We've gotten a few emails asking why we haven't yet posted on John Banville's NYRB review of Saturday. Two reasons - first, because we've moved, NYRB is delayed reaching us; and second, it isn't freely available online. (Until now ... )
The Complete Saloon and Jenny Davidson's Light Reading both weigh in on the review, coming from slightly different angles. The review might be the most prominent negative review the book has gotten ... Have a looksee after the jump and decide for yourself. But if you say you read it here, we'll deny, deny, deny ...
A Day in the Life
By John Banville
Saturday
by Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 289 pp., $26.00
"Most novel readers," the critic John Bayley observes, "are less interested in life itself than in its happenings, money-making, love-making, committee-sitting, being young, growing old"—in other words, stories. In all of us there persists the child who longs to snuggle down and draw the covers close and hear a fairy tale, the scarier the better, so long as it ends with the promise that the good people in it will live happily ever after while the bad perish in misery and in pain.
In a fine essay printed in these pages in 1989, Bayley noted how during the Second World War "bus drivers and brigadiers" rediscovered the pleasures of reading Anthony Trollope. "The atmosphere of crisis and boredom in the Battle of Britain made a red-letter day for the classic novelists, offering the comfort and relaxation of a complete and credible alternative world." Among contemporary novelists, Ian McEwan would have seemed the unlikeliest to take on the role of bedtime storyteller to our own time of "crisis and boredom." Since the marvelous stories in his early books, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, he has been the least consoling chronicler of life's perils and difficulties. A master of the ironic title, he offered us, in novels such as The Comfort of Strangers and The Innocent, precious little comfort and no innocence at all. Even in the superb pastoral idyll which is the first half of Atonement we are constantly aware of the glint of the knife blade partway out of its sheath.
If we all have a novel in us, nowadays it is likely to be a September 11 novel. It would have seemed that McEwan was one of the few who might profitably bring his out. Surely he would find a form in which to express the lingering horror of that sunlit morning when mass murder came winging out of the blue upon an unsuspecting city. He is a connoisseur of catastrophe, of the sudden irruption of violence and bloodletting into the drawing room or the shopping mall. Indeed, the destruction of the Twin Towers is just the kind of enormity McEwan might have invented as an opening to one of his more chilling tales, although even an imagination as dark as his might have balked at the murderous scale of the attacks.
In fact, McEwan in his recent work has shown a disturbing tendency toward mellowness. It would seem that, like one of the characters in Atonement, he has been "thinking of the nineteenth-century novel. Broad tolerance and the long view, an inconspicuously warm heart and cool judgment...." This is a fairly accurate description of the methods and aims of his latest novel, Saturday, an account of one day in the life of Henry Perowne, a London neurosurgeon and quintessential homme moyen sensuel, decent, hard-working, moderately and at a distance engagé in the politicsof his, and our, time, a fine physician, a uxorious husband, an ideal father. Henry has everything, and as in all good fairy tales, he gets to keep it, after getting rid of the troll who had sought to challenge his right of ownership.
Owning things is important to Perowne, an unashamed beneficiary of the fruits of late capitalism. Few passages catch the flavor of this extraordinary book as well as the one in which, apparently without a trace of authorial irony, Perowne is made to recall an epiphanic moment on a fishing trip when his eye lit on his beloved car, a "Mercedes S500 with cream upholstery":
Glancing over his shoulder while casting, Henry saw his car a hundred yards away, parked at an angle on a rise of the track, picked out in soft light against a backdrop of birch, flowering heather and thunderous black sky—the realisation of an ad man's vision—and felt for the first time a gentle, swooning joy of possession. It is, of course, possible, permissible, to love an inanimate object. But this moment was the peak of the affair; since then his feelings have settled into mild, occasional pleasure. The car gives him vague satisfaction when he's driving it; the rest of the time it rarely crosses his mind. As its makers intended and promised, it's become part of him.
