Seoulscapade

Saturday is the second McEwan novel I’ve read and for me it suffered from the same thing the first did: the drilling down into minuscule detail of mental processes, beyond which for me is realistic. Perhaps I lead a dull inner life. But that would surprise me to learn.

It was also the tangential excursions, not just of emotions but of the intricate descriptions of surrounds and objects, such as the details of Henry’s cooking that drove me to question their relevance. OK, Henry, the main character, can cook, he is a competent modern man—we get it, we don’t need pages of how he cooks to labour the point.

Character introductions or establishments were forced for me, too contrived, such as descriptions of blues guitar playing that not even most blues players would recognize or jargon filled neurosurgerical procedures. I wonder what blues player would analyze “playing off triplets against two- or four-note clusters.” At least, I never did. The impression is that a lot of the novel has been, well, over-researched, which is fine, but you know it only too keenly.

The family at the centre of the novel is very well-to-do. They are so well off that the son can pursue a career in blues music and the daughter in poetry. Half their luck! Their well-to-do upper-class parents, a lawyer and a brain surgeon, don’t seem to mind having kids bordering on wastrel, which might strike some as very unrealistic. On top of that, offspring with such easy fortune put me off them pretty quick.

Here is a well-balanced family, then, the artists and leaders of society as their parents. Henry, the father and surgeon, is hard on himself for lacking artistic sentiment, but not to outdone he has his own highly lauded craftsmanship. He also good at creating fictions to avoid trouble, so he is not totally devoid of creativity. He appears to be cast as truly a figure of British accomplishment in an age when there seems to be so few of them around.

It didn’t feel so much as Henry’s perceptions of the times as McEwan’s idea of what we should be thinking of them. Against the backdrop of an anti-Iraq war rally, much of it seemed like a modernized rendering around the theme of a “stiff upper lip” or promoting the sentiment British World War II posters used to proclaim: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Spoiler warning: the family encounter their own form of home grown terrorism. But for me the parallelism here of world and local terrorism was too pat. I enjoyed musing, however, that the local terrorist was on the path to becoming a raving lunatic (because of a medical condition), and how that seemed to imply as much of the nature of Islamic terrorists—that is, they are insane.

So, the family, offspring and parents, prevail through their own little war on terror using their collective and superior talents. Then they help the terrorist and give him as much ease as possible. Again, I couldn’t help drawing parallels with what this suggests about the terms of the international drama in the background, a drama that is still going on—the rich Western nations helping to rewire the brains of the poorer (invariably Islamic) troublemakers.

I would never say McEwan wasn’t the master at taking a very simple story and padding it out into a book of many intricacies. It’s happened in both of the books of his I’ve read. But it’s too much padding for me—the scenery in fine detail, the mental process excessively probed. It’s like McEwan was giving film makers every last detail for a film, saving them all the work. This is just not my thing, not in literature: too much served up on a plate, too much like watching a movie.