Saturday

Ian McEwan

There has to be more to life than merely saving lives.

Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in--you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto--think small.

And it's at this point he remembers the source of his vague sense of shame or embarrassment: his readiness to be persuaded that the world has changed beyond recall, that harmless streets like this and the tolerant life they embody can be destroyed by the new enemy--well-organized, tentacular, full of hatred and focused zeal...The world has not fundamentally changed.

This is the first book I have read by McEwan and it will be my hopefully be my last. I was captured by the middle quote above about thinking small--the idea intrigued me, but Saturday is far too big in its dusty boldness to be concerned about anything small. McEwan's writing is good enough, and the book flows wonderfully well with moments where you will be flipping pages faster than philosophical quips go through the main character's mind--which is fast.
I almost felt this was a tired attempt at coming to terms with all the baggage we seem to have developed for ourselves in our modern age--McEwan fills pages with interesting and witty ponderings on such topics as the war in Iraq, terrorism, materialism, and even a little bit of poverty and socialism. But I never felt that McEwan believed there to be any answer hidden behind all this. He clearly wants there to be an answer, but he simply cannot get beyond the wonderful sense of melancholy his jaded view offers up. There are moments where he shamelessly indulges in deep fits of self-loathing mixed with self-pity--afterall we are such a screwed up world, it is almost dramatic. McEwan, like the vast swath of modern western humanity lusts deeply after anything great. Give us great accomplishments, great good, great sadness, great tragedy, give us great bad even, only do not for the love of life, give us normalcy.
McEwan seemed to be writing a novel about the normal lives of people who think about the same things you and I do, but he couldn't help make the father a philosophical neurosurgeon parent to a famous and young poet daughter and an equally famous and young blues musician son. Did I mention their grandfather was a distinguished and cantankerous poet himself? Aiming for normalcy in thought, McEwan couldn't resist grandeur in fact.
But for all that, McEwan still had his brilliant moments. Such comments as: "Only at work is he single-minded; at leisure, he's too impatient" and "For the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack" are so perfect--they were the deciding factor in whether or not I wrote about him here.
Saturday pissed me off. Maybe an older mind would recognize the weariness in McEwan's voice, I confused it with an exuberant attempt to imitate that dark world-worn experience which is so in vogue--and which also happens to be a lie.