The novel is set on a specific and momentous day, February 15, 2003, the day when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of London to protest the imminent war on Iraq. Perowne wakes early, some hours before dawn. Standing at the window in his bedroom, he sees an airliner with an engine on fire streaking through the night sky in the direction of Heathrow. Although his mood is euphoric—he is at the top of his career, he loves his wife and still finds her desirable, his house is handsome and secure, and that night there is to be a loving family reunion—Perowne's thoughts, like the thoughts of all of us in these days and nights, have been straying over the millenarian threats that have arisen against the soft target which is the developed West. But surely, the reader thinks, this potential missile flying over the city is too clumsily obvious a memento mori for a novelist as subtle as McEwan to introduce in his opening pages. In the end, the threat the plane seemed to represent turns out to have been nonexistent: as the day goes on Perowne learns that the aircraft was a Russian cargo plane with only a pilot and copilot aboard, and that it landed safely and the fire was doused. It is briefly suggested that the two men may have been terrorists —there are reports that a copy of the Koran was found in the cockpit—but by midday they are on their way home, innocent of all ill intent.
Going down to the kitchen, Perowne encounters his eighteen-year-old son Theo, a rising blues guitarist, who has come in from a late-night gig. The two are at ease with each other, with no trace of Oedipal or any other kind of conflict between them, a happy circumstance which any father of a teenage son will hardly credit and certainly envy. As so often throughout the book, McEwan seems uneasily to feel the need to justify such familial harmony: "Where's the adolescent rage, the door-slamming, the muted fury that's supposed to be Theo's rite of passage? Is all that feeling sunk in the blues?" Perowne tells of sighting the flaming aircraft, and Theo comes up with an aphorism: "The bigger you think, the crappier it looks," and follows it with an apologia pro vita sua which we assume, mistakenly, as it turns out, Perowne, or McEwan, will challenge as vapid and self-serving:
When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in—you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're doing with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto— think small.
It might also be, amazingly, the motto of McEwan's book.
Perowne's early-morning wakefulness ends in gentle lovemaking with his wife, who by day is a high-powered libel lawyer working for a liberal London newspaper. Throughout their marriage he has never strayed once, nor has he wished to—"What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife"—and why would he, since she is a paragon, beautiful, clever, sympathetic, and wise. She is also unfailingly fragrant:
Perowne shifts position and nuzzles the back of Rosalind's head, inhaling the faint tang of perfumed soap mingled with the scent of warm skin and shampooed hair.
Apparently in the purlieus of north London, or at least in McEwan's fantasy version of them, no one suffers from morning breath, and women long-married wake up every time primed for sex—as the book ends, no one will be surprised to learn, there is another amatory encounter between husband and wife.
Presently Perowne sets off for his weekly game of squash with his anesthetist and friend, Jay Strauss. The streets are clogged with antiwar protesters, some with placards declaring "Not in My Name," the "cloying self-regard" of which suggests to a skeptical Perowne "a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice," unlike, we are to suppose, Perowne in his cream-upholstered Merc, and fair Rosalind of the shampooed hair.
We accept Perowne's "cloying self-regard" in these opening pages on the assumption that something nasty is going to rise up and put a dent in it. And sure enough, as he drives down a deserted street he collides with a car containing his almost-nemesis, one Baxter, and his two henchmen. This encounter, as one might expect, is beautifully described, and is the best thing in the book. Baxter, a small-time crook, is the only rounded character among a cast of pasteboard cutouts, including Perowne himself, and the moment when he gets out of his wounded car and approaches Perowne and instead of attacking him offers him a cigarette is masterful.
The encounter rapidly descends into menace and the possibility of serious violence. However, Perowne has recognized that Baxter is displaying the early symptoms of Huntington's chorea, a dreadful inherited genetic disorder which will eventually destroy its victim's mind, and he uses the diagnosis to stay Baxter's well-practiced fists. Lying, he assures Baxter he can help him with new treatments that have just become available, and while Baxter, who knows how ill he is, considers this straw of hope, Perowne makes his getaway. We know full well, of course, that we have not seen the last of Baxter.
