Sunday, January 23, 2005
A pint of McEwan's... posted by Richard Seymour
I am not, I should stress, a regular reader of Ian McEwan's writing. The emotional tenderness doesn't particularly appeal to me, being the tough and youthful thug that I am. At the same time, the didacticism - which is the only way that McEwan knows how to write about politics - is usually ill-conceived. The Child in Time, widely regarded as McEwan's best, captures both of these aspects of his style. The heroes of McEwan's books are usually liberals fraught with ambiguity, which one imagines is supposed to be the same thing as intellectual suppleness. Didactic ambiguity, then, is McEwan's currency.All of which is a way of introducing a topic visited and revisited on a couple of fine literary blogs I frequent. McEwan has undertaken a political novel of sorts, a story which unfolds over the 24 hours of Saturday, 15th February 2003. It is ambitiously titled Saturday. From the enticing nibbles that have been released to the Guardian, I gather that the novel is framed around the massive Stop the War demonstration that preceded the war. It has a nice chap, a liberal character named Harry Perowne, who knows another nice guy, a liberal Iraqi who tells him "yes yes, the Americans are perhaps coming for bad reasons, but we'll be rid of Saddam, and when he is gone I will buy you a meal" (that's a paraphrase). I knew a couple of Iraqis who had similar sentiments myself, but they didn't offer me any prandial delights. Perowne is a surgeon who has treated an Iraqi with wounds from torture, obviously meted out by Saddam's mukhabarat. He thinks the Stoppers are animated by self-defence (don't start another bloody war, it'll get us all killed!), yet insist on a monopoly of morality and righteousness.
There's much more, but this is the kind of thing that McEwan has been asked about, and has talked at length about, in interviews. Now, the two bloggers I mentioned.
First of all, This Space has written several dissenting posts . He makes some perceptive points. The novel, says This Space, is unconscious of its own narrative limits (why does the good doctor not treat a Colombian torture victim, or an Acehnese torture victim?):
There is no involvement but a supercilious schematic based on a very limited perspective that is also unaware of its limits. However, this is the understanding of what fiction is if one reads reviews in newspapers like The Guardian. Here we have a narrative of complete control where the only doubt is the contemptible liberal umming-and-arring of a character designed to justify the inexcusable open-mindedness to Blair's criminal war by writers like Ian McEwan and other journalists.
He also mentions the author's own moral commitments:
The author of Saturday talks about how, in 2001, he was planning a comic novel about a tabloid journalist. Then 9/11 occurred and he lost interest. He lost interest in the novel and novel writing itself for six or so months. Clearly the deaths of 100,000+ Iraqis didn't have the same impact.
The second blogger is the novelist Ellis Sharp, who has also been anticipating McEwan's latest with a sense of dread . He imagines he'll find Christopher Hitchens between the sheets, which I admit is an alarming prospect (although it has a strange allure for a fantastic pervert like me). Ellis discusses McEwan's political naivete:
Looking ahead to the war and its aftermath, McEwan wrote that he hoped that “the regime, like all dictatorships, rootless in the affections of its people, will crumble like a rotten tooth” – which indeed it did. But he also hoped that a “federal, democratic Iraq that the INC committed itself to at its conference can be helped into existence by the UN”. McEwan had a touchingly naïve faith in the Iraqi National Congress as the voice of the Iraqi people. But of course the United Nations declined to involve itself with either the war or its bloody, chaotic aftermath. His belief that this war had anything at all to do with bringing democracy to the oppressed people of Iraq provides just one more dismal example of the endless naivety of those liberal intellectuals who shut their eyes to the massively documented history of American “interventions” around the world.
Leave aside the political failure, for a second: think of the literary failure. Here is an author in full command of the English language; invective is not beyond him; he ranges across the full diapason of human passion. Yet, he has - from all indications - nothing to say about the deformed crooks, the spies, the former Baathists, the opportunists and the realpolitikers who were instrumental in making the case for this war (I refer to the INC). How about a word or two on the kinds of human beings who populate the Whitehouse or conspire by the Hudson River? Or the smooth persuaders who disseminate whispers, talk to the press, organise this or that speaker for this or that meeting?
By way of contrast, I can't imagine Philip Roth - for all his self-declared cynicism and detachment from the causes of his youth - missing this point. The strength of David Hare's recent work has been his ability to include the voices of his political opponents, and include them eloquently, at their best and most persuasive, without mockery - yet there is no umming or aaaahing. There is no conflict between rigorous self-questioning and absolute ideological commitment. In fact, the two are contiguous.
What appears to be missing is authorial sympathy, for which is substituted ambiguity, liberal bed-wetting, chin-stroking etc.
Of course, I don't suppose I'll bother to buy the book now. I'm prejudiced against it and, like I say, the author has never been in my top ten list. But you might. Let me know if its any good.