To be honest, I’m too knackered to try to think up some clever-clever ‘isn’t he such a smart cookie’ title, so this will have to do. If you’re really interested, you can regard it as a ‘companion piece’ to my ‘entry’ on art a few weeks ago. If you’re not really interested, what the hell, just read this anyway

I was getting one with this Hemingway bollocks when I decided, for one reason or another to post it here as my latest blog entry. (Note to foreign readers i.e. non-British readers: ‘bollocks’ is a semi-technical term we use in the production of newspapers to indicate ‘the matter in hand’, ‘the latest piece of turgid shite from our star columnist who in a more honest world wouldn’t be paid in washers’, ‘this crap’ etc. It is a word extensively used by working sub-editors/copy editors.) For one thing I haven’t been posting as regularly as I once was. For another, it struck me as a possibly useful companion piece to the entry on art. But, hell, whatever...

There is a notable tendency most of us share which is obliquely pertinent to the prominence Hemingway achieved in the literary world in his lifetime and still broadly retains. The tendency is this: many, if not most, of us, are generally quite prepared, often almost eager, to forgive and perhaps even to justify the flaws and shortcomings in those (or that) to which we are generally well-disposed. We are ‘on their side’ and we will gladly cut them a little slack.

Conversely, if for whatever reason we have taken against someone or something, we are only too pleased to pick up on, highlight and condemn each and every flaw and shortcoming, however slight. And here, being one of the minority who are not persuaded by Hemingway’s ‘genius’ and, furthermore, puzzled as to why anyone can be, I am willing to admit that I might well be guilty of nit-picking for fault.

A similar, though certainly not the same, tendency is often at play in ‘the arts’, although unlike in our private lives, it is not driven by personal bias but by something at once both more complex and remarkably simple.

If after reading the latest ‘innovative’ and ‘ground-breaking’ novel, hearing an ultra-modern piece of music or visiting an exhibition of ‘subversive’ art, and despite being assured it is a work of genius, privately we remain unconvinced, it is a brave woman or man who will publicly announce their doubts: but it is not necessarily doubt in our own judgment which causes our reticence. 

It is more likely to be a fear of looking ridiculous: who are we to judge on the worth of a piece when the great and good in the arts have given it their blessings?

Rather than risk the scorn of our peers, we might decide to ignore those aspects of a ‘new’ work with which we feel uncomfortable and cut it a little slack. We might try to assure ourselves that such a new, unusual and ground-breaking piece ‘needs space’ and being new, unusual and ground-breaking can be judged only by new rules.

In a bout of modesty we might even tell ourselves it is no doubt our own fault that we are not immediately able to acknowledge its excellence: look at Picasso and Stravinsky or, in earlier years, the Impressionists, we might tell ourselves, and how the world had to learn to appreciate the art they produced; how we all had to discover ‘new ways of reading’, ‘new ways of looking’ and ‘new ways of listening’.

Read this:

‘In the morning it was bright and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river. We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town.’ 

Were that rather flat, not to say banal, passage (the first paragraph of chapter 10 of The Sun Also Rises) not the work of a writer hitherto hailed as ‘a great writer’, but merely an excerpt from the travel diary of Rockbridge, Illinois’s Lewis Monroe, I suspect the kudos would be in shorter supply. But as it’s Hemingway, he of the ‘lean, hard and athletic narrative prose’ that ‘puts more literary English to shame’ (as a contemporary New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises, has it), so . . .

Flat, banal? Rubbish! Hemingway? He’s a great writer, isn’t he? Nobel Prize laureate, leading modernist, one of America’s best novelist, an original voice . . . How could a man like Hemingway be thought even capable of writing flat, banal passages? Get a grip man! Oh, you’re not an academic, or a fellow published writer, or a professional literary critic? Ah, well, that explains it, doesn’t it? Now, fuck off and don’t waste our time!

It is, in fact by Hemingway (he of the ‘lean, hard and athletic narrative prose’), but had I, in fact, accomplished a double bluff and, after persuading you beyond any doubt that the piece is a passage from Hemingway’s masterful pen, then come clean and revealed that in fact this is from the travel diary of Lewis Monroe, of Rockbridge, Illinois, composed while he and a few pals, would it still be a piece of masterful writing?