Perowne goes on to his squash game, which he manages to win despite the fright he has endured and the punch in the sternum that Baxter delivered him as preliminary to a serious roughing-up. The game is one in the series of discrete set pieces out of which the book is assembled. The hard-fought match between Perowne and his American-born rival is meant, we assume, to illustrate the competitive, indeed warlike, nature of the human male, and to show us that McEwan is not entirely Mr. Nice Guy. Here, as elsewhere, the author is wearyingly insistent on displaying his technical knowledge and his ability to put that knowledge into good, clean prose. This is the case especially in the medical scenes, of which there are many, too many. In a note of acknowledgment at the end of the book McEwan names the various doctors who shared their expertise with him, including Neil Kitchen, MD, FRCS (SN), whose operating room the author frequented over a period of two years, and the Nabokovianly named Frank T. Vertosick Jr., to whom he is indebted for an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy—yes, there are many big words in this book.
Having thrashed his squash opponent, Perowne returns to the arts of peace, and goes to the market to purchase the ingredients for the fish stew he will cook that evening for the family reunion—the stew, the recipe for which is given, is the most pungent thing in the book—when his daughter Daisy, a poet, will return from a sojourn in Paris to be reconciled with her grandfather, another and very famous poet, rejoicing in the unlikely name of John Grammaticus. This latter personage, with his flowing gray hair and gin dependency, is an unintentionally risible caricature of the Great Man. Some years previously, at his home in France, he had in a drunken fit of temper severely criticized a poem of Daisy's which had just been awarded the coveted Newdigate Prize, awarded by Oxford University and won by, among others, Matthew Arnold, and grandfather and granddaughter have been estranged ever since.
Daisy arrives with Parisian airs still in her sails, and immediately father and daughter fall into an argument over the coming Iraq war, which Daisy vehemently opposes and which Perowne sort of approves of. This fight seems meant to be a further display of McEwan's tough-mindedness, but is merely as tedious as any other overheard squabble between youth and age.
For years Daisy has been trying to educate her father in matters literary, but to no avail. His ignorance of literature is frankly incredible. Are we really to believe that an intelligent and attentive man such as Henry Perowne, no matter how keen his scientific bent, would have passed through the English education system without ever having heard of Matthew Arnold, or that any Englishman over fifty would have no acquaintance with the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V, if only through Laurence Olivier's ranting of it in the wartime propaganda film of the play? The awful possibility arises that Perowne's ignorance may be intended as a running gag; if so, it is the only instance of humor in the book, if humor is the word.
Now Grammaticus appears—"with long belted woollen coat, fedora and cane, head tipped back, his features in profile caught in the cool white light from the lamps in the square"—and the evening can begin. At first the strained relations between Grammaticus and Daisy persist, despite the fact that she has brought with her a proof copy of her first book of poems, squirm-makingly entitled My Saucy Bark, which is dedicated to the old man. The last two family members awaited are Rosalind and Theo. The latter's arrival is used by McEwan to work one of his storyteller's tricks. Since by now we are sure that Baxter will again burst on to the scene—his red BMW has been spotted a couple of times shadowing Perowne's S500—we are on edge to hear him crashing through the undergrowth. Perowne is
reaching for the bottle and checking his father-in-law's drink when they hear a loud metallic jiggling from the hall, a scream from Daisy, a baritone shout of "Yo!" followed by the thunderous slam of the front door which sends concentric ripples through the poet's gin; then a soft thud and grunt of bodies colliding.
But it is only Theo arriving home and greeting his sister, for naturally the siblings bear an unblemished love for each other. We must wait a little while longer for Baxter to make his entrance, which he does along with Rosalind.
She meets her husband's eye.
"Knife," she says as though to him alone. "He's got a knife."
