![]() ![]() ![]() Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong if Tony Blair-who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity-were to appoint a committee to produce a ‘novel for our time,’ the result would surely be something like this. ![]() There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks’ home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The numerous set pieces-brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.-are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. “Something of the kind seems to have happened here. ![]()
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