A New Atheist Novel

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Ian McEwan’S Saturday as a New Atheist Novel? A Claim Revisited
Article · April 2012

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IAN MCEWAN’S SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL?
A CLAIM REVISITED
Abstract: In the first decade of the 21st century, atheism has seen a renaissance as
a result of a series of bestselling publications by authors such as Sam Harris, Chris-
topher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which advance atheism as a social and po-
litical force. These publications have been subsumed under the term “New Athe-
ism”. In the course of its wide public reception, New Atheism has also had
repercussions on contemporary English literature. Especially, Ian McEwan’s novel
Saturday has been reviewed as New Atheism cast into fiction. This article re-exam-
ines this claim. After discussing McEwan’s relationship with New Atheism and
contextualizing Saturday as a New Atheist novel, a close reading of two passages
will be offered. The analysis of these passages will demonstrate that Saturday, in
spite of McEwan’s affiliation with New Atheism, construes a much more complex,
even conflicting worldview and is as much a New Atheist novel as it is the decon-
struction of it.
1. WHAT IS NEW ATHEISM?
At the beginning of the film satire The Invention of Lying by the British
comedian Ricky Gervais,1 the protagonist Mark Bellison conceives the
possibility of not saying the truth. Living in a world without lies, this no-
tion gives him incredible power. He manipulates people in numerous ways
but also manages to comfort his dying mother by telling her about a hea-
ven-like afterlife. Immediately, word spreads that Bellison is a prophet.
Soon enough Bellison is forced to share his purported knowledge. In an
emblematic scene reminiscent of traditional depictions of Moses, Bellison
holds up two pizza hut boxes on which he has written ten rules which he
claims to have received from what he calls the “Man in the Sky”. As a
consequence of his claim, people start building houses where they worship
this “Man in the Sky”. Rites are invented, theological debates start, orga-
nised religion comes into being.
This mildly funny satire would not be of interest for the concern of this
article if it was not a piece of popular culture reworking a number of
propositions recently voiced by writers that have been categorized as New
Atheists. Most importantly, New Atheist writers have defined religion ne-
gatively, i.e. as lacking a base in reality. As it is also implied in the The
Invention of Lying, religion is considered a delusion and a manipulative
force.
1
Cf. Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson, The Invention of Lying (London: Uni-
versal Pictures UK, 2009).
DOI 10.1515/ang-2012-0003
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96 JOHANNES WALLY
The beginning of the New Atheist movement is usually marked five

years prior to the release of The Invention of Lying. In 2004, Sam Harris
published The End of Faith.2 This book was the first of a series of bestsel-
ling publications which constitute the foundation of a movement which
has become known as New Atheism. Harris’ publication was followed by
Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell,3 Richard Dawkins’ The God Delu-
sion4 and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great.5 In 2007, Victor Ste-
ger published God. The Failed Hypothesis,6 which is also often counted
among the foundational works of New Atheism. The term itself was
coined by the journalist Gary Wolf and, functioning as a recognizable trade-
mark, has helped promote the movement;7 and public reception has
been remarkable indeed. The publications have been widely received and
discussed in feature pages and various internet fora and the authors have
been invited to panel discussions, talk shows and lecture halls. Most re-
markably, New Atheism has developed from an Anglo-Saxon, mainly
American phenomenon to a global debate which has also reached the Ger-
man speaking world. In 2005, Michael Schmidt-Salomon published Das
Manifest des evolutionären Humanismus8 and has since made numerous
public appearances advocating an evolutionary atheism. His book Jenseits
von Gut und Böse9 overtly partakes in the New Atheist discourse, draw-
ing, among other things, on Richard Dawkins’ meme-theory. Since 2004,
New Atheist publications have inspired more than 500 non-fictional book
publications, either denouncing or supporting the New Atheist move-
ment.10
New Atheism is not a unified system of thought. In fact, the New Athe-
ist pamphlets are as different as their authors’ backgrounds in terms of
2
Cf. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
(New York: Norton, 2004).
3
Cf. Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(London: Allan Lane, 2006).
4
Cf. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006; London: Black Swan, 2007).
5
Cf. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(2007; London: Atlantic Books, 2008).
6
Cf. Victor Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis (New York: Prometheus Books,
2007).
7
Cf. Gary Wolf, “The Church of the Non-Believers”, Wired 14.11 23 Oct. 2006.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2010, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/
atheism.html>.
8
Cf. Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Manifest des evolutinären Humanismus: Plä-
doyer für eine zeitgemäße Leitkultur, 2nd, rev. ed. (Aschaffenburg: Alibri,
2006).
9
Cf. Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 5th, rev. ed. (Mün-
chen: Pendo, 2010).
10
Cf. Thomas Zenk, Literaturliste zum Diskursfeld „Neuer Atheismus“ (Stand
April 2010). Accessed 4 Oct. 2010, <http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/relwiss/
lehrende/lehrstuhl_zinser/zenk/index.html>.

IAN MCEWAN’S SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL? 97
their ideological bent. However, what unifies New Atheism, apart from
the concerted media appearances of its proponents, is a common goal.
New Atheism is committed to advancing a scientific atheism as a social
and political force. Consequently, (empirical) science is granted an eminent
position in the New Atheist campaign and the authors actively solicit their
atheism. Their argumentation is openly hostile towards religion in general,
which is viewed as harbouring outdated and essentially harmful ideas, and
construes an irreconcilable dichotomy between a scientific or rational
worldview and a religious or irrational worldview.11
The hostility of the New Atheists towards religion is commonly viewed
as a reaction to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing rise of religious influ-
ence in global politics.12 Primary targets of New Atheist criticism have
consequently been Islam and Christianity. In order to reach as many peo-
ple as possible and thus avert the threat of religious radicalisation, New
Atheist authors have resorted to rendering their arguments in short, unam-
biguous messages. New Atheist argumentation thus tends to be provoca-
tive and reductive.
New Atheism has been much criticized for this reductionism by theists
and atheists alike. In a fusion of both positions, Terry Eagleton produced
one of the fiercest counter-polemics. In his analysis of The God Delusion
he suggested that Dawkins’ writing on theology was akin to “someone
holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book
of British Birds”.13
However, New Atheism has also found ardent supporters. In particular,
New Atheist ideas have been positively received and incorporated in con-
temporary English literature. This might seem surprising, since New Athe-
ism mostly argues from a science point of view. But New Atheism, especially
as advanced by the late Christopher Hitchens, has expressed considerable
interest in art, especially in literature. This interest in literature has been
attributed to the movement’s potential to create its own mythology, whose
core ingredient is the idea that human beings have the capacity to under-
stand and “transcend [their] genetic origins”.14 This story of the liberation
11
Cf. Harris 2004, 16: “It is only because the church has been politically hobbled
in the West that anyone can afford to think this way [i.e. believe that religion
and science are complementary]. In places where scholars can still be stoned to
death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould’s notion of a ‘loving con-
cordat’ between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.” In this quote,
Harris refers to the scientist Stephen Jay Gould, who claimed to believe in a
respectful if not loving concordat between science and religion. Cf. Stephen Jay
Gould, “Non-Overlapping Magisterial”, Natural History Mar. (1997): 16–22.
12
Cf. Arthur Bradley & Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philoso-
phy and Polemic after 9/11. New Directions in Religion and Literature (London:
Continuum International, 2010) 5.
13
Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Failing and Mispunching”, London Review of Books
19 Oct. 2006: 32–34, 32.
14
Bradley & Tate 2010, 8.