Or would it — on reflection (‘well, of course, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’) — revert to being flat and banal? I believe it might well do so. I have no truck with the ‘transubstantiation’ of Roman Catholic ideology, and I similarly have not truck with any other kind of suggested transubstantiation.

Is a piece of loo paper suddenly valuable because it has been certified that the Epstein (the sculptor Jacob, not The Beatles’ manager Brian) used it to wipe his arse? No, doubt, though some clever shyster would have no trouble drumming up some schmuck willing to part with $1,000 for it. Put it in an ivory frame and you can double the price.

. . .

There are certainly those those throughout the world who are passionate about literature and ‘the arts’ (and, given half the chance, will explain to you at length just why and why they simply could not live without the arts), but in the grubbier corners of the arts world, less lofty, more commercial imperatives come into play.

A great many people make a great deal of money from selling ‘the arts’ in one way or another, and those involved in making it – publishing houses, film and recording studios, auction houses, concert promoters, upscale galleries and dealers of every stripe — are naturally ever keen to talk up the value of the merchandise they are pushing — for when all is said and done ‘merchandise’ is what it is, whether ‘it’ is a rare first edition, a napkin some famous jerk painter doodled on to settle a restaurant bill are that piece of used loo paper you have just bought for $1,000. By the way, if you think I am being unnecessarily scatological, check out Gilbert and George’s Naked Shit Pictures.

What’s good enough for Gilbert and George is certainly good enough for me, though I should point out the Gilbert and George are Turner Prize winners, have several honorary doctorates and three years ago were elected to London’s Royal Academy of Arts. On the other hand, I’m not, I’m just a knob with a loud mouth who likes writing and getting pissed on tawny port.

If a writer, painter or composer ‘has a name’ and is ‘selling’, those with a stake in maximising the profits to be made from that person’s output will try to ensure she or he continues to sell; and thus they have a vested interest in talking up her or his significance in their given field and downplaying any flaws or shortcomings that might be apparent to some. To do that they will to some extent rely on the arts’ industry’s camp followers — the film, theatre and art critics and book reviewers all of whom function as influencers and are an intricate element of the arts industry.

The upshot is that the ‘consumer’ — many might consider using that word in the context of ‘the arts’ vulgar, but to be frank there is none better — can often find it difficult to gauge the worth of a ‘work of art’, especially if the work is unusual and they are assured it is ‘fresh’ or ‘innovative’ or ‘ground-breaking’. So when the rest of the world is lauding to high heaven a new novel or film, a piece of music, play or exhibition, most of us are quite prepared to go with the flow and accept the judgment of those we assume know what they are talking about.

. . .

The world has always demanded new darlings and celebrated them accordingly, and Hemingway was by no means the first when In Our Time, his first book of short stories, was published in 1926. Some are still remembered, many more have been forgotten, at least by the reading public if not by academia, as each younger generation enthusiastically espouses the latest fashion in the arts as they espouse the latest fashion in clothes. And will always regard those who question their judgment and championing of their new darlings as, at best, stuffy, uncool and old-fashioned, at worst wilfully contrary or just mad.

Unlike me, you might well believe Ernest Hemingway really was a ‘writer of genius’, but you might also agree he and his career benefited enormously from the commercial imperatives which dictated Scribner’s decision to publish The Sun Also Rises. Idealists might care to believe the house had the purest motives at heart and by choosing to publish Hemingway’s work was simply concerned with furthering ‘literature’. What is, though, undeniable is that under that guidance of Hemingway’s editor Maxwell Perkins, the publication of The Sun Also Rises was first and foremost a business venture.

Perkins, one of the young Turks of the publishing world who had begun his career at Scribner’s in its advertising department and knew a thing or two about the business side of publishing, also wanted to ensure Scribner’s did not lose market share and would be seen as a house equally as interested in avant-garde work.

Hemingway’s literary prominence and certainly his reputation have, admittedly, declined a little since their zenith, not least because over the past century many other darlings have arrived to be championed (and sold). But with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1927 and on the back of In Our Time, Hemingway became, in more modern parlance, an overnight sensation, and this was thanks to very astute marketing by Scribner’s, and sales of the novel were astonishing. According to Ms Blume in a piece she wrote for Vanity Fair

‘ . . . thanks to [Scribner’s] public-relations machine that plugged [Hemingway] as a personality along with his breakthrough novel, which would sell 19,000 copies within the first six months of its publication. (By the time of Hemingway’s death, in 1961, an estimated one million copies had been sold.)’

