*******Note : SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!! This review is for people who have read Saturday or people who will never read Saturday!********

Reading Saturday is like running a weird obstacle race. At first it’s all manicured lawns and rhododendrons, and then it’s hideous piles of donkey droppings, and that’s how it goes – daffodils, donkey droppings, vistas of beauty, donkey droppings. And I’m not sure that was the intended effect. What a weird novel – here we have one of the stupidest plot devices for many years, followed immediately by one of the soapiest; and we also have an excruciatingly badly written cardboard villain; we have some fantastically overwritten passages which could make you lose your lunch if you’re sensitive to pretension; and yet, I liked it. I thought it couldn’t have tried more to do something which is worth doing, which is, to pick up the chaotic bundles of stuff left around by the journalists* and try to connect them together, and in the middle of the madness of the early 21st century, our madness, to make some kind of sense of some of the lives that can be lived in its midst.

THE TWO RIDICULOUS PLOT DEVICES

1) Okay, there’s a home invasion, like in Clockwork Orange or Death Wish or Funny Games. McEwan’s villain is called Baxter and he’s the standard twitching psycho. He has Huntingdon’s Chorea, the thing that killed Woody Guthrie. He’s got SYMBOL stamped all over his cardboard simian features. He represents THE LOWER ORDERS who in turn represent ANARCHY AND VIOLENCE. The beautiful upper middle class Perowne family represent ORDER, KNOWLEDGE and THE ARTS. So Baxter has ordered the pretty 23 year old daughter to disrobe. But then he notices a book on the coffee table. What’s that? It’s a poetry book I wrote, she says. So the psycho villain then asks her to read something out of it. She then quotes Dover Beach from memory and he has an epiphany, he howls “Oh that’s so beautiful!”, all thoughts of rape flee from his mind. Now really

a) Either Ian McEwan thinks that could actually happen in which case he’s very silly, or

b) He thinks US READERS would think that could really happen, in which case he thinks WE’RE really silly

2) Then, the father and the son overwhelm the intruder and hurl him down the antique stairs, so he receives a brain injury. In true medical soap tradition (British readers will be thinking of HOLBY CITY here), the father who hurled becomes the doctor who will save; yes, he dashes to the operating room to perform the delicate operation only he could do to save this wretch’s life. How morally superior can you possibly get? Well, this second slice of soapy pie was finessed pretty well in the end by our author, because, as he explains, “By saving his life in the operating theatre, Henry also committed Baxter to his torture” (from his terrible degenerative disease). That may be so, but it don't make this situation any less sudsy.


SOME THINGS I REALLY LIKED

Readers have been repulsed by McEwan’s fulsome descriptions of the totally perfect Perowne family, the lovely lawyer wife, the lovely poet daughter, the lovely guitar prodigy son, the lovely brain surgeon dad, and the lovely family donkey (I made the last one up, there is no Perowne family donkey, but if there was, you may be sure it would be the only donkey with a PhD in Egyptology from Balliol College, Oxford). But I don’t think all this gush is to be taken at face value at all. I think it’s a kind of loathe letter to the British upper middle class, the people who have got it all, and whose lives are really quite like this. (For an American equivalent, see The Privileges by Jonathan Dee). This is a book about class (and other things), and about the difficult, inconvenient truth (in McEwan’s eyes, maybe) that the upper classes are necessary, however revolting their ineffable perfectness may be. As an instance of how I think we’re supposed to read this stuff, the son Theo has a guitar talent & so because of some string-pulling and connections, he gets to “jam” with some “blues greats” like Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton. Yes, I reached for the sick bag during this passage too, but I believe McEwan wants us to.

I loved all the neurosurgery stuff, which some readers found boring. Au contraire, I thought it was Ballardian, beautiful and convincing.
I liked McEwan’s efforts in trying to make us see the macro in the micro – the greater political event of the looming invasion of Iraq is set off with the personal event of the home invasion; the determinism which Perowne sees will cause the Iraq invasion can be also seen in the descriptions of Baxter’s inevitable fate. I liked the 18 page description of a game of squash and thought this was a crafty homage to Don DeLillo’s Underworld. I liked that McEwan is almost the exact British equivalent of Jonathan Franzen – yes, McEwan’s novels are short affairs and a re produced regularly, but both writers are writing about NOW, THIS VERY MINUTE, and all of our compromised, mortgaged squishy-squashy middleclass lives.

In three words : a heroic failure.



* First come the journalists with their long lenses and rough drafts – they’re fast, they often work in packs and they don’t look back. They leave the crossing of the t’s and the dotting of the I’s to others. Then walking behind the journalists come lonelier figures, the historians and the novelists.