98 JOHANNES WALLY
of humanity from mythology turns New Atheism into a story of enlight-

enment, with evolutionary biology as source and explanation of human
existence.
Alongside Martin Amis, Philip Pullman and Salmon Rushdie, Ian
McEwan has become considered a leading exponent of the literary section
of New Atheism. His catchphrase “sky-god”, used in various interviews
and lectures in order to refer to the object of people’s faith,15 even seems
to have left its mark on the formulation “Man in the Sky” in The Inven-
tion of Lying. Especially his novel Saturday, with its post-9/11 setting and
its bias towards a biological, materialist worldview, has been viewed as a
vehicle of New Atheist ideas.
In this article, I will re-examine this evaluation of Saturday. In fact, I
will argue that the novel is as much a New Atheist manifesto as it is its
deconstruction. Such an argument might not seem particularly intellec-
tually challenging: after all, it is something of a commonplace notion that
a piece of fiction is always more multi-layered than the ideological posi-
tions it is informed by. However, the fact that Saturday has been received
as New Atheism cast into fiction renders a re-examination necessary. By
the close reading of two passages I hope to demonstrate how complex,
not to say conflicting, the novel’s philosophical subtexts are, thereby ade-
quately mirroring the diverse and sometimes conflicting schools of thought
underlying New Atheism. In particular, I hope to demonstrate that the
epistemological assumption as laid down in the opening scene of Saturday
is one that differs substantially from that informing New Atheist writings.
2. CONTEXTUALISING SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL
2.1. MCEWAN AND THE NEW ATHEIST MOVEMENT
Ian McEwan has been called the “New Atheist novelist par excellence”.16
This claim requires some modification, be it only that McEwan’s first dis-
cussion of so called New Atheist ideas anticipated the emergence of the
movement by twelve years. His novel Black Dogs, first published in
1992,17 centres on two former British communists who turn to different
epistemological models after resigning from the party: one turns to some
sort of religious mysticism and the other to science. By placing a conflict
between religion and science at its core, the novel forestalls a stock theme
of New Atheism.
15
Cf. for instance Ian McEwan, “End of the World Blues”, The Portable Atheist:
Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. Selected and with Introductions by
Christopher Hitchens, ed. Christopher Hitchens (London: Da Capo, 2007) 351–
365, 360.
16
17
Cf. Ian McEwan, Black Dogs (1992; London: Vintage, 1998).

If McEwan can thus be considered a forerunner of New Atheism, one
needs nonetheless to be aware that his development as an author has not
happened in an intellectual void. In fact, McEwan has been associating
with authors that were later to become figureheads of the New Atheist
movement since the beginning of his career as a writer. In the late 1970s,
McEwan became part of the ‘Friday-Lunch group’, a loose group of jour-
nalists, writers and intellectuals grouped around the novelist Martin Amis
and the journalist Christopher Hitchens. The group would meet regularly
in order to lunch, drink, daff and discuss literature and politics. As one
can infer from Hitchens’ autobiography Hitch 22,18 McEwan built lasting
friendships with Amis and Hitchens. Although he never embraced an out-
spoken Marxist stance as, for instance, Hitchens did at the beginning of
his career, he soon abandoned his vague entanglement with New Age phi-
losophy in favour of an interest in science. His novels, as Christopher
Hitchens approvingly comments, “are almost always patrolling some diffi-
cult frontier between the speculative and the unseen and the ways in
which material reality reimposes itself”.19
The close personal ties between McEwan, Hitchens, Amis, and other
New Atheists have caused the scholars Bradley and Tate to call McEwan
acidly “a fully paid up member of the Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and
Harris mutual appreciation society”.20 This claim seems to be corrobo-
rated by the numerous statements supporting an atheist worldview which
McEwan has made since 9/11. Among others, he appeared on Richard
Dawkins’ television documentary The Root of All Evil?, first broadcast in
the UK on Channel 4 in January 2006, and contributed the essay “End of
the World Blues” to Christopher Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist,21 who in
turn dedicated his pamphlet God Is Not Great to him.22 Along the same
lines, one can find McEwan’s approving references on the covers of Hitch-
ens’ autobiography and of Sam Harris’ recent book The Moral Land-
scape.23
In the light of McEwan’s willingness to support New Atheism in public,
it is not surprising that his recent novels, especially Saturday, have been
read as extensions of his non-fictional statements.24 Before analysing this
specific reception of Saturday, it is, however, worthwhile taking a look at
18
Cf. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2010).
19
Hitchens 2010, 176.
20
21
Cf. Hitchens, Christopher, ed., The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the
Non-Believer. Selected and with Introductions by Christopher Hitchens (Cam-
bridge: Da Capo, 2007).
22
Cf. also Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason & the War on
Religion (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2007) 157.
23
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (New York: Free Press, 2010).
24
Cf. for instance David Impasto, “Secular Sabbath: Unbelief in Ian McEwan’s
Fiction”, Commonweal Magazine 136.18 (2009): 14–19; cf. also Beattie 2007,
159f.

