The Irish writer John Banville called it “ dismayingly bad,” with all “the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set.” Keith Gessen in New York Magazine was only slightly less hostile: “Few contemporary writers are as fixated as McEwan on physical violence yet no one’s prose is less violent than his.”
Saturday was a commercial hit - like most or all of McEwan’s books - but split the critics. The novel’s major climatic scene is absurd: Perowne’s daughter, Daisy, uses poetry to disarm a man, both literally and figuratively, who has invaded the family home. Perowne does a great deal of Blairite hand-wringing over democracy and human rights in the Middle East. Saturday’s protagonist, Henry Perowne, is a forty-eight-year-old neurosurgeon who lives in a sprawling town house off Tottenham Court Road. His 2005 novel, Saturday - set on February 15, 2003, the day a million people marched through London in opposition to the impending war in Iraq - is a case in point. Yet McEwan struggles - badly - when he adopts self-consciously topical themes as his primary subject matter. The novel - a rich, anguished tale of guilt and forgiveness - sold more than 2 million copies and became a BAFTA-winning film starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. His early novels were slick, slender texts that shunned the class-ridden tropes of contemporary English fiction in favor of darker, more Freudian motifs - incest in The Cement Garden (1978), murder and sadomasochism in The Comfort of Strangers (1981).Ītonement, published in 2001, was a landmark moment in the rise of McEwan’s public profile. McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam, and the New Yorker anointed him as “ England’s national author” in 2009. Instead of delivering a literary manifesto in defense of liberal democracy, McEwan ends up revealing his own creative exhaustion and sense of bewilderment at the world. The result is a labored exercise in boomer agitprop. His latest offering, Lessons, is an attempt to track the life story of its fictional protagonist through the turbulence of postwar British and European history. Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most prominent novelists. Review of Lessons: A Novel by Ian McEwan (Knopf, 2022)
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