Saturday
I started and finished Saturday by Ian McEwan in two days. I had to. With all of McEwan's work I am motivated by the strength of his written word to press on. Just when I think I can put in a bookmark and close the pages, something unfolds on the pages and my heart races. His descriptive prose reaches something within me. The ebb and flow of memories and movement build complex characters that I can almost reach out and touch they become so real.
As noted in many reviews, Saturday is one of the first novels published in a post-9/11 world. This is not to say that the book world stopped turning two years ago, but that not many authors have become comfortable yet discussing the paranoia now in our daily lives. By setting this story on the day millions of Britons marched against the (then quickly approaching) war in Iraq, we, the reader are anxious at every turn. We expect the worst... from the opening moments of a plane on fire over the London skyline to the shadowy situation our narrator finds himself in on a London side street. What one of us doesn't stare up at the sky now and then at the airplanes overhead seemingly perilously threatening to our world on the ground? (Don't worry I'm not giving away any of the plot to anyone yet to read this.) In the course of one Saturday in the life of a seemingly average (although affluent) Londoner, McEwan tackles the idea that fiction can't have a place in the new seriousness of our world.
*****
(5) stars; This is the best book I've read all year.
The unfortunate legacy of postmodern culture is that novelists are practically required to keep an ironic distance from connections with the real world. "Serious" literature must now put quotes around the serious; it's practically an article of faith that fiction be judged on its formal ingenuity. There is no secret as to why Ian McEwan has gained such a large, intelligent and devoted readership. In book after book, and now, especially in "Saturday," he has gone directly against the grain of fashionable contemporary cynicism and proved that a novel can be topical without being either obvious or dogmatic, that a writer can derive aesthetic sense from confronting the world's concerns.
Salon
This being McEwan, the accident eventually hardens into something much darker and involves questions of how humane and civilised men might confront terror to protect things they hold dear. On this Saturday of all Saturdays, such questions carry complex implications. And the answers, in this profound and urgent novel, are never less than surprising.
The Guardian