Saturday — Ian McEwan

You either like the kind of ‘literary’ fiction — or, perhaps, better ‘would-be literary fiction’ — written by McEwan and his ilk or you don’t. I don’t. I simply find it largely fake and contrived.

There reputedly exists in London — often narrowed down to North London — a colony of ‘serious writers’, many of whom in their salad days made the Sunday Times list of ‘Young Writers to Watch Out For’ (which, if you didn’t know, has ‘publishers’ sales strategy’ stamped all over it, but leave that for now). Since then they have aged and often not at all well.

Some have dropped off the list, but others are right up their with the stars. The others, like McEwan, for example, survived to write another day, and as they get older they are consulted by the ‘serious’ papers to pontificate on current events, as though writers are per se less opinionated and boring than the rest of us. How did the notion gain currency that writers are somehow more reliable guides to understanding the current state of the world? Odd.

That London coterie, which includes in its ranks (reputedly — I’m not part of it as you might have guessed and have no first-hand information) the book reviewers of the ‘serious’ newspapers and the BBC arts department, and the editors of Britain’s publishers, gives incest a bad. And it is to save face in the eyes of their peers that these writers compose the kind of novels which a New York Times book reviewer described as apparently the sort of novel English writers do in their sleep. They are so sharply ‘literary’, you could cut a bone with them.

When they are not reviewing each other’s work, they are shagging each other’s partners, and vice versa. In professional terms they are turning in the kind of ‘serious fiction’ they imagine their peers will like. McEwan is slap bang in the middle of them.

I’ve read that McEwan has previously been accused of stretching out short stories to novel length, and one of my many criticisms of Saturday is that although it might, at a pinch, have made several reasonable short stories (though they, too, would suffer from being ‘literary’), it just doesn’t come together as a novel. And what is he writing about?

Some reviewer or other who described the novel as a sequence of ‘vivid tableaux’ was simply being very kind and possibly even tactful. I, on the other hand, don’t have much of a taste for arse-licking (just in case I bump into McEwan at Chris and Jez’s do next weekend). Oh, and my copy has the Observer’s judgment that Saturday is ‘dazzling . . . profound and urgent’. Dazzling and profound? Nah. And ‘urgent’? I can’t even begin to imagine what that is supposed to mean.

The world of Saturday — the main protagonist examining in articulate detail and reflecting at ponderous length on his every burp and fart; the ‘successful’ lawyer wife; the ‘beautiful’ budding poet daughter, Daisy; the strapping and equally ‘beautiful’ 18-year-old ‘blues guitarist’ son, Theo; the cantankerous, self-centred ‘famous poet’ father-in-law — is not one you or I live in.

In fact, no one lives there except that characters in this kind of novel. That world belongs squarely in the middle-brow alternate universe of novels, novelists and book reviews in the ‘serious’ Sunday papers.

It’s the kind of unreal universe ‘simply adored’ by folk who are ‘passionate’ about literature and, it has to be said, folk who don’t actually live in a house in Fitzrovia (and never bloody will), don’t drive a Merc (and never will), and can’t afford to buy contemporary artwork for the sitting room (and never will), but who know in their heart of hearts that’s where they belong (and that would be their existence if life were not so bloody cruel).

If you ever meet people like the Perownes, remember that they only exist (or seem to) because they construct themselves into that shape after reading novels like McEwan’s Saturday.

Overall, I got the distinct impression that in Saturday (and the character of Henry Perowne) McEwan was just writing about himself. I don’t at all doubt that in his day-to-day life he has important, profound thoughts about TV news and the layout of the roads round Goodge St and jots them down for later; but we must remind ourselves he’s a working novelist and that nothing less will do.

I also note that most recently McEwan has been awarded Germany’s Goethe Medal for performing ‘outstanding service for the German language and for international cultural relations’, which rather baffled me: why are the Germans interested? It’s not immediately obvious.

McEwan’s also 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. Furthermore, Saturday has sold in its tens of thousands since it was published 14 years ago.

So — I hear you ask — what the fuck does Patrick Powell know? I’ll tell you: Saturday is ponderous pants and its success tells us more about the cosy luvvie-land of the literature industry than anything else.

NB I’ve also come across (isn’t Wikipedia marvellous! Though I had actually come across it elsewhere before) the acid attack from John Banville, the Irish novelist, that 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’.

That is a very good description and pretty much spot-on, though the irony is that just before starting reading Saturday, I’d read Banville’s The Sea and thought it was overblown, pretentious guff, and — perhaps consolation for McEwan — a lot worse than Saturday, though not much. And like McEwan and pretty much all of his ‘literary’ peers, Banville is also addicted to remorselessly forced similes. But what the hell, this is ‘literature’.

Oh, and not by the longest stretch of anyone’s imagination is Saturday any kind of commentary on the second Iraq war and terrorism as it has been claimed to be. And, by the way, Mr McEwan there’s only one really important rule in writing: don’t ever write about music. It can’t be done. Hundreds, like you, think they might just be the ones to beat the odds and succeed, but they never do.