100 JOHANNES WALLY
the major arguments which McEwan has brought forward in his essayistic
and novelistic oeuvre and which have earned him a reputation as a New
Atheist novelist. As we will see, the concepts lying at the core of these
texts might seem perplexing when related to what is often perceived of as
an atheist stance. They revolve around the notions of ‘love’ and ‘empathy’
and their inversion ‘narcissism’ and ‘solipsism’.
2.2. EMPATHY AS THE BEGINNING OF MORALITY AND THE DANGER OF

“GETTING EVERYTHING COMPLETELY WRONG”
In the emotional and meanwhile much quoted essay “Only Love and then
Oblivion”,25 published three days after the attacks on the World Trade
Center, McEwan spelled out what, at that time, his most recent novel Ato-
nement had already rehearsed thoroughly, albeit with a particular focus
on fiction: that the core of ethics lies with a person’s capacity for empa-
thy, their ability to “imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of
[others]”. This capacity is “the core of humanity”, “the beginning of mor-
ality”. As the essay argues, the hijackers of the planes purged themselves
of all feelings of compassion and were thus capable of committing their
crime. “Fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanized
hatred” made them overcome “the human instinct for empathy”.26
Atonement places a negative version of this claim at its core, as it tells
the story of an interpersonal catastrophe brought about by misguided ima-
gination and the ensuing misinterpretation of reality. It is crucial to notice
whose imagination is misguided, or flawed enough respectively, to cause a
misinterpretation with such disastrous consequences. It is the child-self of
Briony, the narrator of this fictitious autobiography, a budding writer at
the verge of puberty, who realizes that she needs to abandon the orderly
world of fairy tales in favour of the intricacies of the novel.27 Nonetheless,
her “instinct of order [is] powerful” and does not vanish with a poetologi-
cal insight.28 She accuses the wrong person of raping her cousin Lola and
later testifies to her accusation, even though she has no proof. Yet, she
has the knowledge, which unfolds to her “in an instant”.29 Without hav-
ing to contemplate evidence she “[understands] completely”,30 as if
granted the grace of a religious revelation.
25
Ian McEwan, “Only Love and then Oblivion: Love Was All They Had to Set
Against Their Murderers”, The Guardian 15 Sept. 2001. Accessed 29 June
2010. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/15/
september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2>.
26
McEwan 2001, online.
27
Cf. Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001; London: Vintage, 2002) 39–42.
28
McEwan 2002, 41.
29
McEwan 2002, 164.
30
McEwan 2002, 164.

Briony’s crime has a name: narcissism, “the ordering of the world in
line with your needs”, as Henry Perowne, the protagonist of McEwan’s
next novel Saturday, calls it.31 In the light of McEwan’s essay, “remark-
able parallels” between Mohammed Atta and pubertal Briony become
visible.32 They essentially commit the same crime, namely clinging to a
solipsistic, static worldview in which a notion once believed to be true can
never be altered, not even by evidence pointing to a different conclusion.
Given the parallels between a religiously motivated terrorist and an ado-
lescent writer, it is no coincidence that Lola’s rape and Briony’s false in-
sight are staged in the immediate vicinity of the island’s temple, which is
described as yearning “for a grand and invisible presence”,33 which “be-
stows a faintly religious ambience” on it.34 As a site of a dreadful mis-
interpretation of reality the temple becomes much more than just some
innocent architectural asset included in order to increase the tellability of
Briony’s story. It is a comment on Briony’s narcissism, which, as we have
seen before, mirrors religious narcissism. That there is an intrinsic connec-
tion between the temple, a (mock) religious symbol, and Briony’s episte-
mological flaw is corroborated a hundred pages later when Briony ago-
nises over the question whether her testimony was right after all.
Although she claimed to have seen the rapist, she feels that her “seeing”
was “more like knowing”.35 However, afraid to displease the adults, who
with the exception of two happily believe her accusations, she never re-
vokes her testimony and thus finds herself in a predicament comparable
to that of a person who has lost their faith but is nevertheless forced to
proclaim it: “An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first
certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the
altar”.36 Through this metaphor, the approximation between narcissism
and religion, which was suggested at the level of story a few pages earlier,
is reinforced at the level of discourse. As we shall see, the temple will re-
cur as a metaphor of religious delusion in Saturday.
The essay “Only Love and then Oblivion” was published around the
same time when Atonement was first critically reviewed.37 One can pre-
sume that the essay was informed by notions that were on McEwan’s
mind when writing Atonement. However, the problem of decoding the
world correctly, and thus the danger of possibly “getting everything com-
31
Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005; London: Vintage, 2006) 17.
32
Bradley and Tate 2010, 24.
33
McEwan 2002, 72.
34
McEwan 2002, 73.
35
McEwan 2002, 170.
36
McEwan 2002, 170.
37
The first review enlisted on McEwan’s homepage was published on September
12, 2001 in The Times (Russel Celyn Jones, “A Fiction Triumphant and Tra-
gic”, The Times 12 Sept. 2001; quoted as on <http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/
books/atonement.html>, accessed on 7 January 2011).

102 JOHANNES WALLY
pletely wrong”38 is not a peculiarity of Atonement or “Only Love and

then Oblivion”. Rather, it has been a central theme of McEwan’s writing,
which at one point in his career was extended to comprise the relationship
between religion and science.39
If the connection between misinterpreting the world and religious
thought is alluded to in Atonement only subtly, the novel Enduring Love
ties a dangerous misinterpretation of the world to religion, in this case to
a New Age version of Christianity, much more overtly.40 Like Briony in
Atonement and, albeit for different reasons, Henry Perowne in Saturday,
Jed Parry too fails to understand that his view of the world might not be
the only one possible. The Clérambault’s syndrome, which Jed suffers
from, makes his perception subject to an overtly pathological kind of so-
lipsism, and thus epistemological circularity. He, too, starts out with a
conclusion and reads any kind of evidence as pointing to what has already
been concluded.
According to New Atheism, epistemological circularity is typical of a
religious worldview,41 which in turn is seen as belonging to the infancy of
human kind.42 In the essay “End of the World Blues”, which McEwan
contributed to Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist, McEwan again takes up
questions of a troubled epistemology and gives them a further, darker
twist. “End of the World Blues” is a reflection on various apocalyptic
trends. Although McEwan briefly comments on secular apocalyptic fanta-
sies, which he locates in Soviet communism and Nationalsocialism, the
major part of his essay is devoted to Christian and Islamic apocalyptic
prophecies. To McEwan, “apocalyptic faith is a function of faith – that
luminous inner conviction that needs no recourse to evidence”43 and that
has, especially in the form of organised religion, always had “a troubled
relationship with curiosity” and consequently with reality.44 Underneath
38
McEwan 2002, 39.
39
A scene in McEwan’s early novel The Comfort of Strangers might serve as a
case in point. In this scene Mary and Colin try to find an adequate map of the
city they are visiting. However, none of those available serve their purpose. They
either show too few or too many details and consequently offer no orientation
[cf. Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers (1981; New York: Anchor, 1994)
20f.]. For a more in depth analysis of empathy in McEwan’s later work cf. Hel-
ga Schwalm, “Figures of Authorship, Empathy & the Ethics of Narrative: (Mis-)
Re-presentation in Ian McEwan’s Later Fiction”, Ian McEwan: Art and Politics,
ed. Pascal Nicklas (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009) 173–185.
40
Cf. Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1997; London et al: Vintage, 2004).
41
Cf. Harris 2004, 26.
42
Cf. for instance Hitchens 2008, 64: “[Religion] comes from the bawling and
fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable
demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile
needs)”.
43
McEwan 2007, 353.
44
McEwan 2007, 359.