Baxter and his sidekick, the horse-faced Nigel, come swaggering in, and for a while things look very bad indeed. The knife is held to Rosalind's throat, Grammaticus's nose is broken —which gives the old buzzard a chance to redeem himself with a show of debonair sang-froid: "'It's all right,' he's saying in a muffled voice. 'I've broken it before. On some bloody library steps'"—and Daisy is forced by the intruders to strip herself naked, which conveniently reveals to us and to her family the fact that she is "surely almost beginning her second trimester," as Dad the doctor calmly notes to himself. Baxter and Nigel are duly put off their evil designs, not only by the fact of their intended victim's pregnancy, but...
At this point the novel descends to a level of bathos that is hard to credit. Baxter, seizing on the proof copy of My Saucy Bark, demands that Daisy read aloud one of her poems. At her grandfather's urging, however, she merely pretends to read, and instead recites from memory Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," the poem which ends with the famous image of a world "where ignorant armies clash by night." Baxter is so taken with this late-Victorian lament for civilized values, which he believes is Daisy's own composition, that he forgets all thoughts of rapine and plunder:
...Baxter has broken his silence and is saying excitedly, "You wrote that. You wrote that."
It's a statement, not a question. Daisy stares at him, waiting.
He says again, "You wrote that." And then, hurriedly, "It's beautiful. You know that, don't you. It's beautiful. And you wrote it."
Even allowing for the fact that Baxter is suffering from a debilitating neural disorder, this is a remarkable response from the kind of thug he is portrayed as being, and it is not meliorated by Perowne's wondering who this Arnold chap is, and what his second name might be.
And still we are far from done. Perowne again manages to pull a fast one on Baxter, convincing him that he has some offprints from medical journals in his study upstairs detailing the new treatments for Huntington's that he had spoken of in their morning confrontation. Baxter drives Perowne up the stairs at knifepoint, leaving Nigel to watch the others. Nigel, however, has had enough, and flees through the front door, whereupon young Theo charges upstairs; he and Perowne disarm Baxter and throw him headlong down the stairs, at the foot of which he cracks his skull. At this point, with a sinking heart, one knows for certain that the final set piece of the book is going to take place in an operating room:
Baxter's unmendable brain, exposed under the bright theatre lights, has remained stainless for several minutes—there's no sign of any bleeding from the arachnoid granulation.
Perowne nods at Rodney [his assistant]. "It's looking fine. You can close up."
After that there is one final, heart-warming twist: Perowne, feeling pangs of guilt for having used his professional knowledge to escape the morning encounter with Baxter, determines to persuade his family, even Rosalind, who had thought her throat would surely be cut, that they should not bring charges against Baxter, but should let him go free to sicken and die, if not in peace, at least not in prison, either. Then it is time for the Perownes, man and wife, to slip back into connubial coziness:
As the sweet sensation spreads through him he hears her say, "Tell me that you're mine."
"I'm yours. Entirely yours."
"Touch my breasts. With your tongue."
"Rosalind. I want you."
It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art—no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong—the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right—but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.
Something of the kind seems to have happened here. Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.—are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair—who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity—were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.
It affords no pleasure to say these things. Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. In this new book, however, he has stumbled badly. This would be of little consequence outside the book-chat columns were it not for the arrogance which Saturday displays. Perowne's literally unbelievable ignorance of literature allows McEwan to indulge in outbursts of philistinism which, whatever his own opinions, may well be enthusiastically endorsed by large sections of his readership. From Tolstoy and Flaubert to the magic realists—there is no direct mention of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, to which Saturday is an obvious hommage—all the writers he mentions get it in the neck. Consider this passage in which Perowne broods on Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, which Daisy had forced him to read:
What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. These books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation.
Is this the higher irony, a little joke against himself and his craft by a contemporary master? Tell that to the readers of The Da Vinci Code. Whatever the passage may be meant to signify, one hopes it is not a claim by the workmanlike McEwan that Saturday can hold a place beside those nineteenth-century masterpieces which Perowne finds so dully prosaic.
