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BOOK 126: SATURDAY: IAN MCEWAN

Saturday is McEwan's ninth novel, published between Atonement and On Chesil Beach, two novels of historical fiction. McEwan has discussed that he prefers to alternate between writing about the past and the present.

While researching the book, McEwan spent two years work-shadowing Neil Kitchen, a neurosurgeon at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London. Kitchen testified that McEwan did not flinch in the theatre, a common first reaction to surgery; "He sat in the corner, with his notebook and pencil". He also had several medical doctors and surgeons review the book for accuracy, though few corrections were required to the surgical description. Saturday was also proof-read by McEwan's longstanding circle of friends who review his manuscripts, Timothy Garton Ash, Craig Raine, and Galen Strawson.

There are elements of autobiography in Saturday: the protagonist lives in Fitzroy Square, the same square in London that McEwan does and is physically active in middle age. Christopher Hitchens, a friend of McEwan's, noted how Perowne's wife, parents and children are the same as the writer's. McEwan's son, Greg, who like Theo played the guitar reasonably well in his youth, emphasized one difference between them, "I definitely don't wear tight black jeans".

The "set-piece" construction of the book was noticed by many critics; Mrs Scurr praised it, describing a series of "vivid tableaux", but John Banville was less impressed, calling it an assembly of discrete set pieces, though he said the treatment of the car crash and its aftermath was "masterful", and said of Perowne's visit to his mother: "the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force." From the initial "dramatic overture" of the aircraft scene, there were "astonishing pages of description", sometimes "heart-stopping", though it was perhaps a touch too artful at times, according to Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Christopher Hitchens said that McEwan delivered a "virtuoso description of the aerodynamics of a squash game," enjoyable even "to a sports hater like myself", Banville said he, as a literary man, had been bored by the same scene. Zoe Heller praised the tension in the climax as "vintage McEwan nightmare" but questioned the resolution as "faintly preposterous".

John Banville wrote a scathing review of the book for The New York Review of Books. He described Saturday as the sort of thing that a committee directed to produce a 'novel of our time' would write, the politics were "banal"; the tone arrogant, self-satisfied and incompetent; the characters cardboard cut-outs. He felt McEwan strove too hard to display technical knowledge "and his ability to put that knowledge into good, clean prose".

Saturday won the James Tait Black Prize for fiction; and was nominated on the long-list of the Man Booker Prize in 2005.

MY VERDICT: I have to say I was not a fan of this novel. I’m not saying it’s badly written because I think the fact that McEwan can write is, just that, a fact.  I didn’t find it engaging at all.  The most interesting part of the book, the real confrontation only peaked my interest a little and I found the whole book flat and uninteresting.  I think it suffers from a little too much detail and too much description which, coming from a fan of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, is really saying something. This could, in my opinion, made a much better novella.