concepts of a collective undoing of humanity lies the human “need of a
plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things”.45
What begins must come to an end. Tying one’s own undoing to a collec-
tive demise brought about by a superior being seems to meet this narrative
need. By seeing a narrative structure where there is none, the religious
mind, the essay insinuates, commits the same crime as Briony, the afore-
mentioned “ordering of the world in line with your needs”. Consequently,
“End of the World Blues” constitutes the provisional terminal of a train
of thoughts that has dominated McEwan’s work and, after September 11,
has become more overtly anti-religious. It is, of course, not without irony
that McEwan, by warning his audience of a collective demise brought
about by the apocalyptic beliefs of religious splinter groups, paints an
apocalyptic scenario, too.
2.3. SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL
Saturday, too, is set in an apocalyptic, post-9/11 world, where, as one

reviewer put it, “the prevailing public mood has come to closely resemble
that of an Ian McEwan novel”.46 The novel takes place in London on
15 February 2003 and deploys Perowne as focaliser. With its adherence
to a predominantly figural point of view and its temporal and spatial
reduction, the novel reworks modernist canonical texts, the most obvious
references being Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s
Ulysses.47 More than just a game enacted for the literary educated, these
references tie in with the novel’s modernist preoccupation with the mind
or brain, respectively, and the novel’s attempt to find a literary expres-
sion for consciousness arising from matter.48 This preoccupation is cru-
cial to the novel’s structure and is varied at the level of story, for in-
stance in the protagonist’s profession or in the antagonist’s disease, as
well as at the level of discourse, for instance in the use of the present
tense as narrative tense. Echoing the modernist stream of consciousness
technique, the present tense creates the illusion that readers witness Per-
owne’s thoughts as they are unfolding. However, the use of present tense
also serves a further function. It adds a documentary-like quality to the
novel and stresses the actuality of its political context. As a result, the
novel echoes much of McEwan’s non-fictional post-9/11 writing themati-
45
McEwan 2007, 357.
46
Theo Tait, “A Rational Diagnosis”, Times Literary Supplement 11 Feb. 2005,
21–22, 22.
47
Cf. for example Sebastian Groes, “Ian McEwan and the Modernist Conscious-
ness of the City in Saturday”, Ian McEwan. Contemporary Critical Perspectives,
ed. Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2009) 99–114, 104ff.
48
Cf. Dominic Head, Ian McEwan, Contemporary British Novelists (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2007) 192f.

104 JOHANNES WALLY
cally and stylistically.49 This has impacted on the novel’s reception. Stuck
with Perowne’s thoughts, which at times tend to resemble McEwan’s,
many critics have conflated Henry Perowne with Ian McEwan and, as al-
ready mentioned, read Saturday as McEwan’s ideological manifesto cast
into a piece of fiction. This interpretation is all the more tempting, since
Perowne shows many parallels with his creator:
No assumption is less safe than that an author’s thoughts are his characters’
thoughts … However, one does not have to know very much about the author
to realize that Perowne has Ian McEwan’s wife, Ian McEwan’s parents, a repre-
sentative cross-section of Ian McEwan’s children and stepchildren, and also Ian
McEwan’s house.50
If Christopher Hitchens – who at the point of writing this review was not
yet known as one of the four New Atheist ‘horsemen’ – approved of Sa-
turday’s ideological implications, many reviewers, especially in hindsight,
have not.
According to Tina Beattie, feminist theologian and critic of the New
Atheist movement, Saturday could have been a “deeply ironic book” or a
“profoundly unsettling existential novel”.51 However, according to her, it
is neither since the novel’s protagonist is a bore. As Beattie argues, Per-
owne is a good study of the “new atheist temperament”;52 and this, one
might want to add, is not meant as a compliment. To Beattie’s eyes, Per-
owne comes across as a rather “dull and unadventurous Englishman”,53
reminiscent of Terry Eagleton’s description of Richard Dawkins in Eagle-
ton’s notorious review of The God Delusion. Eagleton says of Dawkins
that his views are those of “a readily identifiable kind of English middle-
class liberal rationalist”, to whose “brisk, bloodless rationality” Foucault
or psychoanalysis would be just as distasteful as “the virgin birth”.54
Although an intelligent book, Saturday, Beattie suggests, is about as inter-
esting as a materialist manifesto gets.
A similar line of argumentation is pursued by the critic David Impasto.
Impasto summarises Saturday as a novel of (bad) ideas offering the reader
“a day in the life of a New Atheist Everyman”.55 The orderly world of
the Perowne family, freed from religious superstition, offers a glance at
what, according to New Atheism, humanity’s happy future could be like,
once the world is liberated from religion and guided by science. “Satur-
49
Cf. Christopher Hitchens, “Civilization and its Malcontents”, The Atlantic
2005.4. Accessed 30 December 2010, <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2005/04/civilization-and-its-malcontents/3841/>
50
Hitchens 2005, online.
51
Beattie 2007, 159f.
52
Beattie 2007, 160.
53
Beattie 2007, 160.
54
Eagleton 2006, 33.
55
Impasto 2009, 15.

day”, as Impasto concludes, “can be read as a narrative encapsulation of
this creed”.56
A more complex take on Saturday is offered by Bradley and Tate.57
Although they share Impasto’s view that Saturday further develops
McEwan’s notion that there is a continuum between religious faith and
neuropathology, they also concede that Saturday offers room for transcen-
dence, albeit secular transcendence.58 In their brilliant analysis, the
authors show how much Saturday ties in with McEwan’s belief in the re-
demptive power of art, especially literature. As has been argued above,
this belief mirrors McEwan’s fascination with ‘other minds’ and is by no
means free of doubt. One only needs to turn to McEwan’s previous novel
Atonement to find clear evidence pointing to the assumption that the fab-
ulating mind motivated by literary ambition is just as dangerous as the
knowing gaze of the believer. As Bradley and Tate argue, the childish,
narcissistic genius of Atonement in Saturday is personified by John Gram-
maticus, Perowne’s father in law, whom the authors characterise as a
“male Briony Tallis with a drink problem”.59 However, for all the scepti-
cism one does indeed find in Saturday, there are multiple instances in the
novel where art emerges as a surrogate for religion, or, less specifically,
for a transcendence based on seemingly otherworldly experiences. To
Henry Perowne, who is a literary philistine, music is the prime medium of
deliverance, the last justifiable utopia:
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter
than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely
collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy
and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what
we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give
everything you have to others, but lose nothing. Out in the real world there
exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts re-
solved, happiness for everyone, for ever – mirages for which people are prepared
to die and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Isla-
mic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actu-
ally lift on this dream community, and it’s tantalizingly conjured, before fading
away with the last notes.60
If music can, in a sense, fill “a God-shaped hole”,61 its power is neverthe-
less confined to the duration of its performance. Literature, however, of-
fers a more lasting deliverance. This is suggested by the novel’s ending,
when Baxtor is transformed from “a potential rapist to a poetry lover”.62
56
Impasto 2009, 15.
57
Cf. Bradley & Tate 2010, 27–34.
58
Cf. Bradley & Tate 2010, 31.
59
60
McEwan 2006, 171f.
61
62

