Word: mcewan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Saturday By Ian McEwan 238 pages
...Harvard Book Store-sponsored talk at the Brattle Theatre on April 1, McEwan placed the book in a long line of such novels-in-a-day, mentioning—among others—Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. These are bold comparisons indeed, and McEwan’s work falls a long way short of both Woolf’s and Joyce’s. In Saturday, McEwan is attempting to paint a very big picture on a very small canvas: a portrait of post-Sept. 11 England on the brink of war with Iraq, conveyed through the daily interactions...
Recounting a breakfast conversation between Perowne and his blues-musician son Theo, McEwan writes...
Similarly McEwan tries to avoid any need to flesh out Theo’s character by implying that his real self is found in his music. But this too fails in a puzzlingly flat description of one of his band’s rehearsals. Even Baxter is dull in the peril he presents. He has little power over the Perownes and is too erratic and crudely drawn to seem menacing as opposed to merely unpleasant. Perowne is solid if not especially likable but does not provide enough of a solid center to forgive the weak sketches that surround...
...important to emphasize that Saturday is not a slight misstep for McEwan but an almost complete failure. The stultifying prose surrounding his time in the surgery, the flimsiness of the characters, and the dull pacing of the narrative itself—unable to create real suspense surrounding even the most extreme of scenarios—conspire to sink Saturday like a lead balloon. It is perhaps no wonder then that McEwan was testy at his reading, snapping at the audience’s admittedly fatuous questions and reading a lengthy segment spanning each of the novel?...