The Politics of Ian McEwan’s ‘Saturday’

This is a novel which is set entirely on 15 February 2003, the day of the great London anti-war march.

Not a single character in this novel goes on the march.

Although most of them live and work in central London, they are all doing something else that day. The march only exists filtered through the consciousness of Henry Perowne, the brain surgeon protagonist. He catches glimpses of it from a distance. He sees it on the TV news. From time to time he comments on the marchers.

Perowne is off to play squash, and, as a result of the road closures that day, gets involved in a car crash with a sinister thug named Baxter. Henry is “ambivalent” about the war, as a result of knowing an Iraqi torture victim. And this torture victim would not approve of the anti-war march; from his perspective, “Across Europe,, and all around the world, people are gathering to express their preference for peace and torture.” (p. 126) Perowne thinks that “the humanitarian reasons for war” is “the only case worth making” (p. 69). He doesn’t like the anti-war marchers. He thinks they are frivolous. He complains that they are too cheerful:

“All this happiness on display is suspect. Everyone is thrilled to be together on the streets – people are hugging themselves, it seems, as well as each other. If they think – and they could be right – that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.” (pp. 69-70)

Nowhere in ‘Saturday’ is there the perception that the forces pressing for war are precisely the same forces which subsidised, protected and armed the regime which carried out those atrocities. As a novel about politics, history and medicine, it suffers from its own unspoken narrative malady: amnesia.

McEwan dances away from troublesome specifics. We’re told that Perowne has a great relationship with his son and that “They’ve never talked so much before” (p. 34) Among the topics of discussion are “Israel and Palestine, dictators, democracy”. A bit vague, wouldn’t you say? Pleasantly vague. Evasively vague.

Perowne’s squash partner is pro-war and has to abandon his car south of the river and jog to the squash court. Perowne’s wife is a high flying lawyer who is absent all day, tied up at the High Court fighting for press freedom. Alas, the judge (sympathetic to her press freedom argument) is delayed by the demonstration. Perowne’s father-in-law, a famous poet, is flying in from France for a Saturday night family get-together.

Perowne has two fabulously talented kids – so talented you wouldn’t want to receive a Christmas round robin letter from the Perownes, and if you got one you’d want to forward it to Simon Hoggart. Perowne’s daughter, a stunningly talented young poet about to be published by Faber, is flying in from Paris, where she is currently living. Perowne’s son, Theo, a hugely talented 18 year old blues guitarist, is against invading Iraq, but he’s not on the march either:

“His attitude is as strong and pure as his bones and skin. So strong he doesn’t feel much need to go tramping through the streets to make his point.”
(p. 151)

I’m still trying (and failing) to make sense of that fuzzy logic. And I don’t find it remotely plausible that a cool young dude who was passionately against the war and lived just a few hundred metres from the start of the march would think: Nah, I’m not going on it, it’s a complete waste of time.

McEwan does permit an anti-war voice to enter his narrative, on p. 185, when Perowne’s daughter Daisy arrives from Paris and on the way home from the airport stops by at Hyde Park to hear some of the speeches. She and her father proceed to have an argument about the war, with Perowne (sometimes almost verbatim) expressing McEwan’s own published reservations.

Daisy, aged 18, is a tremendous fan of Philip Larkin, who is her favourite poet. “Apparently, not many young women loved Philip Larkin the way she did.” (p. 56) True enough: 18 year old girls probably prefer Snow Patrol to Philip Larkin. But probably not many anti-war protesters were into Larkin either, one suspects, bearing in mind Larkins’ racism, sexism and miserabilist verse which yearns for a fantasy pre-First World War England, mocks and stereotypes the ghastly vulgar working classes and has a gloomy fixation on the inevitability of death (written in his younger days – ironically when he grew old his poetry dried up and he retreated into booze and singing jolly racist chants with his charmless alcoholic lover). As Tom Paulin somewhere remarks, underneath the Larkin monument runs a stinking sewer. But McEwan himself evidently likes Larkin, whose verse is the only copyright material cited in ‘Saturday’.

