Saturday by Ian McEwan

[Pippi]

Has anyone read Saturday by Ian McEwan?
After watching the movie Atonement I read the book and fell in love with his writing style. So the next book I picked up by McEwan, which I did today, was Saturday. I've only read the first chapter and so far so good.
Which of his books is your favourite and what do you think of Saturday and Ian McEwans writing style in general?

:wave: Greetings from Denmark

[WICKES]

Has anyone read Saturday by Ian McEwan?
After watching the movie Atonement I read the book and fell in love with his writing style. So the next book I picked up by McEwan, which I did today, was Saturday. I've only read the first chapter and so far so good.
Which of his books is your favourite and what do you think of Saturday and Ian McEwans writing style in general?

:wave: Greetings from Denmark

It is definitely on my 'to read' list. I have a copy in front of me here, covered in recommendations from leading newspapers. I tend to read a lot of books written by authors from previous generations (Orwell, Waugh, Huxley, Hardy, Woolf) so it would be good to read something set in 21st century Britain- in the London I know.

Will you update this post as you read it and let me know what you think?

[sixsmith]

I think it is a pretty terrible book. The characters are weakly drawn, the writing is bland and replete with cliche, and the middle class angst is wholly facile. I'm no fan of John Banville but i agreed with his assessment.

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.

[wessexgirl]

I think it is a pretty terrible book. The characters are weakly drawn, the writing is bland and replete with cliche, and the middle class angst is wholly facile. I'm no fan of John Banville but i agreed with his assessment.

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.

:eek2: Ouch! I've only started Atonement and On Cheshil Beach, but what I've read I've liked. Does Banville realise he's dissing (getting down with the kids there in embarrassing mom style :redface:) one of the UK's finest? That's almost tantamount to being sacriligious in the UK book world I think. Oh well, each to his/her own. I think he's very readable.

[mal4mac]

This book had mixed reviews, Banville at one extreme, Tim Adams at another:

"Saturday puts you in mind at different times of other life-in-the-day books, the charged neurosis of Bellow's Seize the Day, the comic constrictions of the limousine ride in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, even, as Perowne wanders the city streets in his head, the freewheeling pulse of Bloom in Ulysses.

McEwan finds in Henry Perowne an ideal alter ego. Exact and erudite, he is a man who leaves nothing in his life unexamined. He palpates experience, looking for vital signs. In the novel's memorable setpieces, Perowne buys shellfish for a stew with the comic weight of mortality on his back. He plays squash in the constant knowledge of his brief span on earth, as if each titanic rally might be his last. And, most notably, with painstaking love and duty, he tries to engage his mother in the life in which she has lost all bearings.

In every sentence of this, McEwan inhabits Perowne's restless intelligence with uncanny plausibility."

And:

'An exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained. It is undoubtedly McEwan's best.' - Anita Brookner

Having read four of his novels, including Atonement and Enduring Love, I agree with Brookner *if* the comparison is with other modern British novelists (definitely second division stuff!) Banville has a point about the characterisation. Having not read the book for a few years I can't remember anything about them. In contrast, characters from Dickens remain in the mind forever, and his novels demand to be reread, unlike those of any modern Britsh novelist!

I read Atonement at about the same time as reading some real classics - Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky..., and found it very disappointing in this company.

McEwan's worth saving for light relief when Dostoevsky gets too deep, or Dickens too energetic ... like having a cheese sandwich between Cordon bleu meals.

[mal4mac]

Does Banville realise he's dissing ... one of the UK's finest?

Banville didn't come out well from handing out a dissing :D From the times review of his Booker win for "The Sea":

"....the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest,” fulminated Boyd Tonkin, The Independent’s literary editor. Banville’s prose, he wrote, “exhibits all the chilly perfection of a waxwork model” and the result was “a travesty of a judging process”.

Privately, many figures in the literary world were also foaming at the mouth. One characterised the 59-year-old Dubliner’s work as “empty, vapid, cold, humourless, self-indulgent, snooty and pretentious”.

