Le Carre John L Books : Saturday

Saturday

£2.49


The critical response to Saturday must be making Ian McEwan a very happy man (not that his virtually unassailable position as Britain’s leading novelist has been in doubt). While contemporaries (and rivals) Martin Amis and Will Self have had much more hit-or-miss records recently, each new McEwan novel gleans a host of plaudits, and Atonement has been generally hailed as his masterpiece. Saturday may not enjoy quite such acclaim, but it’s a remarkably accomplished piece of work, as richly drawn and characterised as anything he has written. McEwan s protagonist is neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a man comfortably ensconced in an enviable upper middle class existence. His wife is a successful newspaper lawyer, his daughter Daisy a budding poet. But as he wakes one Saturday morning and witnesses a plane accident through his window, he is not yet aware that this is a harbinger of a sustained assault on all that he holds dear. It’s a McEwan trademark to begin his novels with a striking or violent rupture of everyday existence, but this opening is a prelude to his most impressively sustained narrative yet. It’s the publication day of Henry’s daughter s poetry collection, but a chance encounter with a drunken trio emerging from a lap-dancing club ends violently, even as a march against the war in Iraq streams past nearby. And this encounter with the menacing Baxter, main antagonist of the group, is to have fateful consequences. As Saturday progresses, Henry is forced to examine every aspect of his life and beliefs, not least his attitude to the war.Unlike many of his peers, McEwan is not content to reduce the issues of the war to simple opposition, in which Tony Blair is characterised as a war criminal. Henry has treated a victim of Saddam s brutality, and although a comic encounter with the Prime Minister himself is a highlight of the book, both Henry (and his creator) are obliged to consider the complex skein of the conflict from all sides. While there are missteps (the poetic daughter, Daisy, is thinly drawn), McEwan s invigorating and trenchant novel is an unmissable experience. --Barry Forshaw

Elaborate hoax? - Just when I was beginning to think that the PC trend for favouring minority writers - disabled black communist lesbians for example - had gone a bit overboard, I was powerfully reminded why the tide had turned against white middle-aged, middle-class literary prize-winning male academics. Atonement was excellent and original, Enduring Love meaty and compelling, Saturday, though well-written and very readable, is as has been noted ad nauseam, a pretentious lifestyle novel, very full of its own pedigree ( John Grammaticus , for heaven s sake) - oozing well heeled self-satisfaction at every turn. Sure there s nothing wrong with class, but this is so self-consciously attuned to the lifestyle must-haves of people like us that the characters lack all integrity. They are straight out of the Sunday supplement, down to the coffee and probiotic yogurt. This makes the 9-11 backdrop seem rather fashionably employed, and the treatment of the character of Baxter questionable. Glibly asserting that Some of the worst wrecks have been privately educated does not address the issue here: it doesn t matter how fortunate or unfortunate the characters portrayed, if they re real people brought to life for us with some recognition of their lives myriad associations and complexities. Perowne and his family are too much the kind of people marketing companies dangle before us to aspire to, as for Baxter and co, sadly McEwan reveals a much poorer understanding of social class than he has acquired of neurosurgery. There is also an undercurrent of emasculation, as though on some level Perowne/McEwan would love to be brave enough to fight for a cause, but in this world the serious business of male supremacy is fought to the death on the squash court. He s a cunning writer - perhaps his secret intention all along was to get us to side with the underdog?