The argument between father and daughter rages on, until Perowne stops it with a bet:

‘My fifty pounds says three months after the invasion there’ll be a free press in Iraq, and unmonitored Internet access too. The reformers in Iran will be encouraged, those Syrian and Saudi and Libyan potentates will be getting the jitters.’

Daisy says, ‘Fine. And my fifty says it’ll be a mess and even you will wish it never happened.’
(p. 192)

McEwan finished writing ‘Saturday’ in the second half of 2004. This allowed him the wisdom of hindsight. (At one point – p. 151 - there’s a careless reference to “the war in Iraq” – but of course the war hadn’t yet started. What McEwan should have written was “the war ON Iraq” or “war WITH Iraq”.) By fixing Perowne’s bet on the state of affairs in Iraq three months after the invasion, McEwan allows both sides to be at least partly right. Yes, there was a free press! Yes, there was unmonitored Internet access! But, yes, it was a bit of a mess too!

If he’d fixed his bet one year after the invasion, Perowne would have lost and the absurdity of his liberal humanism been glaringly exposed. Just after the fall of Baghdad, polls suggested that Iraqis were evenly divided on whether or not they felt liberated or occupied. By the time the USA pretended to hand over power in the summer of 2004, only 2 per cent of Arab Iraqis supported the occupation. As for the free press – Al Jazeera was booted out by the Vichy regime, anxious to stifle an independent Arab media outlet loathed by the US government.

It’s noticeable that McEwan’s position has shifted from that which he put forward in January 2003. “I was against it,” he now asserts, when asked about the war (interview with Boyd Tonkin, The Independent, 28 January 2005). But of course, “not as passionately as many friends and colleagues.” McEwan now claims that Daisy expresses his anti-war feelings just as much as Perowne embodies his own ambivalence, but Daisy’s assertion that “there’s nothing linking Iraq to nine eleven, or to Al-Qaeda generally, and no really scary evidence of WMD” (p. 191) is at odds with McEwan’s former belief that it did not seem “outlandish, the possibility of Saddam Hussein passing on weapons of mass destruction to the enemy of his enemies.”

In January 2003 McEwan defended Blair from the charge that he was Bush’s poodle and saw him as a committed humanitarian. Disillusionment has evidently now set in. McEwan’s shift of position seems to me to parallel that of Greg Dyke, who confides, “I understand what Gordon Brown means when he says he finds it difficult to believe a word that Blair says, which is odd because I didn’t feel that a year ago when I was forced out. It was the publication last summer of the Butler report which changed everything for me.” (Independent, 28 January 2005, p. 9)

In ‘Saturday’ McEwan twice mocks Blair. There’s a reference to the science of the human smile: “In the smile of a self-conscious liar certain muscle groups in the face are not activated” but “the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.”

Reprising that episode when the protagonist of ‘The Child in Time’ has a surreal encounter with Margaret Thatcher, Perowne remembers a comic encounter with Blair at the opening party for the Tate Modern gallery. Blair, we learn, mistook him for a painter and, when told of his error, saved face by continuing to congratulate him on his artistry. McEwan, I think we can safely conclude, like Greg Dyke, feels very, very let down by Tony and no longer trusts him.

That sense of disappointment is transmitted in the scene where Perowne sees Blair on TV:

“The Prime Minister is giving his Glasgow speech. Perowne touches the control in time to hear him say that the number of marchers today has been exceeded by the number of deaths caused by Saddam. A clever point, the only case to make, but it should have been made from the start. Too late now. After Blix it looks tactical.” (p. 178)

It is characteristic of the narrative that these cloudy sentences are never subjected to irony or sceptical enquiry. In what sense is it “A clever point” or “the only case to make”? Far from being “clever” isn’t it just meaningless? Isn’t it as fatuous as saying something like, “No matter how many people in Britain went to services of remembrance on Holocaust Memorial Day that will still be less than the number of people who died in the death camps!” No mention, either, of the fact that Blair brought forward his speech by several hours, in order to dodge thousands of Scottish demonstrators who were going to march on the venue where he was due to speak.