Another source of dismay, one for which, admittedly, Ian McEwan cannot be held wholly accountable, is the ecstatic reception which Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike. 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? Yes, human beings have an unflagging desire for stories, it is one of our more endearing traits. The great Modernists, with eminent exceptions, disdained this desire, as they disdained our longing for a recognizable tune, a pretty landscape, a poem that rhymes. These are legitimate if not particularly noble demands; it is the artist's duty and task both to respect and to overfulfill them by giving far more than his audience asked for. The post-millennium world is baffling and dangerous, and we are all eager for re-assurance. As T.S. Eliot has it in Gerontion,
Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"
Saturday is certainly a sign of the times; it is no wonder.
I do believe the May issue of Harper's has a negative review of Saturday, too.
Posted by: Molly | May 10, 2005 at 07:33 AM
Harper's was a negative review, but not all that interesting. It basically got at McEwan via the angles that had already been taken--the book's plot being too tidy, Henry's proclivity for being icily disconnected even when facing down an angry mobster, the unbelievable bit toward the end with the poem.
The excerpts I've read make the book sound a little better than the reviewers' negative takes, but I also think their critiques are valid.
Posted by: Scott | May 10, 2005 at 08:38 AM
The Harper's review also points out how the self-satisfied Henry Perowne is too thin of a character to hold "Saturday" together. Perowne might have some eloquent things to say about the other consumer goods in his life - he delivers a particularly enthusiastic tribute to his tea kettle - but this is the stuff of a decent short story, not that of a compelling novel.
Posted by: Molly | May 10, 2005 at 01:40 PM
I'm a big fan of Ian McEwan since reading Everlasting Love. I'm also a fan of John Banville, a master of the well turned phrase, even though his style can be indigestably dense and a little dour. It doesn't surprise me that his favorite piece of the book is the menacing first encounter with Baxter - it's very like his own work in tone.
Unfortunately I think he's near enough the mark ,if a little cruel, in his review . The Tony Blair jibe is delicious. I cannot understand myself the hysterically enthusiastic reception for this work (a Da Vinci Code for middle-brow Brits). It is clunky and incredible. There is some merit in the idea of Perowne - an everyman hero removed from the high falutin' preoccupations of the chattering classes but nevertheless quietly doing breathtaking things. But he's a little too reasonable and his life is a little too perfect to make him come alive.
The book is worth a read though even if it's not destined to become a classic
Posted by: marcus breslin | May 16, 2005 at 02:18 PM
The guy told me what was going to happen before I read it! Thanks a bunch Banville.
Posted by: Jameson Faly | May 17, 2005 at 04:10 AM
No surprise, given that McEwan's 'A Child In Time' was similarly banal and clunky. 'Atonement' started well, but fell apart in the second half of the match. Frankly, why the high expectations in the first place? McEwan proved himself as a short-distance runner with his stories, but that was three decades ago, and he has yet to produce a great novel. The signs are that, while he will continue to make vast pots of cash for his publishers, middle age soft-headedness has set in. The only thing that kept his work out of the toilet in the first place was that dark sensibility, evident in First Love Last Rites and The Cement Garden, but when that vanishes all we're left with is a suet pudding of bad Virginia Woolf. That Tony Blair comment points us in the direction: this kind of middle-class litchrychewer is as bland, all pervasive and mediocre as market democracy in the globalised economy.
Posted by: Jonathan Mallalieu | May 31, 2005 at 11:41 PM
John Banville's review is very entertaining. But his real objection to the book seems to be that Perowne is a happy, well-adjusted man and that the book ends without his life blowing apart.
What Banville objects to is the formula of the fairy tale, and he erroneously sees that formula at work in the book. Sad academics have long beaten into their students the need for ambiguously negative endings, to differentiate themselves from the popular genre formulas with "happy endings."
But what Banville does--and indeed what Robert Stone and many other authors do as well--is operate by a different formula. They blow things up every time. Love never lasts in their books. They don't believe in well-adjusted people. They are predictable, shallow, and short-sightedly out of touch with reality.
I want to tell Mr. Banville that it is not at all unusal to find women who shower and take care of themselves and smell good.
