One of the (shamefully few) novels I read last year was Ian McEwen’s Saturday. It’s about a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a successful, London-based neurosurgeon whose life is briefly threatened by a brush with the violent underworld of his chosen city.

I read it on holiday, in more or less a single sitting (one night when I had trouble sleeping), and thought it excellent. I had bought it on the recommendation of a philosopher friend, who has good taste in fiction. In an email exchange about the book, he wrote:

In class, I happened to be discussing Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, when I read the McEwan book. Epicurus’ ethics is basically very simple:

1. the most important thing that keeps us from living a good life is fear;
2. the best antidote against fear is knowledge.

So to live a good life, the first thing we have to do is to learn about the world. For example, we are afraid of the thunder, but when we know what a thunderstorm is (Epicurus suggests an explanation – he was one of the atomists) we lose that fear; we are afraid of death, but when we understand what death is…, etc.

I think McEwan’s Saturday basically articulates a modern version of Epicurean ethics. The science is not Epicurus’ atomistic physics, but neuroscience. The fear is provoked not by thunder, but by an airplane in trouble at night, by an intruder (with a neurological disorder), the neurologist knows what the disorder is, etc.

Which seems to me to be spot on. In the first encounter with the violent thug Baxter, for example, Perowne is saved from a serious beating because he recognises that the thug is displaying symptoms of a serious degenerative disease — Huntington’s chorea — and fraudulently raises the possibility that he might be able to help his assailant.

The novel has a somewhat pat ending with the hero living happily ever after and the baddie in even more trouble than he was before, but up to then I had found it an intriguing read.

What took me aback was the vehemence of people’s responses to the book. Whenever I mentioned it to friends, the reactions were very sharply polarised. People either admired the novel, or loathed it. There seemed to be no middle ground. And when they loathed it, it was with a special kind of intensity, the product (I inferred) or moral disapproval. They thought that the book reeked of complacency, ostentatiousness and self-indulgence of a particularly despicable kind.

Many critics mentioned a savage review of the book by John Banville in the New York Review of Books. I’m an NYRB subscriber, but I couldn’t find the issue in which the review appeared (May 26, 2005) in the chaos of my study. And, annoyingly, the review was not available online at the NYRB website. I made a resolution to dig it out in the University Library one day, but you know what these resolutions are like…

This morning, however, I began to sort out some of the chaos in my room and came on the missing issue, hidden in some papers I had taken with me on holiday. So I sat down and read Banville’s review. It is indeed very critical. Saturday, he writes,

is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces — brain operations, the squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. 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 politics of the book is [sic] 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…

Miaow! Lots more in the same vein.

It’s a very hostile review. So what? Isn’t this what highbrow magazines are for? Well, yes. But there is a nice twist to this case. Shortly after the review was published, Banville and McEwen were both shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize — and Banville’s novel, The Sea was declared the winner the following month. I’m sure the eminent judges were not, er, swayed in any way by his savaging of McEwen. But it does show what a snake-pit the literary life can be.

… died unexpectedly this afternoon in a Dublin hospital. He was the nearest thing to Chekhov that Ireland has ever produced. Had he lived, he might have been in line for the Nobel Prize. His last book, Memoir, is a moving, unflinching examination of his childhood. The Guardian has a nice obit.

Memo from KPMG to George W. Bush concerning their audit of his political capital account. Excerpt:

1. We’re having trouble reconciling assets and liabilities (we ran the numbers three times and still couldn’t come up with the positive balance you reported). Do you have a single person responsible for managing this account we might talk to? Is it still Mr. Rove?

2. We think you may have overstated earnings in November 2004. While assets may be depressed due to “market panic,” it seems unlikely they will recover to 2004 levels. And frankly, it’s time to write off some, such as Social Security reform, that have been “under water” for a while now.

3. Anticipated income from specific investments can no longer be reported before it has been fully realized (so called “mark-to-market” accounting). Can you clarify whether the earnings you claimed in 2003 and 2004 from your Iraq holdings—”Spreading democracy in the Middle East” and “Restoring U.S. prestige”— actually occurred? If not, can they be reasonably anticipated before 2009? (Please note, after that date they cannot accrue to this account.)

4. We have moved some assets to the liability column (Mr. Claude Allen, Ms. H. Meirs). Others appear highly troubled (e.g., the Medicare Drug Benefit, Donald Rumsfeld) and may need to be revalued or reorganized…

Nice spoof, by David Atkins.

One of the few good things about tidying up on a Sunday morning is that it gives one an excuse to read old newspapers before they go for recycling. I’ve just come on this gem that I’d missed — Annie Proulx’s acute account of what the Oscars hoopla is like from the inside. (She wrote the story on which Brokeback Montain is based.) Sample:

The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver….

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Now there’s a woman who knows her Winnie the Pooh.

And while we’re on that subject, tech publisher Tim O’Reilly runs wonderful conferences called “FOO camps” (FOO = “Friends of O’Reilly”). Someone from Disney heard about them, and organised an analogous one for Disney staff. They called it a “POOH camp”, naturally.

Nice rant in today’s New York Times…

There is a decision pending within the bowels of the federal government that may be the single most incomprehensibly wrongheaded decision of the century.

It’s small when compared with Iraq, but it’s still maddening. It involves allowing passengers to talk on their cellphones while they are in flight. Now, as everyone who has the misfortune to fly commercially knows, air travel today is mind-bogglingly uncomfortable. The seats are small. The flights are nearly always full to overflowing. The food is unspeakable. The air is fetid and filled with germs. Many a time I board an airliner hale and hearty, only to emerge with a raging pneumonia.

But there is one saving grace. Unless you are seated behind or next to really rude people — which happens surprisingly rarely — air travel is fairly quiet. Yes, the flight attendants stand around and talk. Yes, before the plane takes off people scream into their cellphones, but along about three hours into the flight from, say, Kennedy to LAX, it’s pretty peaceful.

That’s solely because passengers can’t use cellphones aloft. That prohibition was one of the great decisions ever. Now, in a fit of idiocy, some airlines are suggesting that they be allowed to sell the use of cellphones in the air at nominal prices. This will mean yelling and screaming and boasting and complaining for almost all the time you’re sealed in that sardine can. The government is apparently planning to allow this anarchy.

This is Quentin’s new friend. He met him yesterday at the summit of Table Mountain in South Africa — from where he (naturally) sent me an email.

A photograph of Quentin, who is in South Africa installing Ndiyo systems. Cape Town’s in the background. I do not recall any order for a marine installation (he said, enviously). Humph!

This is interesting — as significant in its way as the original Demon Internet precedent. From Guardian Unlimited…

A landmark legal ruling ordering a woman to pay £10,000 in damages for defamatory comments posted on an internet chatroom site could trigger a rush of similar lawsuits, a leading libel lawyer warned today.

Michael Smith, a Ukip activist who stood for the Portsmouth North seat last year, became the first person to win damages yesterday after being accused of being a “sex offender” and “racist blogger” on a Yahoo! discussion site.

Mr Smith, 53, from Fareham in Hampshire, sued Tracy Williams, of Oldham, for comments posted after she joined a rightwing online forum in 2002.

Judge Alistair MacDuff said in the high court that Ms Williams was “particularly abusive” and “her statements demonstrated that … she had no intention of stopping her libellous and defamatory behaviour”.

The judge ordered Ms Williams never again to repeat the “unfounded” defamatory remarks, which included calling Mr Smith a “nonce” and accusing him of sexual harassment.

Although ISPs have paid out for hosting defamatory comments, this case is thought to be the first time an individual has been found to have committed libel on a internet chat site.