*

There is nothing in ‘Saturday’ that seems likely seriously to damage McEwan’s popularity with his American readership. The novel is prefaced by a quote from Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog'. Bellow is another liberal realist whose trajectory over the years has been from fiery young lefty to elderly reactionary. Ironically, the language of the Bellow epigraph is far more sparky, animated and stylistically daring than anything in the buttoned-up, over-wrought, mannered prose of ‘Saturday’. At times McEwan’s style is fussily Edwardian. Whereas the average realist novelist would write “at the end of the week he was unusually tired”, McEwan writes “he finished the week in a state of unusual depletion” (p. 5).

The ravages of US foreign policy never feature in Perowne’s consciousness, other than in the vaguest of ways. There are harsh words for torture regimes, but Israel is not included in the list. The nearest thing to criticism is when Daisy says:

‘You hate Saddam, but he’s a creation of the Americans. They backed him, and armed him.’

‘Yes, and the French, and Russians and British did too. A big mistake. The Iraqis were betrayed, especially in 1991 when they were encouraged to rise against the Ba’athists who cut them down. This could be a chance to put that right.’

‘So you’re for the war?’

‘I’m not for any war. But this one could be the lesser evil. In five years time we’ll know.’
(p. 187)

The only American in the novel is Jay Strauss, a big, tough, warm-hearted consultant anaesthetist. A patient, a stroppy black 14 year old girl from Brixton, vexes the hospital staff by her difficult behaviour. She’s a bully. When a nurse is reduced to tears only tough Jay Strauss can deal with the situation. In the face of his tough, firm no-nonsense attitude the girl’s hostility collapses and by the end of the novel, her operation a success, she wants to become a brain surgeon herself. (There’s a sub-text there, oh yes. But you can work it out for yourself.)

Strauss is also a brilliant anaesthetist: “As far as Henry is concerned, Jay is the key to the success of his firm.” (p. 101) Perowne’s ‘firm’ is his team. And this is a novel in part about having a good team spirit. Perowne and Strauss play squash (for 16 pages – a tour de force of narrative description or a bloody tedious read - you decide). They both get ratty about losing, but at work they rise above such petty irritability, as good professionals should. (Team spirit, I’m afraid, always makes me think of that brilliant moment at the end of the movie ‘I’ll Never Forget Whatshisname’ where surly Oliver Reed screams that it was team spirit that gave us the Nazi death camps.)

Strauss is also pro-war: “Iraq is a rotten state, a natural ally of terrorists, bound to cause mischief at some point and may as well be taken out now while the US military is feeling perky after Afghanistan. And by taken out, he insists that he means liberated and democratised. The USA has to atone for its previous disastrous policies – at the very least it owes this to the Iraqi people.” (p. 100)

War for the purest motives, you see – a position not really any different to Perowne’s, even though McEwan terminates this paragraph with the sentence: “Whenever he talks to Jay, Henry finds himself tending towards the anti-war camp.”

“Tending towards” is a revealing way of putting it – this is a mind that seems to flutter towards one political position, then to flutter to its opposite, but in actuality stays firmly lodged in the centre right, aligning itself with the argument that the forthcoming war on Iraq has a sound humanitarian basis and will be good for the Iraqi people. And throughout this novel there is a fastidious disdain for those dimly glimpsed, marginalised 2 million marchers.

A minor character, Rodney Browne, a neurosurgical registrar, is also against the war, but when Jay Strauss “has been holding forth on the necessity of the coming war” Browne is “reluctant to voice his pacifist views for fear of being taken apart”. (p. 248)

But this suggestion of balance is all a sleight of hand. The argument that it might be a war for oil is mentioned only in passing. The thrust of the novel is to make the reader sympathise with Perowne, the decent, hard-working, agonized, ambivalent liberal.