Scribner’s marketing department know its job. Ms Blume continues that those

‘charged with marketing Hemingway’s work were aware of their good fortune: in a sense, they were getting two juicy stories for the price of one. It quickly became apparent that the public’s appetite for Hemingway was as great as that for his writing. Here was a new breed of writer — brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald’.

She observes that

‘The Sun Also Rises became the guidebook to youth culture. Parisian cafés teemed with Hemingway-inspired poseurs: the hard-drinking Jake Barnes and the studiously blasé Lady Brett Ashley became role models. The reason this pioneering youth movement still shimmers with dissipated glamour has a lot to do with The Sun Also Rises’

. . .

I might be an apostate on the matter of Hemingway’s ‘genius’, but even I won’t deny that among his peers his style was distinctive, although whether being ‘distinctive’ is necessarily praiseworthy is a moot point. It was certainly an aspect of his work which Scribner’s marketing department highlighted in its campaign to launch the writer as a sensation: here was something ‘new’ and ‘fresh’, the publishers stressed, a style and attitude that was very different to that of the old-school writers.

Scribner’s was, though, obliged to tread carefully: among its other authors were both Henry James and Edith Wharton, two of the ‘old-school’ writers Hemingway was touted to be leaving behind and whose ‘more literary’ styles, according to that rather overwrought New York Times reviewer, his own put to shame. Although James had died several years before Hemingway’s rise to fame, Wharton was still alive (and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1927, 1928 and 1930). The work of both writers was still selling so well that some senior Scribner’s partners were discomfited by the tactics of Hemingway’s editor Max Perkins and had to be won over.

There is more to ‘writing’ than just prose style, but here, too, I suggest, Hemingway comes more than a little unstuck and proves to be less than the full deal. He long, and inexplicably, insisted that The Sun Also Rises was not an autobiographical novel. Strictly speaking it isn’t, much of the novel was exactly that, especially to the friends and acquaintances who accompanied him on his third trip to Pamplona and who with barely any attempt to disguise them became the protagonists in his novel. In a piece for Town & Country (about Lady Duff Twysden, Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s novel) Lesley M M Blume observes

‘In the end, The Sun Also Rises was a (barely) fictionalized account of the events that had gone down in Pamplona’.

She adds that Donald Ogden-Stewart (the humorist and later Hollywood screenwriter Donald Ogden-Stewart who, with Hemingway’s childhood friend Bill Smith, was transmuted in the novel into ‘Bill Gorton’ in the novel)

‘. . . was astonished that Hemingway was even passing it off as fiction: it was, in Stewart’s opinion, nothing but a report on what happened … [it was] journalism”.

This is not in itself reprehensible – many authors extrapolate into fiction events from real life. It is what you do with your material which tells, how you transmute it into something greater than what is was before you started. What is baffling is Hemingway’s continued and persistent insistence that his novel was not autobiographical.

I suspect that, as Ms Blume establishes, desperate as he was to become a ‘great writer’ — and to be acknowledged as such — he feared his novel would not be taken seriously if it was seen as according to one reviewer of Ms Blume’s book put it mere ‘gossipy reportage’, even though, uncharitably, at the end of the day in many ways that is all it was despite the high-flown claims made for it as literature.

I’m disappointed. When you tell a joke, it’s a bit of downer when no one laughs. OK, not a joke you know what you mean

About 15 months ago, I came across a very useful website called Deadlines for Writers. And that’s exactly what it is: you are provided with a monthly ‘prompt’, a strict word count and a deadline for a story and a poem (you can accept the challenge for both or either).

Crucially, it’s free. There is no charge as, for example, there is a charge, usually about $20, for entering writing competitions to win a top prize of $3,000 (and far small second and third prizes. OK, you might say, wearing your charitable ‘let’s not get too cynical’ hat: these sites have costs and have to be paid for somehow so a small charge is understandable. And anyway, what’s $20?

