avenge an earlier insult over a fender-bender with Perowne's Mercedes. Sounds real enough, but then McEwan keeps the machinery humming by afflicting Baxter with Huntington's chorea, a fatal brain disease. (Woody Guthrie was a victim.)

Perowne is the perfect person to understand and sympathize with him.

Now, it's time to introduce readers to Matthew Arnold, the English Victorian poet best remembered, if at all today, for "Dover Beach." Even the Brit Perowne never heard of him.

And, who should be from near Dover? Why Baxter, naturally.

Now, try to imagine this scene: a naked Daisy, forced to disrobe by a lascivious Baxter, disarms her possible rapist by reciting "Dover Beach."

"It's beautiful. ... It makes me think about where I grew up," exclaims the smitten thug. The moment sounds like something from "Guys and Dolls."

With his Arnold, his new ally at his side, Perowne seizes the day. Poetry rocks!

What follows is as predictable as waking up at 6 a.m. to that faithful alarm clock.

Here are the key lines of "Dover Beach":

It's not these pertinent lines that move Baxter however, but rather Arnold's description of "the cliffs of England" which "stand glimmering and vast."

The poet's message -- that in this uncertain world of "confused alarms of struggle and of flight," love is our salvation -- would appear to be the crux of McEwan's novel.

If only he had delivered it from the soul of his characters rather than producing it like a product of a novel factory, it might have been felt more vividly.

Local note: McEwan drew on the work of Pittsburgh neurosurgeon and author Dr. Frank Vertosick Jr., whose book "When the Air Hits Your Brain" was an account of his medical student days.