Mr. Banville, it is also not at all unusual to find married couples in their forties still in love with each other and enjoying sex. Since you think otherwise, you have my sympathy, but it is you, not McEwan, who is out of touch with reality here.
Posted by: Richard L. Pangburn | June 01, 2005 at 03:30 AM
The commentators on John Banville's review of Saturday are mostly as wrong as McEwan's aesthetic is itself. Literature is summed up by the towering banalities of "relevance" or "engagement". In the words of another great novelist, Milan Kundera, from his novel Ignorance, art is an attempt to liberate us from the "tyranny of the emotions". A great critic like Roberto Calasso - see his excellent Literature and the Gods - knows that when the spark that animates art is enslaved by childish emotion and proffered only in service of sentiment it suffocates, smolders and is extinguished. John Banville, a truly great writer, has exposed one of the great modern myths of writing: that simplicity equals sincerity (which is nonsense) and that personal honesty equals artistic truth.
Posted by: Liam Lenihan | June 02, 2005 at 04:03 AM
Who is this Lenihan dude?! Who are you to criticise the readers man! Stop kissing John Banville's ass and accept it - literature lives in the real world. It is relevant. Literature has to engage and grapple with the world or it is nothing. McEwan's making an effort to deal with 9/11 and he did it in a sensitive way. Rock on relevant realism.
Posted by: James Barry | June 03, 2005 at 04:13 PM
Dear Mr. Barry. Question the poeple! What tosh. No intelligent person appeals to popularity for answers in relation to art. What do you think literary criticism is, an episode of Big Brother?! That's the poverty of popularism for you. Stick to text message ringtones that double as pop records and irrate phone-in shows my limited friend.
Posted by: Liam Lenihan | June 04, 2005 at 02:11 PM
Dear Mr Lenihan, I would direct YOU too John Carey's recent book, What Good Are the Arts? In it he rubbish the snobbish rhetoric of elitists like you.
Posted by: James Barry | June 07, 2005 at 11:26 AM
Anything can be art eh?! Well if everything is great, then nothing is Mr Barry.
Posted by: Liam Lenihan | June 14, 2005 at 11:30 AM
Good point Mr. Lenihan. ALthough you might want to keep in mind that art is not the preserve of the elite, and that beauty can be found in what might seem the most ordinary and mundane of things.
Posted by: George Gordon | June 15, 2005 at 03:48 AM
Those who want to get further perspectives without actually reading the book might be interested to read the New Yorker short story at this URL: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/041220fi_fiction1
This story, also by McEwan, contains some of the themes and scenes of the novel, and was presumably a precursor to it.
Posted by: Paul Epstein | October 12, 2005 at 05:13 AM
I actually loved the book when I read it. Perhaps because it was my first by McEwan and I was quite thrilled by the discovery of a master of the language. I must say however that Banville made me re-think my estimation. I shall now proceed to read his stuff !
Wonder if its just me or does anyone else find points of similarity between the book and Michael Haneke's movie Cache ? They both deal with the disruption of the idyllic lives of successful men. Of course the movie is even more artless but I liked it immensely - perhaps being from India I applauded the sentiment. Also the controlled style of the movie seems close to McEwan's quiet mastery
Posted by: Nacheez | May 11, 2006 at 01:06 PM
I just got through the tedious squash scene, read this and realised it will get worse rather than better. Now I will just read if for the amusement. Thank you Mr Banville for explaining so eloquently the rage I am feeling as I read this obviously overrated book.
Posted by: Beth | August 30, 2006 at 11:43 PM
I very much agree with Mr. Banville's review of the novel Saturday which I have read and thorougyly disliked.
Posted by: Virginia Kovel | December 27, 2006 at 08:08 PM
In reply to Richard L Pangborn, I love my wife dearly but have to say her breath smells in the morning and frankly McEwen's picture of married sex is as absurdly smug and unreal as the rest of his novel.