Well, on the face of it, yes, but just do the maths (US ‘math’ though why I really don’t know) and you will realise that first and foremost such ‘competitions’ are exceptionally nice little earners for the poor, hopeful schmuck who cough up their $20. But I have written about that before (and you can find the post here) so I won’t do so again.

The point is that Deadlines For Writers does not charge you anything. It does have a higher tier where, for a small fee, you can have your story or poem appraised (by whom I don’t know), but joining at the basis, free level, does me (and it seems many others) fine.

The benefits are learning discipline, pretty much as far as I am concerned the prerequisite for most endeavours, including writing fiction of verse. You have a month to write and revise you piece, but just a 12-hour window so submit. And although the word count is a little flexible, it’s not much.

This month 155 were submitted, which is about the average. Members are from all around the world from every continent, though for some reason women predominate.

Another benefit is that, if you are lucky, others who have submitted stories (this month well read other stories and occasionally make comments. They only do so occasionally, but these comments can sometimes be useful.

I have submitted two stories (I created second identity a few months after joining so I could do so) every month, so the discipline side of it is working. Just how engaging and interesting my stories are I don’t know. And that is cause of my disappointment.

Usually get one or two comments every month and, I don’t mind admitting, I look forward to them. But this month I have had no comment on either one of the stories I submitted.

As you can imagine subject matter and style vary. Most folk, it seems, try their hand at chick-lit, science fiction or fantasy, which are not my bag and I don’t. Also some of the stories (I read a few at random every month

and sometimes leave comments) vary in — how do I say this without coming across as snob? — quality. Of the ones I read some are engaging and interesting, many are not.

Now for the cause of my disappointment: one of the stories I submitted this month was a little different. I attempted a pastiche of the kind of rotund, wordy, often overblown style of the 19th-century. It took the form of a review of a novel by Henry James (he of the rotund, wordy, and as he got older, often overblown style).


I realised it wasn’t quite the kind of stuff most folk choose to submit, but I took care over it, a great deal of care, in fact, to make sure it was not just horribly wordy and overblown, but actually also made complete sense. And I have so far had no comment.

Well, that’s a shame, so here and now I ask any of you reading this, if you have time, to read it and tell me what you think. It’s called Yes, You Mr James! and you can read or download it here.

Pip, Pip

(Or as Henry James, he of the mysterious bicycle/fire hose incident — find out for yourselves — would put it, pip, as it were and indeed, pip.)

When, why, how and where (subs: please check) using a simile is always pretty pointless, rather like driving a red car with a tennis racket or eating a sausage in Latin or (cont. P94)

No entry here for almost two months (well, seven weeks). Am I losing interest? Well, no, it’s just that pretty much all that’s been occurring to me has to do with Trump, the coming economic crash and Brexit, and how in many ways both Putin/Russia and Xi Jinping/China are running rings around ‘the free world’.

To be frank, on those matters I’ve nothing much to add to the generalities I’ve already posted in this blog (and which, as I’ve long admitted, are generalities I recycle from only papers and the media. The Economist is always a good bet. Subscribe to the Economist, pick up one or two obscure facts every week — that the housing market in New Zealand has seen better days, for example — and get ready to score Brownie points with the more gullible of your friends who don’t subscribe when you drop them — obliquely! — into conversation).

Then there’s my Hemingway project. It’s coming along OK, though slowly, and I don’t have anything new to say about that either. But one topic has presented itself which might take me away from all the doom and gloom (though the bad times are not complete — football is back on TV).

I’ve been doing a lot more reading over these past 30 months since I hung up my eyeshade and stashed away my spike and pot of glue, and although in that time the bulk of it has been about Hemingway — biographies and related books — I have also been able to read more fiction again. Over that time I’ve read and enjoyed Troubles by J G Farrell, got stuck into Middlemarch (but I’m taking is slowly) and read, but not enjoyed several other novels. In fact, I’ve not enjoyed more novels than I have enjoyed, but I have a kind of rule to finish reading what I’ve started to read as I think that’s only fair to an author.

I’ve also been working on the principle of casting my net far and wide and reading stuff I wouldn’t normally be interested in. So after hearing on the radio that the writer and ex-spy Ted Allebury was an excellent writer, I read his novel Show Me A Hero and discovered — on the basis of that book at least — that he wasn’t.