The climax of the novel subverts the pacifism of Daisy and her brother. When Baxter and an associate force their way into the house they force Daisy to strip naked before them. She is threatened with rape. In the face of violence the representatives of civilized decency are themselves forced to resort to violence, and Perowne and Theo end up fighting Baxter and throwing him down the stairs. It’s a parable of sorts. At the height of the terror Perowne hears the police helicopter as it monitors the dispersal of the protesters from Hyde Park. It’s a moment calculated to appeal to Daily Mail readers – police resources taken up by a left-wing demonstration while an affluent middle-class household is broken into by a pair of violent, terrifying working class thugs with knives.

In a twist of fate (one of the many implausible aspects of a supposedly realistic narrative), Perowne is asked to operate on Baxter, who has suffered a serious head injury. Perowne does so, successfully, afterwards deciding that he will decide not to press charges, even though Baxter has broken Perowne’s father-in-law’s nose, slashed Perowne’s expensive Knoll sofa, held a knife to his wife’s throat, and forced his daughter to strip, then threatened her with rape. Perowne represents decency and liberal humanity; Baxter has a rare genetic condition and is biologically doomed – that is punishment enough, he decides.

On his way to the hospital Perowne encounters the cleaning-up operation after the great march:

“the debris has a certain archaeological interest – a Not in My Name with a broken stalk lies among polystyrene cups and abandoned hamburgers and pristine fliers for the British Association of Muslims. On a pile he steps round are a slab of pizza with pineapple slices, beer cans in a tartan motif, a denim jacket, empty milk cartons and three unopened tins of sweetcorn.” (p. 243)

This is the final mention of the march in the novel (which continues for another 36 pages), and it takes us back to Perowne’s encounter with the marchers in Chapter Two:

‘ “Not in My Name” goes past a dozen times. Its cloying self-regard suggests a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice… A placard of one of the organizing groups goes by — the British Association of Muslims. Henry remembers that outfit well. It explained recently in its newspaper that apostasy from Islam was an offence punishable by death.” (p. 72)

Perowne’s final encounter with the detritus of the march reinforces his earlier perception of these gullible, muddle-headed peaceniks as self-centred consumers, enjoying the good life of western capitalism while cheerily aligning themselves with the dark force of Islamic extremism. Perowne, in other words, is right all along. (And for Daily Mail readers there is, I suppose, the added bonus that these lefty anti-war marchers are a scruffy lot who drop tons of litter.)

This is more sleight of hand, of course. Those who take the trouble to travel to central London and march against the war are self-centred consumers. Those who spend that Saturday doing other things like playing squash or shopping or playing their guitars are not self-centred but superior creatures possessed of a more complex inner life.

The final 34 pages of the novel describe Perowne’s operation on Baxter and his return home, where he has sex with his wife for the second time that day and finally goes to sleep. The biggest protest march in British history is simply erased from existence – a non-event, really, remote from the central drama of Henry Perowne’s mind and life.

*

In reality ‘Saturday’ is far less about 15 February 2003 than about 11 September 2001. From his published comments, it appears that McEwan experienced that event as something of a personal trauma. He subscribes to the US-centric ‘world was changed forever by 9/11’ thesis. After 9/11 McEwan abandoned writing fiction for six months. No public event in his writing career had touched him so deeply. The violent death of 3000 people, mostly Americans, was a horror much greater than all those millions upon millions who died from malnutrition, disease, torture, massacre or war in the 27 years of his career as a published writer. But then they died off-camera, and almost none of them were white middle class professionals and they were just statistics, not individuals with life stories that interested the media.

