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Review - Saturday
Jun. 12th, 2008 04:11 pmLike my (upcoming) review of Perdido Street Station, this was written as I went along. My mum told me to read this book just so that I've read something of McEwan's work, to get an idea of the East Anglia style -- I was once planning to do the same writing course. We had Saturday, so that was what she handed me.
The first ten pages bored me. Blah, blah, blah, mostly medical procedure, a doctor's life is so busy, blahblahblah -- a scenario I know well as a doctor's daughter, that doesn't really seem to merit ten pages to me. It got old fast in real life; in print, it's even worse. The prose is quite ordinary, and lingers on topics I don't find particularly interesting: pages on pages about medical techniques, a couple of pages about the main character's son's music, a paragraph about the advances in kettles, pages in which the main character denounces the value of stories, half a chapter devoted to a squash game I couldn't care less about...
Despite that, there's something about it that kept me reading. Something vaguely hypnotic. I didn't find it "dazzling... profound and urgent" as the cover promised. I found it dry, plodding, boring, stolid. By seventy-eight pages in, the guy hasn't left his home yet and the most exciting thing is the plane in flames, which is dismissed in about two pages, near the beginning.
Strangely enough, I thought it did pick up near the end. Most of the drama was anti-climatic and sandwiched between pages and pages of irrelevant detail, but I tried to read it with the view that the book is meant to be about an ordinary guy going about his ordinary life. The prose mimics that, and the pages and pages of description enforce it. On the goodreads scale, one star means you didn't like it and two means that it was okay. I'm not sure which this was -- I'm not sure there was much to really like or dislike. The idea could have been interesting, but I'm not sure there's realistically a way to write about an ordinary man going through his mostly ordinary day in a way that keeps someone genuinely interested throughout. The build up was needed so you could care enough about the characters, but all the build up made me bored with them. I definitely don't think this is a "modern classic" or whatever. I don't think it has the strength to last.
I might try something else of this guy's, to see if I like him better when he's not restricting himself to one day of an ordinary guy's life. Any recommendations?
The first ten pages bored me. Blah, blah, blah, mostly medical procedure, a doctor's life is so busy, blahblahblah -- a scenario I know well as a doctor's daughter, that doesn't really seem to merit ten pages to me. It got old fast in real life; in print, it's even worse. The prose is quite ordinary, and lingers on topics I don't find particularly interesting: pages on pages about medical techniques, a couple of pages about the main character's son's music, a paragraph about the advances in kettles, pages in which the main character denounces the value of stories, half a chapter devoted to a squash game I couldn't care less about...
Despite that, there's something about it that kept me reading. Something vaguely hypnotic. I didn't find it "dazzling... profound and urgent" as the cover promised. I found it dry, plodding, boring, stolid. By seventy-eight pages in, the guy hasn't left his home yet and the most exciting thing is the plane in flames, which is dismissed in about two pages, near the beginning.
Strangely enough, I thought it did pick up near the end. Most of the drama was anti-climatic and sandwiched between pages and pages of irrelevant detail, but I tried to read it with the view that the book is meant to be about an ordinary guy going about his ordinary life. The prose mimics that, and the pages and pages of description enforce it. On the goodreads scale, one star means you didn't like it and two means that it was okay. I'm not sure which this was -- I'm not sure there was much to really like or dislike. The idea could have been interesting, but I'm not sure there's realistically a way to write about an ordinary man going through his mostly ordinary day in a way that keeps someone genuinely interested throughout. The build up was needed so you could care enough about the characters, but all the build up made me bored with them. I definitely don't think this is a "modern classic" or whatever. I don't think it has the strength to last.
I might try something else of this guy's, to see if I like him better when he's not restricting himself to one day of an ordinary guy's life. Any recommendations?
