Saturday
Anchor - Anchor
Release date: 2006-04-11
Paperback
Author: Ian McEwan
Mcewan, Ian - Prose & Criticism, Fiction, Fiction - General, Literary, Fiction / General
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Saturday
Date undefinedPass on this one, unless you wished to be bored to a new state of existence...not a pleasant one, to be sure...Worthless trivel is the mainstay of this novel...based on a stream of consciousness, it in no way approaches literary merit...Faulkner, this is not...For your own sense of well being, find another book to read...There is essentially no plot, no action, no theme, no story...Caveat emptor!!!
Saturday
Date undefinedThis book is sooo good on many levels. The author did research for this character, the descriptions of neurosurgey were particularly fascinating for me, but also the interior thoughtlife of the doctor contemplating his life and the events of the times (the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003). This is a novel I want to make several friends read. It is very well-written and thought-provoking.
Saturday
Date undefinedI liked Ian McEwan's Saturday partly because of its focus on the mind-body relation. The main character, Dr. Perowne, is a materialist -- there's nothing more to a mind than a brain.
Perowne regards three persons through this reductionist lens:
1. Perowne's alcoholic father-in-law, a complicated poet whose foibles grow predictably from the effects of alcohol on the brain;
2. Perowne's mother, who suffers from dementia; the sections about her are the most profound in the book, focusing on the pathos and tragic affront when a good and caring person is deleted by brute, neural wiring malfunctions; and
3. Baxter, the intelligent thug; the issue here is the conflict between, on the one hand, our natural moral indignation at the heinous crimes of a free person and, on the other hand, the picture of the criminal as an unfree victim of his own gnarled neural wiring. (Shades here of philosopher Wifrid Sellars' contrast between the Manifest Image [our common, everyday sense of ourselves and others as free and responsible persons] and the Scientific Image [in which those persons dissolve into amoral atom-swarms].)
The main weakness of the novel is its plot, which seems implausible and jury-rigged in places, as if McEwan had notebooks full of good passages and riffs that he was itching to publish and just threw together any old narrative in which to embed them. Still, there's some great writing in Saturday.
