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the complete review - fiction

Saturday

by
Ian McEwan

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : artfully wrought character study -- but not more

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Impressed -- though the American critics decidedly less enamored

  From the Reviews:

• "McEwan's novel ends with the hard-won virtues of forgiveness, familial love, and decency. It's not the grace found at the end of Atonement, but there's something moving in the fact that Henry always can be counted on to do the decent thing." - Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor
  
  
• "The highly textured but low-pitched prose, with its accretion of detail and its insistent use of the present tense, allows the submerged uncertainty of life after 9/11 to emerge not as an occasion for rhetorical or stylistic fireworks but as one of the many tonal strains, albeit an intense one, pervading a man’s daily experience." - Sam Munson, Commentary
  
  
• "This is a rich book, sensuous and thoughtful. Occasionally, McEwan stacks his intellectual cards too neatly (.....) In general, however, McEwan has found in Saturday the right form to showcase his dazzling talents." - Caroline Moore, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Saturday is not a McEwan masterpiece: it is just a little too safe. But it is still hugely enjoyable for all that." - The Economist
  
  
• "(H)is least frightening book yet. The violent confrontation late in the narrative may be the silliest, most overwrought climax McEwan has ever cooked up. Rather than the manifestation of a dark, unknowable force -- or even just an angry, complicated man with a will of his own -- Baxter turns out to be the hapless puppet of a grotesque neurological condition that Perowne manages to diagnose at a glance." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "None of this is in itself remarkable, but McEwan’s examination of the minute workings of conscience and personality is thrillingly shrewd. (...) In other hands this could become maddeningly flashy, a torrent of clever aperçus and topical graffiti. But McEwan’s style has long been skewed towards understatement; even when he’s itemising the details of a craniotomy. In Saturday he is at his best -- thoughtful, eloquent, yet restrained. The novel has all the technical assurance of its predecessors, and suggests as well a newly political sensibility and a seductive, Joycean attention to the textures of normality." - Henry Hitchings, Financial Times
  
  
• "By recording with such loving care the elements of one rich Englishman's life, Saturday explores the question of to what extent it is possible to insulate yourself against the world's concerns. (...) One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, it succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world." - Mark Lawson, The Guardian
  
  
• "Ecce homo: in this middle-aged, middle-class, well-to-do white man, McEwan distils all that is good, decent and honourable about English society today." - Elena Seymenliyska, The Guardian
  
  
• "Among the novel's panoply of virtues is its acute and sensitive ear for the noise in the background of ordered urban life. (...) Its author's scrupulous application of his talent merits real gratitude from its readers. Saturday is distinguished by an intense literary imagination that is fundamentally scientific in its vision and its criteria." - Marek Kohn, The Independent
  
  
• "Refreshing and engrossing, Saturday has a pleasing intimacy, dense with revelation, and is not at all encumbered by dogmatic argument. (...) McEwan's superb novel amply demonstrates how good fiction, by dramatising unwieldy and fraught ideas in a deeply personal narrative, can fashion the world into gobbets sometimes more digestible than factual reportage." - James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "Saturday is a commentary on how politics gets invented from the stuff of emotion the way mind is created out of the brain. Read (and written) in the light of events following the Iraq invasion, this carefully ambiguous tale about the "brightly wrought illusion" of unstable selves amounts to a cool, temperate, humane protest against belligerent certainty. (...) This extraordinary book is not a political novel. It is a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics." - Lee Siegel, The Nation
  
  
• "Doch dem Leviathan der Politik hat McEwan in Saturday auf diese Weise zu viel an literarischen Werten geopfert. Ein politischer Kommentar zur Zeit seit dem 11. September und auch den Bombenattentaten von London ist das Buch sehr wohl, doch als Roman ist es missglückt." - Uwe Pralle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "McEwan ties a lead weight to his own carefully accumulated details with this invocation of the magical powers of poetry. For his accumulation has been splendid." - Max Watman, The New Criterion
  
  
• "But one will forgive much when prose is as good as this" - James Wood, The New Republic
  
  
• "In the foreground, there is personal violence; in the background, the implied violence of the war in Iraq. And yet -- unusually for McEwan -- Saturday is about feeling good rather than feeling bad. The novel addresses the idea that pleasure and happiness don't make good fictional subjects. (...) It would have taken the tiniest nod to the possibility of pretension to redeem Perowne into charm. For all his flaws, he is interesting, and the story, as ever with McEwan, is twisting and clever. But only when the surgeon visits his mother do we glimpse a novel that is likeable as well as smart." - Sophie Harrison, New Statesman
  
  
• "McEwan is skeptical, sometimes brutally so, of this society: It has made us unfeeling, and unsure. But it has been his method, and even his genius, to accept its premises. In crafting grim, carefully structured novels in which characters receive their comeuppance -- but, at least in his recent work, never too, too much of it -- he has become the consummate professional novelist." - Keith Gessen, New York
  