the nineeleveniraqwar novel - Ian? This is the marketing department, for God s sake write a nine eleven novel! . But the authour has little to say on the subject beyond school boy observations that moslim women wear veils and that post Sadam Iraq (at the time of writing) couldn t be expected to be any worse than the then status quo. However the book is beautifully written and its characters are fully formed by McEwans perfect prose. Yes, they re the predicatable metropolitain, extended middle-class nuclear family, but in MacEwan s hands they come to life fully and have a detailed and interesting back story which completes and explains their reactions to the events in the narrative. Events which are partly given by circumstance, but also by accident of neurology, a subject he tackles with clarity whilst not detracting from its obvious complexity. En route we learn a lot about how to play the blues, play squash (the infamous 15 pages) and even the development of the cordless kettle. In the hands of a lesser writer these would appear padding for the non-nine-eleven novel, but in MacEwan s hands every word adds to his reader s understanding of the characters. Be warned, the story line struck me as being of secondary importance to the people that inhabited it, and the ending felt rather improbable. Without giving too much away, one moral of the narrative might be the pen is mightier than the sword . Something we all agree with but which can be difficult to show convincingly in fiction given the backdrop of our times - both at home and abroad.

A bad kebab - I binned this book after the first few dozen pages. They were totally leaden. The author seemed to have swallowed a medical dictionary, whose contents were then regurgitated like a bad kebab supper. More of an endurance test than a novel, this was the second McEwan offering to bore me rigid. There won t be a third.

I thought it was just me... - As I write this, I m about 15 pages from the end of Saturday and can t wait to finish it, just to get it over with and to move onto something I might actually enjoy reading! It seems to have taken me forever to read and has turned into more of a chore than a pleasure. I ve only stuck with it in the hope that something would actually happen - alas, it seems I am to be disappointed (unless someone comes and blows up the Perownes house in the final pages...). I thought I would read some reviews just to see if I was alone in wondering what all the fuss was about, and am very relieved to find I am not - I was beginning to think that this novel was part of some literary in-joke which I didn t get.I am, perhaps, something of a latecomer to McEwan. A friend lent me Enduring Love a couple of years ago and I loved it, so resolved to read more of him. On Chesil Beach was my next McEwan outing, and I enjoyed that too, so had high hopes for Saturday - and the back-cover synopsis does make it sound as if this book has all the right ingredients for a gripping read. I have, however, found I have little interest in the main protagonist and, as many reviewers before me have stated, found his seemingly perfect family and upper-middle-class life nauseating.McEwan s depth of research clearly cannot be faulted, however, the reader is rather beaten over the head with it - perhaps occasioning the need for Perowne s services... I just found myself drifting off with every description of a brain operation, the naming of each piece of equipment used, each procedure carried out, etc., etc., and could certainly have lived without the 20-or-so-page-long-shot-by-shot description of Perowne s squash game, which came across as pointless and self-indulgent. The description of the squash game may be interesting to those who play squash (which I don t), I will concede that squash players may make up a reasonable proportion of those who might read this book, however, the surgical descriptions are probably fascinating only to neurosurgeons who may want to read this book so that they can congratulate McEwan on his research, and I suspect that they will constitute only a tiny proportion of the readership. For most of the rest of us, these laboured passages seem to be just rather dull filler and add little to the plot.Also very disappointing was the complete anti-climax that was the opening plane crash. The book opens in such a way that the reader expects this event to have a major impact on the rest of the story (in a similar vein to the incident at the opening of Enduring Love ), however, it turns into a minor distraction and one is left wondering why it s there. Sure, it may be the event that kicks off Perowne s unease throughout the day but as a plot device the plane crash turns out to be something of a damp squib.Overall, I have found Saturday to be self-indulgent, implausible (the Perownes perfect life, Baxter s apparent road-to-Damascus moment on hearing Daisy reciting poetry) and, at times, rambling. I still have Atonement and Amsterdam sitting on my bookshelves, waiting to be read but think I will have to psych myself up for my next dose of McEwan, and cross my fingers that those two do actually live up to all the hype - which Saturday , sadly, certainly did not.

gipping by young reader - i read this at the age of 17 and even then found myself fully immersed in the ordinary routine of a londoner /neurosurgeon. there was nothing immense in the style of writting, nothing even brilliant however its the way the book forces u without forcing you to realise life and understand its qualities to be happy about what you have etc that was amazing. i was finding myself tlaking about it with friends as if it was some film or soap i had been watching te detail is immense.absolutley gripping.




Saturday