When Saturday came (continued)

Socialist Resistance no23 | page 23-24

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

with a variety of uncertainties and anxieties. Reflecting the author's outsider's view, in the novel the march is always "over there" at some distance, a homogenous illdefined mass. A character permanently off-stage with no direct engagement.

I sensed that McEwan feared the march's militancy, favouring a questioning of the invasion that doesn't rock the establishment. An impossibility, as Clare Short conference after the Falklands/Malvinas war -"Saturday" successfully uses global political convulsions to highlight an individual's dilemmas in relating to an unstable world.

There are advantages to a story that is ambivalent and distanced, yet which brings the war and global opposition into close focus. This is hardly the approach favoured by the Bush/Blair camp that yearns to just "move on".

When millions mobilise there has to be room for neurotic neurosurgeons and their creators. Watch out for them on March 19!

page 24 of the scan

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