EVERY WORKING NOVELIST secretly has the same dream: to write “le roman du moment”; the novel that everyone simply must read, and that doesn’t just become a talking point at every “chattering class” dinner table, but also finds a wide readership. What’s more, it’s a book that manages to strike a major chord in the contemporary sensibility and address the complexities of modern existence.
But a novel that garners so much chatter is certain also to win its author his fair share of detractors. Certain critics will spit bile at the book because (a) they find its timeliness rather opportunistic; (b) it is a novel that works both sides of the literary/popular divide and therefore (c) has turned into a commercial triumph at the same time.
Ian McEwan’s masterful Saturday is such a novel. When published in hardback last year, it received largely ecstatic reviews and confirmed McEwan’s position as Britain’s leading living novelist; a writer who, above all others, has his finger on the pulse of the here-and- now.
But while Saturday has many passionate defenders, it also has quite a few equally passionate (and fiercely articulate) detractors, who consider its elegant narrative an eggshell thin veneer, glossing over the storyline’s blatant absurdities and moments of breathtaking incredulity. Now, as the paperback is published, more readers will be able to see for themselves.
From the outset, McEwan takes several big risks in Saturday; the biggest is to look at the dense metropolitan machine that is modern London from the well-heeled perspective of a member of the professional classes. More tellingly, Henry Perowne isn’t the usual disaffected lawyer or stockbroker for whom the professional and personal responsibilities of life at the upper end of the bourgeoisie have become an existential burden. On the contrary, he’s a man who, to descend into psychobabble, largely appears “centred”. An eminent neurologist who loves the complex mechanics of his chosen trade, he is also a devoted husband and father, living in a grand house in the rarefied confines of a grand square in Central London.
Indeed, that staple of modern fiction — family dysfunction — plays no role in the narrative (another of McEwan’s gambles). Perowne doesn’t have a mistress tucked away in the Barbican, he has always been faithful to his wife and still enjoys robust sex with her. Even more extraordinary is the fact that he genuinely likes his two grown-up children — and (shock, horror) they consider him a good egg as well. What’s more, they are both disgustingly accomplished — the son (who still lives at home) is an accomplished blues guitarist; the daughter (based in Paris) an emerging and gifted poet, while Perowne’s wife is a media lawyer.
So far, so upscale and cozy. But then the novel — which unfolds over the course of one Saturday, February 15, 2003 (the day of the large anti-war demonstration in London) — takes a dive both literally and figuratively down a blind alley. En route to a squash game, Perowne’s Mercedes is involved in a fender-bender incident with another vehicle, occupied by a group of men who could politely be described as yobs. What seems a minor case of road rage is later transformed into something far more menacing and nightmarish.
With its brilliant eye for urban detritus (McEwan really does capture modern London’s profound energy and tawdriness) and for domestic detail (the sequence where Perowne goes shopping for a fish stew), Saturday has the feel of lived experience, especially as it attempts to grapple with the undercurrent of fear that has haunted all cities since 9/11 (Perowne’s troubled musings about the inevitability of a terrorist attack on London have chilling resonance since the events of July 7 last year).
However, the novel does demand that you accept several large contrivances (to detail them would spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it). John Banville — last year’s Man Booker winner — certainly couldn’t buy into such narrative ploys and in a now-infamous New York Review of Books critique, essentially demolished the novel, writing: “Overall . . . Saturday has the feelings of a neo-liberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair . . . were to appoint a committee to produce ‘a novel for our time’, the result would surely be something like this”.
Ouch. But Banville’s dyspeptic response seemed to be largely caught up with McEwan’s alleged “mellowness” — and the fact that he dares to write a novel in which husband and wife and children are not engaged in internecine Strindbergian antics. Yes, if a writer sets up a situation of general domestic calm you can be certain that he will upend it by having dark outside forces deface its picture postcard calm. Equally, it is no surprise when the central character ’s professional skills are needed to assist the very person who threatens everything he holds sacred.
But if you accept these contrivances as part of a larger thematic design — a day-in-the-life tale, in which important realities penetrate the protective world of our own private lives — the novel is both bracing and great reading.
McEwan dares to be both highly literate and unapologetically accessible at the same time; Saturday’s narrative ploys may not always work — and it might seem just a little too smug for those who hate reading about the well-upholstered lives of the well educated.
But, for me, it is a first-rate example of serious popular fiction; one of those rare novels that still says more about the way we live now than many an arid dispatch from that dubious summit called High Art.
What they said
The good...
“Saturday should have won this year's Booker Prize.”
Craig Raine
Times Literary Supplement
“This novel reinforces his status as the supreme novelist of his generation.” Peter Kemp
The Sunday Times
“One of the most serious contributions to post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature.”
Mark Lawson
The Guardian
“Wonderfully involving and affecting on every page. Everybody with any interest in contemporary literature will want to read it at once.”
David Sexton
Evening Standard
The bad...
“The only thing that stopped me hurling Ian McEwan’s Saturday across my American motel room, was the fact that I had bought it in hardback. This Booker shortlisted novel is the most self-satisfied and complacent work I have ever read in my life.”
Janice Turner
The Times
“It feels dislocated from everyday life, McEwan’s cool prose proving counter-productive, a triumph of polish over effect.”
Tom Adair
The Scotsman
“The violent confrontation late in the narrative may be the silliest, most overwrought climax McEwan has ever cooked up.”
Jennifer Reese
Entertainment Weekly
... and the ugly
“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?”
John Banville
New York Review of Books
