Ian McEwan, Saturday and pretentious writing

Why I hate Ian McEwan and other pretentious, post-modern writers

When set the task of reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday in late 2009 as part of our Critical Reading module I didn’t know what to expect. I was rather naive at that point of what I would call “pretentious literature’ - my reading experience in the previous year led me to read authors I hadn’t known before but that came from recommendations from friends. In this way I was introduced to such greats as Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and Donna Tartt. I therefore presumed and hoped, especially giving the gratuitous reviews, that this book from the author of ‘Atonement’ would at least give me some level of enjoyment, of escapism, of relation to character, of feeling my heartbeat increase as the pace and pages of the novel went by (which are my own personal definitions of what makes a book readable). However, it did not. What it did give me was a bitter after taste that has still to leave my literary palate. Reading ‘Saturday’ was one of the most torturous experiences of my life, and I’ve had four teeth out at once. What made it even more irritating were the fawning reviews on the front: “Dazzling...profound and urgent’ (The Observer), “Ian McEwan has triumphantly developed into a writer of outstanding subtly and substance...” (Sunday Times) and “Ian McEwan is one of the greatest masters of our time and Saturday is a brilliant feat” (Die Ziet). A brilliant feat of what, Die Ziet doesn’t say but boredom and pretentiousness as well as egotism comes to mind. So before you even read the first page you have all this hype surrounding it but, eager to read on, you gradually begin to wonder, as the pages painfully hobble by, whether the cover of the book had been replaced at some point and you are in fact reading “A detailed day in the life of a Neurosurgeon with extra surgical details and a recipe on how to make Bouillabaisse.” That is basically the unofficial blurb minus the original clichés that McEwan has thrown in; the artistic rebellious daughter Daisy who is political and writes poems about her politics and bla bla yawn bla. Then the jazz musician son, Theo, who is also so talented and artistic, and let us not forget Baxter (named after the rather delightful brand of soup perhaps?) the sufferer of Huntington’s disease who is thwarted in his attempts to rape Daisy not by a violent struggle, or even a tricky conundrum but by her reading lines from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach.’ The words stun him into letting her go. I’m surprised that the police have never taken up McEwan’s advice and issued copies of ‘In Flander’s Field’ or ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ instead of giving out those useless rape alarms, Wordsworth’s the way forward obviously. I’d imagine McEwan wanted to show the power of art defeating barbarism but instead he paints a ludicrous and absurd scene, destroying any chance of tension or drama whatsoever.  I’m sure if this was submitted as a creative piece it would have the words cliché or absurd scrawled all over it in that dreaded red ink, perhaps even underlined with one or more exclamation marks.

It is obvious that McEwan is acting on his desire to write a book commenting on recent-ish events in Iraq as well as alluding to the first post-modern novels of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway. Fair enough. Not the way I write, but you could possibly write a novel of interest set in 24 hours in the life of one man - after all, the television series 24 does this admirably. But not McEwan. It seems he got so involved in researching neurosurgery that he forgot he was actually writing a novel for people to read and, supposedly, enjoy. The obsessive and microscopic detail of a neurosurgeon’s life leaves you wondering whether McEwan discovered during his research that writing was not his real vocation in life; perhaps he became jealous of the neurosurgeon's world and in Saturday he wrote his ideal life for himself. We can never know.

Another thing that also grates me about Saturday is the egotistical, condescending tone and style of McEwan. It isn’t a book that makes you happy or cheerful but a book that tries to make you feel that this is how you should act and think and inspire to be. For the critics and the people who liked it (believe me there are some!) I guess this effect worked. For the rest of us however, we trudged through the pages as the infantry did at Passchendaele and the Somme, arriving at the end exhausted and disenfranchised.

It’s the tedious details and repetitions in this novel that really grind down your soul, the squash game that lasts 10 pages and feels like 100. The minute details that add nothing to the story, the plot, even the general ambiance of the piece but just remind you of the rave reviews on the front and back and make you think whether they actually reviewed the same book as the one you’re reading. As an amazon reviewer sums up perfectly:

“It takes the hero the first seventy pages of the book to wake up in the middle of the night, go back to bed, have a quickie with the wife, go back to sleep and eventually get up and get out of the house! Well, draw your own conclusions.”   

McEwan started as a short story writer and there he should have stayed. The world of full length novels is not for him I think, or writing in general to be honest unless it’s an essay on neurosurgery. He fails to grasp, and sadly so do a lot of post-modern writers, what the point of writing a novel actually is. You’re writing a story. Not a minute by minute account of a man’s movements and thoughts. It doesn’t matter whether you haven’t memorised a thesaurus, or worry that you haven’t described every tiny detail and thought - think back to those stories that you love. That you come back to again and again. I’m sure you go back to them because they possess the key qualities of the real novel; of escapism, relation to character, beauty of language, flow of words and dialogue. This is what a real piece of literature should possess; forget the hidden meanings, the multi-layers of intertextuality. Writing isn’t a process of how many other pieces of work you can reference; you write for the reader and for yourself, not to show off your intelligence or please a few critics. Leave the analysis and so called “hidden meanings” to critics and English literature students. As creative writers our job is to create, to entertain, to satisfy ourselves and those who can really get immersed in the worlds that we create and want to be in them. Wherever they are set, a sense of adventure, of the unknown, of personalities should transcend all genres and all styles of writing, leaving you with the core and everlasting attributes of the true masterpiece. The main lesson we can learn from Saturday therefore is simply how not to write if you want to create something that will stand the test of time.