What you don’t get in ‘Saturday’ and what you’ll never get in McEwan’s fiction is the kind of perception of the main character in Iain Banks’s novel ‘Dead Air’ (2002), who comments:

“every twenty-four hours about thirty-four thousand children die in the world from the effects of poverty; from malnutrition and disease, basically. Thirty-four thousand, from a world, a world-society, that could feed and clothe and treat them all, with a workably different allocation of resources. Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that two-thousand eight hundred people died in the Twin Towers, so it’s like that image, that ghastly, grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated twelve times every single fucking day; twenty-four towers, one per hour, throughout each day and night. Full of children.”

McEwan’s trauma was, I suspect, partly the shock of seeing something that was personally important under attack. “From the vantage point of the Brooklyn Heights, we saw Lower Manhattan disappear into dust,” he wrote in The Guardian on 12 September 2001, from the viewpoint of someone familiar with New York. “Yesterday afternoon, for a dreamlike, immeasurable period, the appearance was of total war, and of the world's mightiest empire in ruins.” There was also, perhaps, the disturbing thought that it could so easily have been him on one of those planes, “crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message”.

McEwan complained that the hijackers lacked empathy for their victims:

“If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.” (The Guardian, 15 September 2001)

This is perfectly true. But it is a point that could also be made against members of the US army or RAF bomber pilots.

McEwan asserted that, “The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination.”

In one sense, he was extraordinarily wrong. The hijackers had the perceptions of literary critics. They did not lack imagination. They were interested in symbolism. The pentagon represented the US military war machine and the twin towers represented US commerce. There was an additional cultural spin-off. What the hijackers did by demolishing the twin towers was to mock American cultural hegemony in a curiously deadly way. Suddenly all those cinematic images of New York became an ironic comment on their own complacent self-regard. The twin towers are everywhere in that hegemonic imagery. The re-make of ‘King Kong’, the Hollywood ‘Godzilla’, old episodes of Friends, in innumerable Hollywood movies, Spielberg’s AI, Schwarzenegger’s ‘End of Days’ – the twin towers are always there, somewhere. And, seeing them after 9/11, you can’t help thinking of what is to come. History intrudes on fiction. 9/11 re-imagined the past. It mocked the staple convention of the disaster movie – a good American always, at the last moment, prevents disaster. 9/11 mocked America’s image of the future. Hollywood imagined the twin towers would be there forever. It was wrong. In that most visual of cultures, partly because of the accident of a fine, clear sunlit day, partly because of the presence of a French film crew, 9/11 supplied a visual feast.

‘Saturday’ is a parable of the ideas that McEwan put forward in his two Guardian pieces on 9/11. Perowne’s day begins with him looking out of the window of his central London home and seeing a plane on fire coming in to Heathrow. He wonders if it is another 9/11 style hijacking. That possibility evaporates. Instead a worse, more personal crisis follows later in the day. The knife wielding Baxter and his accomplice who burst in and threaten Perowne, his wife, his daughter, his son, and his father-in-law, represent a version of the 9/11 hijackers. Baxter is like a suicidal terrorist: Perowne identifies him as “a man who believes he has no future and is therefore free of consequences.” (p. 210)

Baxter is, metaphorically, an Arab extremist. His genetic defect is also, arguably, a displaced version of that popular reactionary concept, the criminal gene (which is paralleled by the poverty gene and the homelessness gene, and all those other bogus genes which offer a soothing pseudo-scientific explanation for the consequences of the inequalities of capitalist society).

But what stops a dangerous and dreadful situation – the impending rape of Daisy - is the benign force of the human imagination. Baxter engages in a conversation with his intended victim (a plot device straight out of James Bond – the villain unfolds his fiendish plans but the delay this involves provides a way out of an apparently hopeless situation). He orders her to read from her book of poems. In a state of shock Daisy is able only to recite an old favourite, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Baxter likes it so much he asks her to recite it again, then sobs, ‘It’s beautiful’, adding ‘It makes me think of where I grew up.’ (p. 222) So Baxter, unlike the 9/11 hijackers, does not lack imagination. He is redeemable. He loses all interest in raping Daisy. He isn’t an Arab after all!

