God Spare me Ian McEwan

I sat through a bleak New Year's Day in the National Theatre, enduring Alan Bennet'sThe History Boys. Some funny moments but sloppy directing, some emotional drivel, in some weird bywater of current affairs, and yet one more hymn to the virtues of repressed homosexuality. Yet another gay hero as martyr, give us a break. Terence Rattigan did that stuff truly well ... revive those for us, but write us something new. If a writer still sees being gay as something to deal with, then work it out in private then bring a fully realized work to the stage

Of course it's won the best play of the year awards. Richard Griffiths has won best actor. I like the guy, and maybe he had a bang-up New year's Eve so was below par, but what a tired performance it was.

Yesterday I read Ian McEwan's new novel Saturday. Reviews are great and it's already the hottest ticket for the Booker. Well count me out. I enjoyed early McEwan, and Amsterdam was a tight little romp, but the man's in another camp to me. He seems to be writing out his early marriage still. Separation was bitter and the former wife is a doyenne of the New Age. McEwan's work sometimes glimmers around that whole area (Black Dog the most obvious case in point) but increasingly pushes his work the other way, as though that was the only choice. In writing terms, he appears to be claiming tha science is where the true mysteries lie and a 'literary imagination' is a way not of revealing life but of avoiding it. He's done great work on researching neurosurgery which feeds through well, and clearly stands as his metaphor for real life as against the stuff found in fiction. He's set himself firmly against magical realism in this book, as voiced by his lead character. The plot grows nasty (not surprising) and fanciful, spinning on a doctor's appraisal of early onset Huntington's in his assailant. Taut but barely credible. You like squash? Like, love it? Then you may enjoy the technical feat of pages and pages of a squash game.

It's set on the Saturday of the march against war on Iraq. Millions go one way, McEwan smugly goes another. For me, the march was a joyful stream of people power even if it had no immediate effect. It was empowering. What a fine subject for a novel. How miserably McEwan sidelines it. His character knows the horrors inside Iraq better than anyone else, knows the truth of Saddam's rule, and presumes all the marchers are acting out of ignorance. Well excuse me, but the level of knowledge of the agonies of Iraq was profound and heartbreaking. The stuff of real art if an artist cares to use it. Blair served his own aims by badmouthing those good people and their intentions. Why does McEwan need to leap on that perverted bandwaggon by setting his book on this day? Arrogance, I guess.

The warped aspect of McEwan's imagination, that intrigued me as an adolescent when I first read his short stories, is still there, still warped, still adolescent. Heard the one about the beautiful sensitive girl forced to strip naked at knifepoint by intruders while her family looks on? Well read it again here. Why not deploy a sick middle-aged sexual fantasy when you find it lurking. People will get off on it. This is a clever, twisted little book. I suppose it will run off with all those prizes.

So I guess I am at odds with English culture. A part that is still great though is our underused library service. My copy of Saturday is now back on my local library's shelf. Next on my borrowing list is Candas Jane Dorsey's A Paradigm of Earth - a fine book, an American book, so much not a McEwan book that it's got aliens. Phew.