2005 There are no prizes for the most devastating review ever published. Were there one, the winner for this year (and arguably for the first decade of the 21st century) would be that published on this day.
When Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday was released in early summer 2005, the reviewers, British and American, fell over themselves to throw superlatives at it. ‘Few literary events are today met with as much enthusiasm’, crooned the Boston Globe, ‘as the publication of a McEwan novel. Saturday, a brilliant and graceful hymn to the contented contemporary man, will be greeted with cheers.’
Quick to join in the cheering was the Daily Telegraph (‘This is a rich book, sensuous and thoughtful’), the New York Times (‘it’s clear that with this volume, 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’), the Guardian (‘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’), and the Spectator (‘Saturday is an exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained. It is undoubtedly McEwan’s best’). Even the normally crusty London Review of Books, like the ranks of Tuscany, could scarce forbear to cheer (if somewhat sniffily):
The customarily firm forward march of the narrative works surprisingly well with the more spaced-out requirements of a day-in-the-life story, and at its best the combination of precision and lyricism is very effective.
Praise indeed.
Saturday is, as the above reviewer notes, a circadian novel – like Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses. The Day in Question is 15 February 2003. On that day, across the world, there were demonstrations in protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq. That in London, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, was massive. Estimates of protestor attendance (overwhelmingly peaceful) ranged as high as two million.
McEwan’s narrative follows 24 hours in the life of a brain surgeon, Henry Perowne, who lives in Fitzroy Square and carries out his operations at University College Hospital, 200 yards away across Tottenham Court Road. On Saturdays he plays squash in a gym at adjoining Huntley Street, and on this day he intends to pick up some smoked salmon in nearby Marylebone High Street, for a dinner party in the evening. His day is interrupted by the mustering of the demonstrators in Gower Street (by the hospital) and by a street accident that leads to home invasion. The hero is ambivalent about the rights and wrongs of the coming war.
Saturday looked set to win the Man-Booker prize for 2005. There was not a bad word to be found against it in the opinion-forming prints. Its progress to triumph in October (when the Prize is awarded) was, however, stalled (at least in popular opinion) by a devastating review of the book by fellow novelist John Banville, in the New York Review of Books, in May. After a devastatingly sarcastic summary of the narrative, Banville concluded:
Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces – brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. – are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.
There were protests (not least from the chair of the Man-Booker committee, who wrote a letter contradicting Banville’s estimate). Ironically, Saturday did not win the Man-Booker that year. John Banville’s The Sea did.