The message of the poem ‘Dover Beach’ is also the message of ‘Saturday’. The world is a truly dreadful place full of nastiness and very, very confusing. God is dead. Nothing makes sense any more. Therefore retreat into the personal and ‘be true’ to your lover. Or as Lennon and McCartney put it: All you need is love.

‘Saturday’, is, then, a novel about anxiety. It is in the great tradition of the nineteenth century bourgeois liberal novel, when affluent, talented writers were terrified of the idea that their whole way of life was under threat by dark, destructive forces. Back then the threat was from working-class radicalism. The image of workers gathered together for political purposes sent a shiver down the spine of novelists like George Eliot, whose vision of the proletariat was that of a terrifying mob, a “mass of wild chaotic desires and impulses”. Dickens in ‘Hard Times’ suggested that those who suffered under capitalism should respond with dignified restraint, in heroic isolation. Nothing as vulgar as politics should intrude. Henry James in ‘The Princess Casamassima’ proposed that the major motive of political radicals was envy and suggested that the only decent destiny of a thinking militant was to see through the sham of revolutionary politics and commit suicide. (Thanks, Henry.) The actions of Al-Qaeda have, alas, soured the agreeable quality of suicide as an apt political destiny, and even when liberals with a capital ‘L’ do something so liberal as to empathise with the state of mind of Palestinians who detonate themselves beside Israelis, they quickly find, as Jenny Tonge did, that the liberal – or Liberal - imagination is suddenly a very narrow and slyly calculating one.

Perowne is an anxious man. “He bought Fred Halliday’s book”, we’re told (p. 32) and having read it frets that “the New York attacks precipitated a global crisis that would, if we were lucky, take a hundred years to resolve.” Frightening stuff, eh? Later Perowne convinces himself that the crisis will fade, like all the ones before it. But that still leaves him with lots of other anxieties. But these are the anxieties of an affluent professional enjoying a very agreeable lifestyle. He lives in a large house in central London. He drives a Mercedes which he houses in a nearby mews. He enjoys fine food and wine. What haunts him is the threat of Islamic extremism. He fears another 9/11 style hijacking. He worries about the shoe bomber. He worries that there will be a major terrorist attack on his city. And the problem is ideology, which makes fanatics do terrible things. Perowne concludes (much in the manner of George Eliot): “No more big ideas. The world must improve, if at all, by tiny steps.” (p. 74) Perowne even has an example. The design of kettles has much improved over the years: “The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.” (p. 69)

Perowne is not entirely McEwan. His views on literature are different, and there are various jokes for the literati. Perowne doesn’t like McEwan’s ‘The Child in Time’ or Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’. His poet father-in-law is envious of McEwan’s great friend Craig Raine. He is not well up on his Matthew Arnold. If Perowne has one shortcoming it is that his grasp of literature is weak and he does not read novels with a proper sense of appreciation – an irony which flatters the ego of the reader of ‘Saturday’.

The BBC has treated the publication of ‘Saturday’ as a newsworthy event. A feature on the ‘Today’ programme (February 1st) called it “Ulysses-like”. Well, yes, it’s set on a single day but apart from that it is entirely unlike Joyce’s novel, which is massively radical and ambitious in its language and form. ‘Ulysses’ is a difficult, stubborn, challenging read. ‘Saturday’ is the kind of novel Joyce set out to annihilate. It has solid characters, a suspenseful plot and uses the conventions of realism to portray an affluent middle class social world. As a product it is easy reading, shiny, highly processed. It presents itself (as realism always does) as a transparent window through which to observe a real world. Its artifice and partiality goes as unacknowledged as the shared values of a BBC news team. It emanates the stale authority of omniscience, treating its readers to little nuggets of wisdom. Here’s a good example of the style: “Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air.” (p. 51) The reader is required to nod wisely in agreement at this profundity.