106 JOHANNES WALLY
With this ending, Saturday takes up the central theme of Atonement but
takes it a bit further: in Saturday, the notion of redemptive power of lit-
erature is fully developed. Consequently, Bradley and Tate conclude their
discussion of Saturday with the observation that this novel constitutes
“the fragile profession of faith in the supernatural power of literature it-
self”.63
This is indeed a very strong argument for reading Saturday as a New
Atheist novel. As was indicated above, New Atheist authors have ex-
pressed considerable interest in art, especially in literature. This has mainly
to do with the alleged capacity of literature to serve “as a source of ethical
reflection and as a mirror in which to see our human dilemmas re-
flected”.64 Saturday, with its celebration of neurosurgery and literature,
can indeed be read as a complex ethical reflection on the social functions
of science and literature.
3. SCEPTICISM AND CONTRADICTORINESS IN SATURDAY:

A CLOSE READING OF TWO PASSAGES
3.1. THE STORY OF ROSALIND’S EMANCIPATION:

AN EXAMPLE OF NEW ATHEIST SUBTEXTS IN SATURDAY
Towards the end of Part I of Saturday, Perowne, lying in bed nestled up

against his wife, remembers his courtship of Rosalind: Young Rosalind,
the daughter of the famous poet John Grammaticus, has suddenly begun
to lose her eyesight while studying in the law department library at Uni-
versity College and has thus come to the hospital where young Perowne is
working. The reason for her diminishing vision is soon established. Young
Rosalind has a tumour on her pituitary gland and the haemorrhage
around the tumour is pressing on her optic nerves, thereby causing loss of
sight. Rosalind is operated and recovers. Perowne, who has fallen in love
with her and was watching over her while she was sick, woos her. How-
ever, as he goes about this business, he encounters a new problem. Young
Rosalind’s isolation is not “confined to the neurological ward”, rather it
is a general condition which equals “distrust of life”.65 As Perowne is to
find out, Rosalind’s sense of self is deeply influenced by the continuous
presence of her dead mother, who was run over by “a drunk jumping
traffic lights” three years earlier.66 This accident has caused Rosalind to
live in the constant presence of her mother, who is “not so much grieved
for, but continually addressed”.67 Henry Perowne realizes that in order to
63
64
Hitchens 2007, xxiv.
65
McEwan 2006, 46.
66
McEwan 2006, 46.
67
McEwan 2006, 46.

“earn the trust of the daughter he [will] have to know and like everything
about the mother. This ghost [will] have to be courted too”.68
This embedded story is interesting for several reasons. First of all, giv-
ing the story of Perowne’s courtship serves to characterise the intimate
bond between Perowne and Rosalind and thus constitutes an important
backdrop against which the full scale of Baxter’s attack can be appre-
ciated.
Secondly, Rosalind’s incapability of letting go of her dead mother con-
stitutes a variation of the motif of the troubled mother-daughter relation-
ship, which has been analysed by early feminist criticism. Young Rosalind
is shown in total identification with her mother, who died as the victim of
a – if statistics are to be trusted – presumably male driver. As Adrianne
Rich, whose Poem “Sibling Mysteries”69 McEwan quotes as epigraph to
his early novel The Comfort of Strangers, has argued, daughters hold the
desire to free themselves from their mother’s bondage in order to become
individuated and free. This, however, results in “Matrophobia …, a wo-
manly splitting of the self”.70 As “the mother stands for the victim in our-
selves, the unfree women, the martyr”, daughters, afraid that their person-
alities conflate with those of their mothers, “perform radical surgery”.71
In the case of Rosalind, the knowledge of her mother being a victim has
had the opposite although equally pathological effect. Instead of perform-
ing radical surgery between herself and her mother, she performs surgery
between herself and the world, seeking counselling and friendship with
someone who lives only, as the novel suggests, as a projection of her
thoughts.
Thirdly, and most importantly for our discussion, the psychological di-
mension of this subplot mirrors the philosophical implications of Saturday
as a New Atheist novel. In his Die Zukunft einer Illusion, Sigmund Freud
defined religious belief as an illusion rooted in the terrifying impression of
helplessness which every person endures during their childhood.72 By ima-
gining a heavenly father, believers manage to incorporate the infantile
wish for security, justice and everlasting life into their adult lives and thus
evade the shattering insight of their true helplessness and insignificance.
Freud calls religion an ‘illusion’ rather than an ‘error’, arguing that the
crucial difference between these two concepts is that an illusion is derived
from a wish, whereas an error is not. Thus, Aristotle’s belief that vermin
are developed out of dung is an error, whereas the nationalistic idea that
68
McEwan 2006, 46.
69
Cf. Adrianne Rich, “Sibling Mysteries”, The Dream of a Common Language
(New York: Norton, 1978) 47–52.
70
Adrianne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
(London: Virago, 1977) 235.
71
Rich 1977, 235.
72
Cf. Sigmund Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1927; Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1993).

