Saturday – Ian McEwan

 

I found an autographed hardback copy of the novel on the second-hand bookshelf at my local urban farm. It was selling for 1£. It says a lot about the value of literature these days...

The book is beautifully written. No wonder, it’s McEwan. The book is about rich people and their perfectly imperfect lives. No wonder, it’s McEwan. The book actually annoyed the hell out of me, which is a shame because, after all, it’s McEwan...

I’m not quite sure whether McEwan depicts a Henry Perowne that is irritatingly detached from reality or if that’s actually a reflection of the author’s outlook on life in London (the autobiographical elements in Saturday are clearly many and at times it’s hard to disentangle pure fiction from McEwan’s experiences).

The book annoyed me because Henry Perowne and McEwan seem to mock those who protested against the invasion of Iraq. I did back in the day, I’m quite proud of that, and I’m happy I carried those signs that he seems to find fairly meaningless. It annoyed me because I had little intention of spending half an hour reading about a stupid squash game. It annoyed me because during the squash game one of those supposedly average athletes in their 50s jumps “two or maybe even three feet into the air” (you’re either a real athlete, or you are delusional if you think you can jump that high with a couple of steps). Similarly, you don’t run a half marathon in less than an hour and a half if you’re little more than a casual jogger (trust me on that).

It annoyed me because the book hates on the student halls in Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia where I lived and worked for years. It annoyed me because, protected by his fancy car on Tottenham Court Road, Henry Perowne/McEwan thinks that everyone around him is fundamentally happy (the guy selling The Big Issue? The old lady diving for reduced to clear sandwiches at Tesco? The underpaid McDonald’s staff?). It annoyed me because, for all the medical research he’s had to do to write this book, Perowne’s mom has the same illness that Briony develops in Atonement (which he wrote four years before, without publishing any other novel in the meantime).

The novel’s greatest merit has been that of arousing something similar to a weird nationalist pride in me (something I’ve never possessed and that I hope I’ll get rid of by tomorrow morning). As an unknown Italian archaeologist impregnates Perowne’s flawless daughter, McEwan allows himself to label the Italians as pueri aeterni (eternal teenagers) and says that Italian men won’t get up in the middle of the night for the cries of their teething children. Screw that, I have a right to say those things if I want to. You, rich and pompous foreigner, don’t.