Apparently McEwan wants us to think that Perowne’s fence-sitting on the war is akin to “Hamlet-like indecision” – a cultural analogy which strikes me as preposterous. Hamlet had to decide if the ghost was a demon or a truth-teller, if his father had really been murdered, and whether or not to kill the king – rather substantial personal anxieties, with potentially lethal consequences. Perowne’s banal equivocations about the rights and wrongs of war on Iraq have no personal consequences at all.

Equivocation – having your cake and eating it – is a noticeable narrative strategy in ‘Saturday’. Perowne owns a Mercedes (as does, or did, McEwan – I have a hazy memory of reading some years ago a profile of the novelist which referred to his Mercedes parked in the drive of his Oxford home). Perowne has a memory of seeing his parked car “a hundred yards away, parked at an angle on a rise of the track, picked out in soft light against a backdrop of birch, flowering heather and thunderous black sky” – then adds: “the realisation of an ad man’s vision”. But though the description is lightly mocked, it is not seriously challenged. Seeing his car like this, Perowne experiences “a gentle, swooning joy of possession” (p. 76).

Boyd Tonkin complains that books as a cultural form don’t get enough attention from TV (Independent, 4 February 2005), but he adds:

“On the credit side, an item about Ian McEwan’s ‘Saturday’ made the principal BBC evening news this Monday. This was not because it grabbed a gong or stirred a quarrel or triggered a fatwa, but simply because a world-ranking novelist had brought out a landmark work.”

But I can’t think of anything more characteristic of the news values of the BBC than that it should choose to privilege the publication of ‘Saturday’ as deserving of respectful attention as ‘news’. ‘Saturday’ is ideologically kin to those values. It’s a novel which adopts a reverent attitude to affluence. A Mercedes is a lovely car. Squash is a splendid game. It’s nice to have a big house in central London. A war on Iraq will get rid of a disgusting torture regime.

‘Saturday’ is a novel for liberals who didn’t go on the march (and I have yet to read a review of the novel or hear or watch a discussion of it that engages with the question of whether or not the critic participated in that march. My guess is that probably not a single one of them did.) It’s a bourgeois novel in the sense that it celebrates a bourgeois life style and worries about the threats to that way of life. At the end of the novel Perowne stands at the window, back where his day began:

“A hundred years ago, a middle-aged doctor standing at this window in his silk dressing gown, less than two hours before a winter’s dawn, might have pondered the new century’s future. February 1903. You might envy this Edwardian gent all he didn’t yet know. If he had young boys, he could lose them within a dozen years, at the Somme. And what was their body count, Hitler, Stalin, Mao? Fifty million, a hundred? If you described the hell that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor – an affable product of prosperity and decades of peace – would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of the path to an ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing, and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing. A hundred years to resolve. But this may be an indulgence, an idle, overblown fantasy, a night-thought about a passing disturbance that time and good sense will settle and rearrange.” (pp. 276-7)

As usual, McEwan has his cake and eats it. He equivocates. But these parallel nightmare visions are questionable on other grounds than that the second, twenty-first century one might not come to pass. If the twentieth century was hell, what was the nineteenth century? Paradise? What was the body count of the British Empire? And if Hitler, Stalin and Mao racked up 100 million dead, what about the 17 million who die every year on our planet from disease, malnutrition, filthy water and suchlike? What’s the body count resulting from US foreign policy? If it was hell in the Gulags or the death camps, was it more agreeable being a Kikuyu in Kenya in the 1950s? As for those "zealous men" of the twenty-first century, what is it exactly that makes them "angry"? Perowne is supposed to represent civilised values but one of the many absences from his sensitive conscience is global warming and the link with personal consumption, car driving, air travel and all those other ingredients of an agreeable middle class lifestyle.

But that’s quite enough from me. I finish this week in a state of unusual depletion. I’m off for another listen to that timeless classic, Phil Ochs singing ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal.’