108 JOHANNES WALLY
only the Indo-Germanic race is capable of civilisation is an illusion. More-

over, illusions might not necessarily be false. A middle-class girl hoping
for a prince to marry her might see her illusion turn into reality. This is,
however, not the case with the illusion called religion. Freud views religion
as linked to an infantile neurosis. As an infantile neurosis can be sur-
mounted, so can religion. The cure of this collective neurosis is secularisa-
tion, men’s growing to maturity.
Freud’s explanation of religion constitutes a cardinal point of New
Atheist argumentation and the idea that religion is an infantile illusion can
be found in various variations throughout New Atheist discourse. As was
indicated above, Christopher Hitchens directly takes up Freud’s idea and
links religion to an infantile misrepresentation of the world, and the ques-
tion, asked in Die Zukunft einer Illusion, of whether the wish for a more
powerful, everlasting father is an illusion or a delusion provides a promi-
nent point of reference for Richard Dawkins bestseller The God Delusion.
Rosalind is characterised as remaining in silent contact with an “imagin-
ary intimate”.73 A similar formulation can also be found in Sam Harris’
book Letter to a Christian Nation, when he dismisses praying as talking
to “an imaginary friend”.74 With regard to McEwan’s writing, Rosalind’s
“imaginary friend” echoes the solipsistic worldview imputed to narcissism,
be it infantile or religiously motivated, which readers already know from
Atonement. Rosalind’s solipsism is, however, presented much more sym-
pathetically than Briony’s, almost along the lines of the notorious Marx-
ian quote of religion being “das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt”.75 One can
speculate that living in the presence of her dead mother is a kind of com-
fort to Rosalind; a comfort, though, which comes at a price. Rosalind is
shown to be afraid of intimate bonds with other people and her reclusive-
ness comes to a point where Perowne understands that “he [is] in a com-
petition”.76 In the end, Perowne wins, although his victory requires effort
on the part of Rosalind: “It was not easy for her. To love him she had to
begin to relinquish her constant friend, her mother”.77
In the light of Die Zukunft einer Illusion and the repercussions this text
has had in New Atheist discourse, it becomes evident that Rosalind’s story
is an allegory with a clear morale: The prerequisite to happiness in this
world is to realise that there is only this world and no imaginary friend. If
you need someone to take care of you, you had better find them among
your fellow human beings. With its ideological implications, Rosalind’s
73
McEwan 2006, 47.
74
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to the Faith of America
(2006; London: Bantam, 2007) 52.
75
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie.
Einleitung”, 1844, Marx. Engels. Werke, 43 Vols. (Berlin: Dietz, 1976) 1: 378–
391, 378.
76
McEwan 2006, 47.
77
McEwan 2006, 47.

emancipation from her “imaginary intimate” also alludes to a core postu-
late of Marxism: “Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks
des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks. Die Forderung, die
Illusionen über einen Zustand aufzugeben, ist die Forderung, einen Zu-
stand aufzugeben, der der Illusionen bedarf”.78 Or as the notorious anar-
chist Emma Goldman put it: “How far man will be able to find his rela-
tion to his fellows will depend entirely upon how much he can outgrow
his dependence upon God”.79
These Marxist and anarchist echoes in Perowne’s thoughts on his wife’s
coming of age are quite remarkable since Saturday is anything but a
pamphlet of leftist politics. Perowne might show himself to be annoyed
with the Chinese state for “giving philosophical materialism a bad
name”,80 but his overall outlook on political and social issues is utterly
conservative. He thoroughly appreciates private property – an apprecia-
tion which underpins the choice of his car, a silver Mercedes S500, as well
as his feelings for Rosalind, which are described in terms of “possession,
belonging, repetition”81 – and at one point concludes that capitalism is
the only cure for religious fundamentalism:
It isn’t rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shop-
ping and all that it entails – jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment
to realisable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next.
Rather shop than pray.82
This mix of two seemingly contradicting alliances – capitalism and Marx-
ism – is not Perowne’s idiosyncratic take on politics. It adequately cap-
tures that of the New Atheists. Although only Christopher Hitchens
openly supported the war in Iraq, all New Atheist writers have been ac-
cused of indirectly backing neo-liberal policy, especially with regard to
foreign policy.83 In particular, critics have pointed out that the mono-cau-
sal claim that religion lies at the core of the world’s suffering has helped
obfuscate the socio-economic reasons that have given rise to religious fun-
damentalism. Richard Dawkins’ identification of the Israeli-Palestine war
78
Marx und Engels 1976, 379, original emphasis.
79
Emma Goldmann, “The Philosophy of Atheism”, 1916, The Portable Atheist:
Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. Selected and with Introductions by
Christopher Hitchens, ed. Christopher Hitchens (London: Da Capo, 2007) 129–
133, 130.
80
McEwan 2006, 129.
81
McEwan 2006, 40.
82
McEwan 2006, 126.
83
Cf. among others Terry Eagleton, “The Liberal Supremacists”, The Guardian
25 April 2009a: 34; Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections
on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009b); Robert Wright, “Why the
‘New Atheists’ Are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy”, The Huffington Post 13 July
2009. Accessed 13 July 2010, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-wright/
why-the-new-atheists-are_b_230448.html>.

110 JOHANNES WALLY
as a religious conflict may serve as a case in point. Although Dawkins

objected to the war in Iraq, his argument nonetheless fuelled into the de-
piction of Muslims being obsessed by “this irrational, quasi-autonomous
force known as religion”.84
This right-wing affiliation of New Atheism is indeed ironic, given
George Bush’s open commitment to the United Methodist Church and his
religiously tinted rhetoric.85 To Terry Eagleton this alliance, however,
does not seem all that puzzling. It is an indication of the crisis of liberal-
ism which reached its peak in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. This de-
velopment is comprehensible: if one perceives of oneself as a liberal, how
is one to react to those who despise and attack one’s liberalism? Tolerate
them? Moreover, as Eagleton, argues, advanced capitalism, the economic
flip coin of liberalism, is inherently faithless, as ardent convictions might
get in the way of the all-encompassing dictate to shop. Hence, “[t]he ag-
nosticism peddled by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as sub-
versive stuff is part of late capitalism’s everyday routine”.86 New Atheism
and Bush’s religiosity share a common ground: their economic basis. Be-
sides, as one might want to add, like capitalism, “[a]theism has little in-
trinsic ideological bent”.87
Whether or not one agrees with Eagleton or Wright, is of no impor-
tance for our discussion; although it is tempting to allow oneself a little
sociocritical leeway and ponder on whether Perowne would have been as
convinced an atheist had McEwan conceived him as a less privileged char-
acter, say, as one of those job seekers in the economically deprived North-
East of England, where the unemployment rate has been up to three times
higher than in the South.88 What is, however, of importance is to see that
this seemingly marginal episode in Saturday comprises core assumptions
of New Atheism, including all its ideological contradictions. That young
Rosalind is depicted as addressing a dead mother and not a dead father as
an imaginary friend goes to the credit of McEwan being a fine novelist,
and only among other things a person with pronounced ideas about the
world. After all, this character constellation runs counter to the Judeo-
Christian trope of God being a father. Consequently, the ideological allu-
sions are implied rather than stated explicitly. Hence, this scene is open to
other interpretations too, for instance in terms of the feminist undertone
which I have referred to and in the light of which much of McEwan’s
84
Wright 2009, online.
85
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Bush called the war on terror a
“crusade”, thus implying a religious motivation. Cf. interview with George
Bush, 16 Sept. 2001. Transcript at <http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.
gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html>, accessed 6 January 2011.
86
Eagleton 2009b, 34.
87
Wright 2009, online.
88
Cf. for instance ONS, Local Unemployment Statistics 29 October 2010,
<http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=16067>, accessed January 2011.