  
• "Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. (...) Another source of dismay, one for which, admittedly, Ian McEwan cannot wholly be held accountable, is the ecstatic reception Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike. Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this ?" - John Banville, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Saturday reads like an up-to-the-moment, post-9/11 variation on Woolf's classic 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. (...) Mr. McEwan has not only produced one of the most powerful pieces of post-9/11 fiction yet published, but also fulfilled that very primal mission of the novel: to show how we -- a privileged few of us, anyway -- live today." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "In Saturday, as in all McEwan's work, there is much to admire in the efficiency and clarity with which he marshals his themes. Here, though, his control over his material is too pronounced." - Zoe Heller, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(A) novel you can't help admiring and can't possibly love." - David Gates, Newsweek
  
  
• "His gift of observation, wonderfully precise, now comes thick and fast. There is next to nothing in this novel that feels forced; the author's mature attention illuminates equally everything it falls on. (...) One strand of the book's many arguments explores this debate between rationality and imagination. For all the author's occasionally irritating in-jokes, it is not clear which side comes out on top." - Tim Adams, The Observer
  
  
• "Saturday appears indebted to Mrs. Dalloway for its premise. Yet McEwan has claimed Saul Bellow as Muse, and this book is more akin to Seize the Day as well as those Bellovian fictions in which nasty urban realities intrude on an urbane man’s privileged existence." - Steven G. Kellman, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "(A) magnificently imagined and surprisingly flawed work." - David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "In Atonement, McEwan chose young characters whose life-changing experiences slowly resonated through wider events. In Saturday he has turned it all around: a middle-aged hero resistant to change is set against the fate of millions. Perowne cannot hope to win. The writing is as sharp and vivid as ever; it is the raw material that is flawed." - Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday
  
  
• "Offsetting local and global menace, McEwan invites us to make other parallels -- not least between the surgical dissections of the neurologist and the layer by layer revelations of the novelist, so absorbed in probing his character’s hard-wired psyche and knotted skein of emotional threads." - Tom Adair, The Scotsman
  
  
• "McEwan is writing close to the news and to the facts: fiction has to take its place within a context of reality. Both are given equal weight, but there can be no doubt that this hyper-real novel is absolutely convincing on its own terms. The reader is able to coexist with the writer, in an identical time frame and with the same preoccupations. (...) Saturday is an exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained. It is undoubtedly McEwan’s best." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator
  
  
• "McEwan's fiction has typically dwelt on worst-case scenarios (.....) In this novel, though, threats are never quite implemented. Perhaps this is a sign of artistic maturity, a response to the political situation, or both." - Lewis Jones, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Saturday has its inert elements (...). But, written with superb exactness, complex, suspenseful, reflective and humane, this novel about an expert on the human brain by an expert on the human mind reinforces his status as the supreme novelist of his generation." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
  
  
• "(A) book of great moral maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence -- chemical, biological, social and political -- threatening it. Everyone should read Saturday (.....) Artistically, morally and politically, he excels." - Ruth Scurr, The Times
  
  
• "It is all very impressive: McEwan gives lie to the view that novels can no longer encapsulate the present, and shows that being topical does not mean being merely gossipy. (...) Saturday is much less boring than it sounds. It is executed with his customary skill, intelligence and seriousness: the structure is minutely planned; the individual scenes have a cinematic, brightly lit clarity; the prose is clean, sharp and watchful. And, inevitably, there is a constant undercurrent of menace to keep readers on their toes." - Theo Tait, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "His new novel, Saturday, can only be described as dull. (...) (C)ompared with Atonement, Amsterdam and Enduring Love, among others, Saturday is a chore to read, bogged down by McEwan's political musings and obvious medical research." - Deidre Donahue, USA Today
  
  
• "This is not a modest book, and it buckles under its immense ambitions. (...) The novel is most provocative as a philosophical inquiry into happiness -- though even in this capacity, it tends toward a defeated conservatism." - Dennis Lim, The Village Voice
  
  
• "At times its implied meanings may seem too explicit. This is a political novel finally, and one that appears to beat its drum a little hard at times. (...) Despite all its virtues, and these include some astonishing pages of description (...) Saturday still feels a little too artful, just a smidgen over-contrived. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of observing the dramatic unities of place, time and action: The intersection of the public and private takes on a disturbing neatness." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Das Problem mit glücklichen Menschen in der schöngeistigen Literatur ist nicht, daß sie so selten vorkommen, sondern daß sie, wenn sie vorkommen, ihren Kollegen aus den Kitschromanen so schrecklich ähnlich sehen. Nicht nur die Dialoge sind ärgerlich. Die ganze Konstruktion erweist sich spätestens beim zweiten Lesen als allzu durchsichtig, durch das Gebäude des Romans pfeift ein eiseskalter Wind. Es ist alles zu genau abgezirkelt. Und genau deswegen kippt auch die Konstruktion immer wieder in die Kolportage." - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt
  