Then by chance I came across Time Of The Beast by Geoff Smith, which was billed as ‘horror’ (or something) and not having read any ‘horror’ before, I read it. It was dreadful in quite a few ways, but at least I gained a little from it: how not to write.

Trickier to deal with was The Colour by Rose Tremain. She is an ‘award-winning’ author (which surely should impress us all, surely?), a ‘Dame’ to boot and I gather something of a respected fixture in contemporary English literature. All that leaves me out on a limb when I confess that I wasn’t particularly impressed by The Colour, either. In fact, I didn’t think it was at all good.

. . .

A crucial point to make, though, is that we all like different things, in this case writers and styles. Quite obviously given Ms Tremain’s reputation and her long list of awards I (who admittedly is only talking about one book here, the only one by her I have read, though did and does not encourage me to read any more) I am in a distinct minority. Some might, possibly with some justification, claim I don’t know what I am talking about. I happen to think I do, but you’ll see that no definitive answer can be given to that question.

Nor can a definitive answer be given to the question ‘is this book [whatever it is] good or bad?’ I contend that, particularly if a novel or story or poem isn’t the kind of thing we usually ‘like’, all literary judgments are subjective and can’t be anything but subjective.

You might argue that this or that critic or English literature department academic is ‘a professional who is daily immersed in literature of all kind’ and is able to evaluate a book dispassionately without letting her of his personal tastes intrude. To that I would respond ‘cobblers’, simply because there is no way at all we can be sure personal tastes has not intruded. And when it does, the particular critic or academic is very likely to be unaware that it has.

The ‘professional’ critic or academic might well agree with me that Geoff Smith’s Time Of The Beast is pants, rubbish. But I also don’t doubt Mr Smith’s novel has entertained many and they felt it is ‘quite good’.

How would you react to that? Would you insist (in a sense pulling rank on behalf of the ‘professional’ critic/academic) that in some way she or he is ‘more qualified’ to pass judgment, because they have read more etc? I’ll concede that ‘having read more’ might mean their judgment and reasons for making it are more interesting to listen and pay attention to rather than those of someone who thinks Time Of The Beast is ‘really, really brill, I mean it’s ace!’; but that still doesn’t make the one subjective judgment more objective than another, quite simply because it cannot. It simply isn’t possibly, just as 2 plus 4 will never add up to anything but 6 however hard you try.

. . . 

As it happens I am not alone in being more than a tad sceptical about the views of ‘professional’ critics and academics or rather the overly respectful attention they get and, no doubt, often demand. As part of my background reading for this — almost interminable, but not quite yet and I shall finish it — Hemingway project (which I’m thinking of subtitling ‘Was Hemingway a twat or just a pillock?’) I came across Virginia Woolf’s contemporary review of Men Without Women, his second volume of short stories, in which she is quite scathing about ‘the critics’ and the almost slavish respect we give them and their views. You can read her piece here.

I am certainly not about to claim that the judgment of the ‘ordinary reader’ is just as good as that of the better-read critic or academic. Instead I am trying to make the, rather negative and certainly more subtle point, that the judgment of the critic or academic is not per se better. I shall simply ask those who will continue to argue that it is: how then do you explain that quite often the judgment of one critic about the latest work by this year’s new darling might utterly contradict that of another.

To show you what I mean, here are two judgments by two ‘respected critics’ about John Banville’s 2005 novel The Sea (it won the Booker that year). The Guardian wrote: ‘Banville’s book recalls such poised masters as Proust and Beckett (and, indeed, James) . . . And that we can mention such writers in the same breath as Banville should alert us to the fact that we can count ourselves privileged to be around at the same time as he is.’

Then there’s the view of the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani that The Sea is

‘a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale’.

So which is it? Who is right and who is wrong? Actually, neither is, because there can be no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ subjective judgment.

. . . 

I happen to agree with Kakutani. Certainly, Banville does try something different and something quite interesting, but by Christ does he spoil it all by shitting on his own doorstep. As far as I am concerned for every point he scores — and he does score one or two, not least that he shares with many of his fellow Irish writers a feeling for the flow of prose, something which is all-too-often distinctly lacking in too many English novelists (are you listening, Ms Tremain?) — he loses two.

