By recording with such loving care the elements of one rich Englishman's life, Saturday explores the question of to what extent it is possible to insulate yourself against the world's concerns. Saturday catalogues the local only in order to focus on the global.
Here, though, his symmetries seem to have gotten the better of him and his art comes perilously close to stifling life altogether.
In other novels, McEwan has proved more than able at capturing the breathing warmth of life in fiction's cold frame. Overstatement is still overstatement, even when effected with a knowing wink to the reader. And in doing so, they threaten to undermine the very literary immediacy that they champion. The final chapters, with their literal enactment of the notion that the truest poetry is the most feigning, only reiterate what has already been amply, if implicitly, communicated in the course of the novel. Here, though, his control over his material is too pronounced. In Saturday, as in all McEwan's work, there is much to admire in the efficiency and clarity with which he marshals his themes. Here, though, the contemporary setting lends the questions a new moral urgency. In giving us a protagonist so steadfastly hostile to the charms of his own art, McEwan signals a return to some of the questions about the purpose and value of literature that he posed in Atonement. In Saturday, McEwan's new novel, these characteristic virtues of structural elegance and coherence are on prominent display.
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