Posted by: Rufus Thomas | July 21, 2007 at 04:42 PM
Coming to a bestselling novel some 2 years after its publication and after several respected friends' hectoring ("You haven't read Saturday? Oh, I wish I had that to look forward to!" ) I was predisposed to like it. Within the first few pages however, something far too simple about the marriage portrait disappointed me. I'm the same age as Henry and have been married for many years to a woman I too love and still desire. All the same, I do daydream about having, in Virginia Woolf's unforgettable phrase: "A little mustard with my meat". Henry, loving husband that he is, must have had his moments of yearning or he wouldn't be human. After this breezy read, I can only conclude that I'm not meant to identify with the character's humanity rather I'm expected to enjoy being entertained by a ripping good yarn ( see John Banville's review). The problem is I don't like ripping good yarns unless they ring with the truth of messy and irreducibly complex lives. That said, McEwan can write like an angel even if, at times, he's more smug cherub than insightful messenger.
Posted by: John Bourgeois | October 08, 2007 at 06:33 PM
John Banville is definitely a great writer, I owe him a sincere admiration. I wrote my Master's degree paper on his Revolution Trilogy, which are really extraordinary books, in particular his Kepler. I am not surprised he truly hated Saturday because it does seem to totally lack the intellectual thrill that could be experienced in Banville's Dr Copernicus for example. Yet I think we must distinguish the relative mediocrity of the characters from what they seek to represent, which is in my opinion a form of criticism towards our self-satisfied bourgeois everyday life. I think that the big idea behind these rather dull and inconsistent characters (I admit they are) is a reflection on human nature and humanism : in a world were literary culture and humanities are progressively replaced by consumerism and technological babble, what can we still call "human"? If Darwin is mentionned, and if Perowne's thinking echoes a certain evolutionary psychology slant, it's precisely because what is at stake: what kind of human nature is this society trying to sell us?
Posted by: B; Arquié | April 07, 2008 at 06:33 AM
John Banville is definitely a great writer, I owe him a sincere admiration. I wrote my Master's degree paper on his Revolution Trilogy, which are really extraordinary books, in particular his Kepler. I am not surprised he truly hated Saturday because it does seem to totally lack the intellectual thrill that could be experienced in Banville's Dr Copernicus for example. Yet I think we must distinguish the relative mediocrity of the characters from what they seek to represent, which is in my opinion a form of criticism towards our self-satisfied bourgeois everyday life. I think that the big idea behind these rather dull and inconsistent characters (I admit they are) is a reflection on human nature and humanism : in a world were literary culture and humanities are progressively replaced by consumerism and technological babble, what can we still call "human"? If Darwin is mentionned, and if Perowne's thinking echoes a certain evolutionary psychology slant, it's precisely because what is at stake: what kind of human nature is this society trying to sell us?
Posted by: B; Arquié | April 07, 2008 at 06:33 AM
'Saturday' may err on the smug side but for me there's plenty of intelligence and insight and irony in the novel to ponder on and make it well worth the reading. Perowne the neural surgeon and his family were certainly no less interesting to me than the crumply art historians that appear in too many of Banville's books. Why should Banville think it incredulous that Perowne had never heard of the poet Arnold or had little appreciation of ninteenth century liturature? Surely most people would be in that boat, even brain surgeons. Neither did I think there was too much medical terminology in the novel. If Perowne is cast as a little too 'straight' so be it. There must be as many 'straight' people out there in real life as there are crumply art historians.
Posted by: Anthony | October 26, 2008 at 05:19 PM
This review is a piece of utter crankiness on Banville's part. Saturday sets up a lot of tragic expectations which it defeats skillfully, and by not indulging in post-9/11 existential despair it displays a level of maturity that Banville is probably incapable of understanding, addicted as he is to philosophical pessimism. The tragedies that didn't happen in the course of the novel might indeed have happened on a different Saturday. It was refreshing to read a book that was willing to allow these fortunate people their happiness, without resentment, and that acknowledged its fragility at the same time. Banville has completely misread the book.
Posted by: John Tangney | April 25, 2009 at 06:51 PM