For one thing he chooses to use so many arcane words — her’s a pick of them: ‘leporine’, ‘strangury’, ‘perpetuance’, ‘finical’, ‘flocculent’, ‘anthropic’, ‘avrilaceous’, ‘anaglypta‘ and ‘assegais’ — that you get the distinct feeling he’s just showing off.

In fact and on the face of it, that would seem to be very unlikely, given his prominence etc. But that is how it comes across and that is, sadly, what I suspect Banville is doing. When he won the Booker with The Sea in 2005, he commented along the lines of ‘wasn’t it good that for a change a work of art won the Booker’. Modest, he ain’t.

In The Sea, Banville is also horribly addicted to similes and — a trait he shares with the lovely Ms Tremain — he doesn’t use just one where one might do: every burp and fart gets at least two similes, and most are so bloody forced you think you are sitting in a junior creative writing course class.

Overall — to my mind, I’ll stress that point once again — The Sea is horribly overwritten and so top-heavy with ostentatious ‘fine writing’ that it is nothing but bad writing.

The all-important arts establishment, who possibly never got around to reading The Sea, disagree. Among his honours, Banville has won (this list is from Wikipedia) the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature’.

He has also been ‘elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007’, and in 2017 ‘Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood)’. The bottom line: he must be a fine writer, and you, Pat Powell, couldn’t tell a purse from a sow’s ear. Ho-hum.

. . . 

Another writer who has been honoured by the bods who like to do the honouring is one our English literary critics’ several darlings, Ian McEwan. Once an enfant terrible of contemporary English ‘letters’, McEwan has, as sadly always seems to happen, become an eminence grise.

He hasn’t yet been knighted as Ms Tremain — sorry Dame Rose Tremain — has been honoured, but many, many bodies, in Britain and abroad have made it clear just what a splendid, splendid writer they think he is. Nor only has McEwan, like Banville, also won a string of prizes, but among other things a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and most recently was awarded Germany’s Goethe Medal who being a splendid chap who isn’t a kraut.

Immediately after finishing Banville’s The Sea, I read, again at random, McEwan’s ‘James Tait Black Memorial Prize’ winner Saturday. This is billed by the Observer, at least on the cover of my paperback edition as ‘Dazzling . . . profound and urgent’.

Yes, as far as London’t literary luvvies are concerned it is firmly in the camp of ‘important literature’. Here’s my subjective opinion: it’s not ‘dazzling’ or ‘profound’ and what ‘urgent’ means or might mean in the context I have no idea at all.

Actually, I do have an idea as to what is going on: publishers — spoiler alert! — don’t publish books because they are ‘passionate about literature’. They publish books to make money and preferably as much of it as possible. Thus telling the constituency of readers who regard themselves as ‘passionate about literature’ that McEwan’s novel is ‘dazzling . . . profound and urgent’ should urge those on any doubters further towards the Waterstone’s till.

Like Banville, McEwan is also addicted to two similes where even one is one too many, and like Banville they are usually so bloody forced, you wonder whether the writer’s literary judgment had taken the day off at the time of writing. Perhaps you might even agree with me that supplying two similes is remarkably odd: doesn’t that second simile more or less neutralise the first? In which case why provide the first?

To be frank, why not let words you are trying to illuminate with a simile (or do whatever similes are intended to do) speak of themselves? In short, junk similes now and forever. I have not — in my more mature and enlightened reading — yet come a cross a simile which is not pointless, affected and could certainly be junked without a second thought.

We’re told — and we have to be told because I doubt the average reader would guess however ‘passionate’ they are about literature — that Saturday is (or was when it was published in 2005) a commentary on the second Iraq War and the ‘state of the world’. Well — ahem, in my view — it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it is hard to see quite what the point of McEwan’s novel is.

I love ironies, and it is a supreme irony that John Banville — yes, the same John Banville of the mainly pretentious bilge outlined above — was extremely nasty about McEwan’s Saturday when he reviewed it in My 2005 for the New York Review of Books. He wrote:

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.’

I have to say I agree with Banville. Reading McEwan’s novel was like — oh, bloody forget it!