"Some have never forgiven Banville for his demolition job on Ian McEwan’s latest novel Saturday... The book had been greeted with rave reviews elsewhere and was originally the bookies’ favourite for the Booker prize, but after Banville’s mauling it never made it to the shortlist."

"This savaging, it was suggested, might be revenge for the fact that Banville’s novel The Untouchable had failed to make the Booker shortlist when McEwan won with his novel Amsterdam in 1998."

Whatever the reason, support for McEwan leached away. “The tide seemed to turn,” says Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times’s fiction editor. “I can’t imagine it was just because of Banville’s article, but people who had rated the book highly suddenly found all sorts of things wrong with it.”

"Banville veers between sounding peeved and proud of his small sales, while railing against commercialism... It was John Sutherland who leapt to McEwan’s defence after Banville’s harsh review of Saturday, taking the critic to task in a published letter.

So what explains Sutherland’s crucial vote for Banville when the Booker panel was split?"

“Banville keeps going on about the evils of commercialism, says one cynic. “Sutherland decided to give him a taste of it.”

Moral - don't base your reading list on a Booker prize shark fight, and don't trust reviews from one shark on another shark.

[WICKES]

In the copy I have there are quotes from glowing reviews in German, French, Australian, Italian and American papers. Tbh, I did wonder if it is reviewed so positively because it deals with British opposition the the invasion of Iraq- something that would appeal to European readers? I mean the UK got a lot of criticism in Europe for supporting the USA. Just a thought...

[sixsmith]

"Saturday puts you in mind at different times of other life-in-the-day books, the charged neurosis of Bellow's Seize the Day, the comic constrictions of the limousine ride in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, even, as Perowne wanders the city streets in his head, the freewheeling pulse of Bloom in Ulysses

That's an incredibly superficial observation.


Ouch! I've only started Atonement and On Cheshil Beach, but what I've read I've liked. Does Banville realise he's dissing (getting down with the kids there in embarrassing mom style ) one of the UK's finest? That's almost tantamount to being sacriligious in the UK book world I think. Oh well, each to his/her own. I think he's very readable.



It's strange because i think some of McEwan's early work is quite good. A couple of the stories in 'First Love, Last Rites' are rather funny and show a good deal of promise. They are a long way from the middling, staid fare that he trots out (to inexplicable approbation) these days. The fact that McEwan is held up as a standard bearer for contemporary English fiction is a fairly damning indictment on contemporary English fiction.

[Pippi]

I'll try to update when I've read a bit more.
Thanks everyone for your inputs I'll give it some thought before reading again.

[billl]

I really really liked Amsterdam, Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday. Each of these books is pretty different, but I thought they all worked. I can't say that I discovered any particular voice to McEwan's writing, I just found that the writing worked for me, and that the stories were interesting and gave me plenty to think about. There is no other living author that has written this many books that impressed me this much.

In addition to the negative reviews in the press for On Chesil Beach, I received a thumbs-down from a friend I used to casually discuss books with (in particular, McEwan), so I'm staying away from that one.

[mal4mac]

In addition to the negative reviews in the press for On Chesil Beach, I received a thumbs-down from a friend I used to casually discuss books with (in particular, McEwan), so I'm staying away from that one.

I quite liked it. Not as much as Saturday, but more than Atonement. It has a very simple plot, but the characterisation is quite good, and the length is about right. (Atonement seemed to drag on to me, all that foot slogging to Calais!) As you really like him, I'd give it a go.

[billl]

Thanks for the opinion--I've got a lot of other things to get to, but maybe I'll look that one over again.

[Amethyst2010]

I have read Saturday and On Chesil Beach. I do find Saturday to be dragging a little, and I still could not decide whether the ending is a little bit unrealistic compared to the rest of the book. On Chesil Beach, being a novella, doesn't give me the dragging feeling, and again, I am unsure whether it ends better by not going into Florence's and Edward's life many years later. I see no reason to re-read these two books though, and I do look forward to reading Atonement and Amsterdam some day.