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Saturday is a long day for neurosurgeon Henry Perowne and his family, one fraught with the distant threat of the impending Iraq war and the closer-to-home threat of Baxter, a mentally unstable man whom Henry collides with in his car and, later, in his home. McEwan employed a similar strategy of exploding one life-changing day into a novel in On Chesil Beach, which I loved. Maybe I was in the wrong mood this time around, but I found the level of detail monotonous and I sympathized more with Baxter, whose world is crashing down around him, than with the privileged Perowne family, who are mostly just unnerved by the IDEA of the world crashing down. In making Henry's daughter a poet, I think McEwan is trying to say something about the intricate interplay of medicine and imagination, fact and possibility. But as neurology novels go, I much prefer Richard Powers' The Echo Maker.
A list of things that both Henry Perowne and I did last Saturday:
1. Played squash
2. Cooked mussels
3. Scratched the side of our cars
4. Spent an above average amount of time looking at neuroimaging
As always, Ian McEwan delivers, in his unmistakable painstaking way. I think Ian McEwan is some sort of guilty pleasure for me - guilty not because he's trash but because he's so pretentious and literary.
Shout out to Queens Square; the reason for point (4) above, the reason I read this, and the best eight weeks of my education.
1. Played squash
2. Cooked mussels
3. Scratched the side of our cars
4. Spent an above average amount of time looking at neuroimaging
As always, Ian McEwan delivers, in his unmistakable painstaking way. I think Ian McEwan is some sort of guilty pleasure for me - guilty not because he's trash but because he's so pretentious and literary.
Shout out to Queens Square; the reason for point (4) above, the reason I read this, and the best eight weeks of my education.
Saturday earns 2 stars from me because the last 50 pages or so were decent. However, that is not a compliment, for if McEwan had not redeemed the book with those pages, it would most assuredly have been a 1-star experience. Also to be clear, reaching that decent (not good, just decent) portion of the book was a trying time stretched out over 3 weeks when a normal book of 289 pages would take a couple of days for me. I certainly cannot recommend it to anyone else, and I now hesitate to try out McEwan's acclaimed work Atonement simply out of sheer terror of the possibility that it might involve having to revisit this writing style and characters like Henry Perowne and his family.
You know what, despite my natural generosity with reviews maybe this should be a 1-star.
You know what, despite my natural generosity with reviews maybe this should be a 1-star.
reflective
medium-paced
Deeply corny. Mediocre epistemology dressed up as conscious politics.
dark
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
There were few pleasures for me in this quite ridiculous story but it did confirm my view that McEuan's novels are indeed as absurd as I had suspected after reading Enduring Love. I found the sections about neurosurgery interesting and well researched and the writing was elegant enough to encourage me to finish it even though I was tired of the continual air of menace that hung over the story from the beginning.
Read it in a couple of hours, another fab Ian McEwan book.
adventurous
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Very well-written, eloquent and insightful. From that line of English books where much of the pleasure of the reading is in the writing, the story taking its time to coalesce on the page.