Something for the weekend?
Iain McEwan, Saturday
Alexander McCall Smith took The Sunday Philosophy Club; Virginia Woolf couldn't make up her mind with Monday or Tuesday; T.S. Eliot chose Ash Wednesday; G.K. Chesterton plumped for The Man Who Was Thursday and every other author has found some sort of pun on Man Friday. With the title of his latest novel, Ian McEwan plugs a glaring gap in the literary week: Saturday.
Chronicling the events of one day (15th February 2003, since you ask) McEwan taps into a technique that has been the basis for some of the most celebrated novels of the 20th century – not least Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses. These authors used a single-day structure as a means of demonstrating an ordinary day for an ordinary person: one wonders why McEwan has chosen to follow this precedent.
Certainly his central character – Henry Perowne, a husband, father and neurosurgeon – is as ubiquitous an individual in modern fiction as any, but whilst his musings upon his family, job and car may strike familiar chords, there is nothing mundane about being accosted by knife-wielding man named Baxter. McEwan treads an uneasy line between literary novel and literary thriller – between Atonement and Enduring Love, shall we say – throughout Saturday, settling finally on the latter.
Sadly, this choice of form cannot handle his choice of content, and the novel flounders into satisfying none of its aims. This is not to say McEwan handles thriller poorly; it is a genre he excels at, but the self-imposed limits result in a weak conclusion: it smacks of wasted potential.
McEwan has written some of the best opening chapters of recent years (read the beginning of Enduring Love for proof) Saturday, on the other hand, meanders through irrelevant descriptions of operations, which tell the reader nothing but that McEwan has been hard at work doing his research.
There's even a horrifying attempt to echo Enduring Love's exemplary first-chapter calamity: McEwan, presumably working on the ‘higher is better' principle, moves from a hot air balloon to an aeroplane, but in doing so monumentally fails to create the same degree of tension or involvement. Saturday's greatest limitation is that its narrative bases itself too heavily around the fact that an antiwar march that took place on the day in question.
Evidently this makes the day at least unusual – if not unique – and thus defeats the stylistic endeavour to step momentarily (even arbitrarily) into a life. But it does provide ample opportunity for lengthy expositions of opinions both for and against the Iraqi War – like sitting next to a thoroughly dull man at a dinner party, except you're lambasted with both sides of the argument (so more like sitting next to two dull men), and have paid for the privilege of being so.
McEwan has picked a critically untouchable topic – any denunciation seems to border upon callousness – but the scenes that focus on the war simply aren't interesting. They are vapid, monotonous and bare all the marks of being crafted as quickly as possible, so as not to be outdated upon publication. And yet, just two years after the events described, most of the comments made by the characters already seem inane and irrelevant.
Such may be McEwan's intention; the reader is left uncertain where the author stands, yet the feeling that we are supposed to be agreeing with something is unalleviated. By far the most impressive creations in Saturday are the women. When McEwan moves to details – such as Mrs Perowne's childhood, or her daughter's poetry – he writes with accomplished delicacy and insight. Like his most famous creation, Atonement's Briony Tallis, minimal description is used expertly to encapsulate a life.
Had McEwan chosen a female central protagonist, this novel might have developed into a far superior narrative. Perhaps the author has set himself too high a standard – McEwan's name is all but synonymous with the better end of modern fiction – but it takes more than the inclusion of ‘vertiginous' and ‘disgorges' on consecutive pages to fulfil the promise.
One has to sympathise with an author towards whom so much hype is directed, and this novel would not be a bad debut for any writer, but McEwan has already realised his early promise with some truly inspired novels. Here's hoping that Saturday is the author's literary day-off, and that McEwan will soon be back to form. Roll on Monday.
24th Feb 2005