Saturday
Ian McEwan
278 pages
published in 2005

I've been suspicious of Ian McEwan ever since I read his Book prize winning novel Amsterdam and almost threw the book against the wall at the denouncement where McEwan descended into stupid cliches about the Netherlands' attitude towards euthenasia. That suspicion deepened when it turned out McEwan, like Martin Amis had turned into a permanent bedwetter after the September 11 attacks. He's been less outspoken than Amis, but he has said enough for me to know I dislike his politics, which seems to be of the Decent Leftist persuasion, being obsessed with the struggle against "Islamism", the threat of terror attacks and the vulnerability of the western democracies. As with Amis, "9/11" seems to have functioned as McEwan's midlife crisis, his fear and doubts about his own encrouching mortality being confused for insight into the general condition of the world. It's this mixture of Decent politics and midlife crisis that's been poured out into Saturday. I didn't want to read it at the time when it first came out, being warned off it by various reviews, but four years on I thought it would be interesting to see if it really was as dire as it was made out to be.

It is.

Had I read this in 2005 it would've been thrown against the wall, library book or not. Set on the day of the worldwide anti-war protests on 15 February 2003 a month before the invasion of Iraq, with the London march making regular appearances througout the novel. Not that any of the characters in the book actually go on the march, they all have something better to do. Even the protagonist's son, described as anti-war doesn't, as "he doesn't feel much need to go tramping through the streets to make his point", confusing making a political statement with narcissism. It's typical for the entire novel, which hammers this point home again and again from the first encounter with the march, with a street cleaner sweeping up garbage left behind by people going to the march to the last, with the same street cleaner still busy cleaning up behind the march. This way the anti-war protest is reduced to something hypocritical, narcisstic and even frivolous. Saturday only pays lip service to the arguments of the antiwar movement, spelled out explicitely just once, in a row between the protagonist and his daughter, who gets to represent the antiwar side. She gets emotional and slightly hysterical while her father gets to stay calm and collected; later it's revealed she's pregnant. In such a way the antiwar movement is constantly dismissed, at best shown as shallow people who mean well but who just don't realise how bad Saddam is.

The protagonist Henry Perowne, a succesful neurosurgeon, is himself only vaguely pro-war, his instincts leaning the other side but for the coincidence that he's friends with an Iraqi surgeon and victim of Saddam's torture chambers. It's the sole American in the novel, Jay Strauss, Perowne's favourite aneasthetist and squash partner who gets to make the case for war, much more aggressively and convincingly than Perowne's daughter go to present her arguments. Strauss presents the war as necessary for the purest of motives, to take away "a natural ally of terrorists" and to let the USA "atone for its previous disastrous policies" by creating a liberalised and democratic Iraq. Perowne admires the strength of Strauss' convictions but is repulsed by them at the same time and equally so when confronted by the passionate pleas of his daughter later on. Perowne stays safely ambivalent, not terribly interested in the arguments, convinced the war will happen anyway while it won't touch his own cozy little middle class life.

And it's that essential smugness, even more so than the repulsive politics that makes this such an awful novel. Everything in Saturday is filtered through the consciousness of Henry Perowne and he's one well satisfied, special s.o.b. He himself as said is a brilliant neurosurgeon, his wife is an equally brilliant lawyer on staff to a gutsy metropolitian newspaper, while the aforementioned antiwar son dropped out of school to become a first class blues player, so young but already admired by the giants of British blues and finally there's the daughter, not just a poet but a soon to be published poet by a great British publishing house. It doesn't even end there though: his mother was a regional swimming champion (and as such a miserable failure compared to the rest of the family) while his wife's father is also a poet, of national renown but long since a shadow of his former self and his friend Strauss is of course not just a good aneasthetist but the best. But these last three are just minor figures, only noticed in slightly more detail than the rest of the cast, as they come slightly more into contact with the only four real people in this novel: Henry, his wife Rosalind, son Theo and daughter Daisy. All this told through a series of stream of consciousness infodumps triggered by the banal going-ons of the plot as Henry goes through the motions of his saturday routine.

Henry's day start when he awakes in the early hours of Saturday morning for no particular reason and walks to his bedroom window just in time to see an airliner descending towards Heathrow, with its engines on fire. It'll later turn out to be just an accident, but in Henry it re-awakes the existential fear he has felt ever since the September 11 attacks. Thoroughout Saturday Henry returns again and again to this theme, the idea that he's living at the end of a golden age in history, brilliant but fragile and doomed to disappear, under threat from extremist forces. He's comforted by the idea that progress is still possible, if only in small steps, like the purposeful evolution of the tea kettle, slowly being improved, proof that not everything is getting worse. Henry keeps swinging between these two moods, from existential dread to a belief that this crisis, like every one before it, will fade away with time. Meanwhile his musing remain just that, with no sign that these questions actually matter to him, just like the antiwar march has no impact whatsoever on his life, other than to put into motion the events that will, if only momentarily, shatter his middle class confidence.

These events happen when Henry is on his way to his weekly squash game with Jay, after having had sex with his wife (one of the more excruciating scenes in the book). He finds his way blocked at Tottenham Court Road by the march, but is waved through by a friendly copper only to crash into a car pulling away from the pavement. Said car being driven by Baxter, a small time thug who takes offense to Henry, is about to beat him up when Henry manages to distract him by diagnosing his condition, having recognised Baxter as a sufferer of Huntingdon disease. Henry escapes, goes on to his squash game, then on to the rest of his Saturday routine, visiting his Alzheimer affected mother, buying fish for dinner and then coming home just in time to greet his daughter come back from Paris.

It's when the whole family is assembled, Henry, his wife, daughter, son and grandfather the poet that disaster strikes. Baxter and an associate force their way in the house, force Daisy to strip naked and demand she reads one of her poems. In her panic the only thing she can do is recite Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach", but remarkably this touches a nerve in Baxter, who forgets all threats and becomes friendly --it seems poetry has charms to sooth the savagest of beasts. Henry and Tom manage to overpower Baxter, he hits his head falling down the stairs and of course it's Henry who has to operate on him -- McEwan spending the last thirty or so pages showing off his medical research to the reader.

That's Saturday: a plot too embarassing for melodrama enacted by a cloying self-satisfied fathead in order to illustrate the author's politics. It's not just the way with which McEwan deals with the march or the overall question of the War on Iraq, which is emotional and dishonest, with the marchers consistently portrayed as self-centered hypocrites, while Henry and his family, all too busy or uncaring to get involved, glorified as so much more complex, sensitive people. It's the way in which everybody outside this happy circle is portrayed -- the villain of the piece is quite literally a sick man, his actions being explained by his condition, while the few non-middle class characters shown are either non-speaking walkon parts for Perowne to philosophise about or shown to strive to the same condition as him and his family. The most egregious example being an obnoxious foul-mouthed patient, a Black girl from Brixton, who at the end of the novel wants to be a neurosurgeon, completely converted to Perowne's class and lifestyle. Its not that Saturday has bad politics at its heart, it's that those politics make this a bad novel, with just the occasional glimpse that McEwan can do better.