  
• "Es gibt ein ganzes Bündel von Gründen, Saturday zu loben: die sorgfältige Architektur, die Intelligenz der Beobachtungen, die elegant unauffällige Sprache (von Bernhard Robben glänzend übersetzt) und die geradezu aristotelische Einheit von Ort, Zeit und Handlung. Und doch bleibt ein Unbehagen. Es gleicht dem eines Varieté-Besuchers, der den verblüffenden Kunststücken eines Zauberkünstlers atemlos gefolgt ist, am Ende aber die Vorstellung mit leerem Kopf verlässt." - Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Saturday is a closely circumscribed novel, a detailed day in the life. The life is London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne's, the weekend day -- away from work -- not quite typical or everyday. The Saturday is 15 February, 2003, the day on which hundreds of thousands would march in the capital in protest against the proposed war against Iraq, the teeming masses a constant backdrop (though always kept at some distance, whether on television or on the streets). Perowne's day is one largely of simple routine and leisurely errands, scheduled to culminate in the evening with a family get-together at dinner.
       Prowne's daughter, Daisy, is about to have her first book of poetry published, and is coming home for the first time in six months -- the longest she's ever been away. Son Theo, who abandoned school and has found fulfilment as a blues musician, still lives at home; like Daisy he gets along very well with his father. Perowne is happily married too, to Rosalind, a lawyer for a newspaper (constantly trying "to steer her newspaper away from the courts") -- who has the annoyance of an injunction to fight this Saturday. The final guest expected for dinner is Rosalind's father, John Grammaticus, himself a well-known poet, living in France -- the one possibly disruptive presence, a strong personality who hasn't quite mended a rift with Daisy.
       Perowne isn't much of a reader, but Daisy has been trying to educate him, making up reading lists for him. He still doesn't quite get it, but for the most part he's willing to try. But some of the books she suggests -- the "irksome confections" of the magical realist school -- are too much for him to take:

the actual, not the magical should be the challenge. This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible.

Though things sometimes go wrong, he can control outcomes here, he has resources, controlled conditions.

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Links:

• Official site
• Vintage publicity page
• Anchor publicity page
• Diogenes publicity page
• Einaudi publicity page
• De Harmonie publicity page
• Information at the Ian McEwan site
• The Diagnosis in The New Yorker
• Interview in The Morning News
• Profile in The Observer

• Agony Column
• Alan in Belfast
• The Book Bag
• booklit
• Boston Globe
• Boston Phoenix
• Christian Science Monitor
• Daily Blague
• db’s Medical Rants
• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• duck for cover
• 8weekly (Dutch)
• Entertainment Weekly (at CNN)
• Everyday I Write the Book
• L'Express (French)
• Falter (German)
• Le Figaro (French)
• GoodReports.net
• The Guardian (1)
• The Guardian (2)
• A Guy's Moleskine Notebook
• Harvard Book Review
• The Harvard Crimson
• Head Butler
• Nathan Hobby’s blog
• Independent on Sunday
• January
• John's Blog
• Jungle World (German)
• Karan’s reviews and ramblings
• Kirkus Reviews
• Lit Matters
• Literary London
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• MostlyFiction.com
• The Nation
• New Statesman
• New York
• The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review
• novelreading
• The Observer
• The Onion
• openDemocracy
• PopMatters
• Portico
• Publishers Weekly
• RANT with Lazycatfish
• Reading matters
• Ready When You Are, C.B.
• revish
• The Rogovy Report
• rosslangager
• S. Krishna's Books
• Salon
• San Francisco Chronicle
• satt.org (German)
• schallabrity
• Scotland on Sunday
• The Scotsman
• Richard Seltzer
• Slate
• Sid Smith's Postcards From The Yellow Room
• The Social Affairs Unit
• Spannered
• Squash Player
• Sterne
• The Telegraph (Calcutta)
• There's Always Something
• Unknowing
• USA Today
• The Village Voice
• The Washington Post
• Write Now
• Dieter Wunderlich (German)
• Die Zeit (German)
• Zeitgeist Reviews
• Zubon Book Reviews

• The Official Website of Ian McEwan
• Ian McEwan at Literature Matters
• Ian McEwan at The Guardian

• Amsterdam
• Atonement
• The Children Act
• Machines Like Me
• On Chesil Beach
• Solar
• Sweet Tooth

• See the index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       British author Ian McEwan is the author of many fine novels. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998.

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© 2005-2021 the complete review

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