work has been discussed.89 Nevertheless, the New Atheist dimension of
this episode is unambiguous, much more so than in the scene we shall
turn to now.
3.2. THE OPENING SCENE OF SATURDAY:

A DECONSTRUCTION OF NEW ATHEIST CERTAINTY
In the opening scene of Saturday, readers find Henry Perowne looking out
of his bedroom window well before sunrise, woken by a feeling of elation.
While watching the city from his privileged position (the bedroom is on
the second floor of Perowne’s house), he incidentally witnesses an aircraft
accident. The image of the burning airplane approaching the Post Office
Tower immediately triggers off associations with the attack on the World
Trade Center. Perowne finds himself speculating about passengers’ fates
and their ways of dealing with the presumed hijack. His elation changes
into horror.90
Perowne’s window gaze has a predecessor. In Atonement, Briony wit-
nesses a scene through her window, which to her is confusing and inap-
prehensible and sets off the train of misinterpretations which lead to the
false accusation of Robbie. As Briony is a child, it is in line with her char-
acter that she is incapable of decoding adult behaviour. Equally in line
with his character, Perowne also acts as one would expect him to. Look-
ing at London, stretching out below him, he interprets the world, which is
said to be typical of male window gazers.91
The major parameter in Perowne’s interpreting the world is optimistic
positivism: There’s not more than meets the eye, but that’s not a bad
thing. Observing two nurses on their way home causes Perowne to muse
about the condito humana. To him, these nurses are “hot little biological
engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with innumer-
able branching neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone casing”.92
When Perowne sees the burning plane, which at first he mistakes for “a
89
Cf. David Malcolm, Understanding Ian McEwan. Understanding Contemporary
British Literature (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002) passim.
90
McEwan 2006, 14.
91
Cf. Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, “Fensterblicke statt Vogelperspektive”, Wiener Zeitung
30 Dec. 2005. Accessed 7 January 2011, <http://www.wienerzeitung.at/
Desktopdefault.aspx?tabID=3946&alias=wzo&lexikon=Literatur&letter=
L&cob=213298>: “Männer stehen nicht am Fenster und träumen oder sinnen
ihren Sehnsüchten nach, sie handeln geistig, indem sie das Gesehene ordnen,
deuten, interpretieren. In der Großstadtwahrnehmung löst der männliche Fen-
sterblick die Vogelperspektive der romantischen Helden ab, die auf Bäume oder
Berggipfel kletterten, um sich die nötige Übersicht zu verschaffen”.
92
McEwan 2006, 13.

112 JOHANNES WALLY
meteor burning out in the London sky”,93 he does what McEwan claimed
we all did after seeing an aeroplane “disappearing into the side of the
tower as cleanly as a posted letter”: He fantasises himself into the events,
asking the question “What if it was me?”94
Corresponding to his 9/11-association, Perowne suspects religious fana-
ticism to be the cause of what he witnesses. As his observations on the
nurses suggest, Perowne rejects religion as a wish-fulfilment deflected to
the realm of the imaginary:
If Perowne were inclined to religious feeling, to supernatural explanations, he
could play with the idea that he’s been summoned; that having woken in an
unusual state of mind, and gone to the window for no reason, he should ac-
knowledge a hidden order, an external intelligence, which wants to show or tell
him something of significance. … A simple anthropic principle is involved. The
primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric
colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective,
the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate
your own unimportance. In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum
at whose far end, rearing like an abandonded temple lies psychosis.95
Given this passage, it is indeed not surprising that Saturday has been con-
sidered “a vehicle of the author’s pet beliefs”.96 Perowne’s reflections re-
verberate with ideas that have dominated McEwan’s work since the pub-
lication of Black Dogs. Perowne’s psychiatric colleagues returning a
verdict “on the primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined” takes up
the competition between science and religion as two overarching narra-
tives which lies at the core of Black Dogs. In Saturday, this competition
seems to have been set in favour of the men of science. Perowne’s view
that the difference between psychosis and religion is gradual not qualita-
tive mirrors Jed’s pathological, religiously tinted obsession in Enduring
Love. The formulations used to describe the narcissism which underpins a
religious worldview almost sound like a summary of Briony’s state of
mind. Finally, the metaphor describing psychosis is a religious one and, as
pointed out above, refers to the abandoned island temple in Atonement,
the place where Briony commits her crime.
Perowne’s thoughts continue along these lines, in fact they become
more outspokenly anti-religious:
And such reasoning [i.e. religious reasoning] may have caused the fire on the
plane. A man of sound faith with a bomb in the heel of his shoe. Among the
terrified passengers many might be praying – another problem of reference – to
their own god for intercession. And if there are to be deaths, the very god who
ordained them will soon be funereally petitioned for comfort. Perowne regards
this as a matter for wonder, a human complication beyond the reach of morals.
93
McEwan 2006, 13.
94
McEwan 2001, online.
95
McEwan 2006, 17.
96
Beattie 2007, 154.

From it there spring, alongside the unreason and slaughter, decent people and
good deeds, beautiful cathedrals, mosques, cantatas, poetry. Even the denial of
God, he was once amazed and indignant to hear a priest argue, is a spiritual
exercise: it’s not easy to escape from the clutches of the believers.97
This quote indeed appears to be a checklist of allegations against religion
frequently voiced by proponents of New Atheism: Despite a few cultural
merits which it has brought about in the course of history, religion is un-
reasonable and destructive. It is important, however, to understand what
Perowne is really thinking about. In contrast to the section quoted before,
he no longer contemplates religion in terms of an abstract epistemological
principle: His allegations are now directed at identifiable religions. The
reference to suicide bombing clearly narrows his primary object of refer-
ence down to Islam; and although Christianity is included in Perowne’s
speculations, it is in fact medieval Christianity – the apparent antidote to
enlightened modern times –, which is evoked by the image of beautiful
cathedrals. Thus, Islam and pre-enlightened Christianity – the two pillars
of the much quoted clash of cultures and the primary targets of New
Atheist criticism – feature prominently in Perowne’s thoughts. These two
religions have taken hostage of the world. As Henry concludes: “It’s not
easy to escape from the clutches of the believers”.98
The ideological position of Saturday is, however, not quite as straight
forward as Perowne’s, for Perowne’s reflections are triggered of by a mis-
interpretation of reality. Gazing out of his bedroom window, he indeed
witnesses an aircraft accident, but he does not witness a burning plane
hijacked by terrorists and turned into a deadly weapon in an attempt to
serve some religious purpose. As Perowne is to find out later that day, the
plane was a cargo aircraft that happened to encounter difficulties while
approaching London Heathrow. The plane landed safely. No harm was
done.
What is one to make of a main character that seems to state his crea-
tor’s views but actually ‘gets it wrong’? On the one hand, the incongru-
ence between what Perowne witnesses and what he thinks he witnesses is,
without doubt, a technical device in order to create suspense. On the other
hand, this epistemological incongruence continues a tradition of unreliabil-
ity in McEwan’s fiction, which profoundly affects the reading of the entire
novel. With regard to New Atheism, Henry’s misinterpretation constitutes
a deconstruction of atheism as a coherent narrative of redemption. As the
frequent comparisons of Perowne to god suggest, metropolitan man has
become god and is now sitting “at the top of the evolutionary tree”.99
Still, this ‘god-man’, is as prone to misjudgment as his ancestors, “the
supernaturally inclined” and their “primitive thinking”. This common affi-
nity is rather comically demonstrated in the climatic scene of the novel. In
97
McEwan 2006, 17.
98
McEwan 2006, 17.
99

