I’m not sure what to make of this book…
It’s a magnificent day in the life story, full of incredible & passionate detail. It has a main character who is trying hard to reconcile the mundane realities of his life with the aspirations of his children and the people around him.
It’s filled with glorious observations on the little things in life — the small, minute fixations that occupy us all from time to time. It’s full of moments that are provocative, sexual, idealistic, terrifying, and meditative.
It’s also eeriely perscient of events to come, ranging from the American quagmire in occupied Iraq to the bombing of London — no small feat, considering the novel was written just before the event actually happened.
But it’s also full of things that irritated me. The character of Baxter, his men, his personality…it’s some strange throwback to 1950s English thugs that doesn’t speak to any part of me. In fact, it borders on caricature — as if they escape from a poor B-movie.
Which leads to problem number two: the hostage-confrontation at the climax of the book. I’m not sure if it reduces the book to soap opera or American bog-standard drama — the stuff of CSI and Law & Order. Either way you look at it, it just feels —and reads as — very out of place.
The digressions also left me ambivalent. While nothing like the info-dumping nightmare that is The DaVinci Code, they tend to go off on tagents that draw you away from the main thrust of the story. It’s as if Ian McEwan is trying to shove a number of family short stories into his novel…and the competing thrusts tend to hurt the flow of the book.
Saturday is a worthwhile read, full of worthy & fascinating, spectacular & probing observations, but it tends to make the reader work too hard to get to all the good stuff. It’s worth the paperback purchase, but it’s not a patch on his previous, magnificent opus, Atonement.
