{"id":1200,"date":"2005-08-02T19:01:36","date_gmt":"2005-08-02T19:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2005\/08\/saturday_1\/"},"modified":"2005-08-02T19:01:36","modified_gmt":"2005-08-02T19:01:36","slug":"saturday_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/saturday_1\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=friday05-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0224072994&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000ff&#038;bc1=ffffff&#038;npa=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;IS1=1&#038;f=ifr&#038;bg1=ffffff\" width=\"120\" height=\"240\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" align=\"right\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\nI&#8217;ve only read a handful of McEwan&#8217;s previous books. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0099272776\">Amsterdam<\/a> won the Booker a few years back, and I&#8217;ve never quite understood why, since it has no really likeable characters. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/000388.html\">Enduring Love<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0099429799\">Atonement<\/a> are far superior &#8211; pleasurable books.<br \/>\nSo along comes Saturday, which had vast swathes of press devoted it to it back at the start of the year when it was published. It&#8217;s set against a backdrop of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/000167.html\">Stop the War protests<\/a> of 15 February 2003.<br \/>\nWe follow the day through the eyes of Henry Perowne, a neuro-surgeon, and his family. Things go wrong when he has a car accident with the &#8220;wrong sort of person&#8221; in the morning. And you just know that things are going to catch up with him later in the day.<br \/>\nI found the first half of the book a little slow, with extended sequences describing a game of squash for example, but it&#8217;s undoubtedly exquisitely written, and things certainly do hot up later in the day. The fact that it&#8217;s set against the protests is reasonably relevant to the plot, but far from essential, and I suppose the backdrop might have been better used. It seems unlikely to me that anybody would have attempted to drive around central London that day.<br \/>\nA very worthwhile McEwan, but not quite as good as his best, and I say that as someone who&#8217;s very aware that he&#8217;s not read the earlier works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve only read a handful of McEwan&#8217;s previous books. Amsterdam won the Booker a few years back, and I&#8217;ve never quite understood why, since it has no really likeable characters. Enduring Love and Atonement are far superior &#8211; pleasurable books. So along comes Saturday, which had vast swathes of press devoted it to it back [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}