114 JOHANNES WALLY
contrast to the ‘god-man’ Perowne, Baxter is on three occasions called si-

mian or apelike.100 Nonetheless, for all the hierarchy that is implied in
these comparisons, both the rational ‘god-man’ and the irrational ‘ape-
man’ make the same error. They mistake Daisy for the author of the poem
and misread its meaning.
Perowne’s proneness to misread the world can be interpreted as con-
taining a wider cultural critique. Shortly before Perowne meets Baxter, he
laments the loss of a belief in an all-knowing supernatural force allotting
people to their respective places in life. Such a belief might have been a
commodity, Perowne muses, for it can serve as a justification for one’s
own prosperity. Again, Perowne views this belief in terms of a mental dis-
order – anosognosia, “a lack of awareness of one’s own condition”.101
Perowne’s verdict causes Peter Childs to interpret Perowne allegorically,
hence as embodying “the fragility of the dominant Western Welt-
anschauung”.102 With his positivistic nineteenth-century scientism, Per-
owne himself can be diagnosed with anosognosia: Although he sees the
destructive impulse in religions, especially in militant Islam, he does not
see the destructiveness of the culture he represents. Furthermore, he fails
to realize that his altruism – operating on Baxter – is not simply the Dar-
winian reflex of a social animal but ultimately a secularized expression of
a culture which has been shaped by the – at least theoretical – exaltation
of forgiveness over condemnation. Perowne reflects on his decision to op-
erate on Baxter in existentialist terms, reminiscent of Camus’ solidarity,
believing that “they’ll all be diminished by whipping a dying man on his
way to hell”.103 This is indeed a highly moral stance too, at whose core
the idea of solidarity among human beings lies. This idea, however, could
also be traced back to the radical social revolution that was brought
about by a religion which placed at its heart a crucified human being.104
Tracing Perowne’s thoughts back to their most pristine form is well be-
yond the scope of this article and I do not intend to venture on this under-
taking. Nevertheless, it is crucial to realise that Perowne, as a 21st-century
subject, is “for good or ill, post-Christian”, hence living in a world that
was “transformed by an ancient revolution”.105 Being, as Childs suggests,
a typical representative of the dominant Western culture, Perowne’s cul-
tural memory is short. He is thus unaware of the historical implications of
his reflections and is, in this respect, reminiscent of the New Atheist
100
Cf. Peter Childs, “Contemporary McEwan and Anosognosia”, Ian McEwan:
Art and Politics, ed. Pascal Nicklas (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009) 23–38, 28.
101
McEwan 2006, 74.
102
Childs 2009, 33.
103
McEwan 2006, 278.
104
In the context of New Atheism, it is ironical to notice that early Christians were
called atheists, too, as they were thought to reject the Roman world order.
105
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusion: The Christian Revolution and its Fash-
ionable Enemies (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2010) 108.

pamphlets. Furthermore, as a character with a set of unchangeable ideas
about the world, his thoughts suffer from the same epistemological loop
as Briony Tallis’ or Jed Parry’s.
Drawing all threads together, the scene discussed in this chapter shows
that Saturday contains passages which are much more complex with re-
gard to their philosophical implications than the label “New Atheist no-
vel” might suggest. This ambiguity is closely tied to the narrative situa-
tion. Perowne is made to navigate through a highly complex world. As
the novel’s occurrences are filtered predominantly through his perception,
it is sometimes difficult to realize that the validity of his reflections on the
events is relativized by the events themselves. It is this focalization that
prevents Saturday from becoming an ideological pamphlet. In a sense, the
opening scene of the novel subtly hints to this. Perowne’s window be-
comes the reader’s spyhole into the world as constructed by the novel. By
encountering a protagonist who is quite certain about how the world
works but misreads what happens at the beginning of the novel, readers
are reminded of the relativity of its content and also of that of philosophi-
cal assumptions in general. Instead of the certainty which characterises
much of New Atheist writings, the novel thus tends to settle for scepti-
cism.
4. CONCLUSION: SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL REVISITED
I have pointed out that McEwan’s novels began negotiating the value and
relationship of religion and science at a time when religion was generally
considered a marginal social or political force. In the aftermath of Septem-
ber 11, the ensuing war on terror with its emotionalising religious rhetoric
and the much evoked clash of cultures, New Atheism emerged. McEwan
soon became associated with New Atheism, mainly as a result of his es-
sayistic post-9/11 writings. His personal ties with central proponents of
New Atheism, however, go well back to the 1970s. Although we can as-
sume a reciprocal influence between McEwan and, for instance, Christo-
pher Hitchens, who would later go on to become a New Atheist celebrity,
one still ought to be aware that reading novels such as Black Dogs or
Enduring Love as part of the ‘New Atheist discourse’ constitutes an ex-
post-evaluation. These novels were written a good deal before anyone had
even heard of the term New Atheism. Such a labelling is strictly speaking
a-historical and thus requires a complex methodological justification.
Saturday does not pose this problem, although the novel too was pub-
lished before New Atheism received its full media coverage. Published four
years after 9/11 in a medial environment that reverberated with debates
about destructive fundamentalism, New Atheist concepts are nevertheless
present on all levels of the narrative – from the character constellation to
the subtle use of the present tense as a narrative device. Hence, viewing
Saturday as a benevolent meditation over an atheist lifestyle is fully justi-

116 JOHANNES WALLY
fied. It is, however, not a celebration of New Atheism, for which it has
been mistaken.
One of the most outstanding features allocated to New Atheism by its
critics is philosophical crudity – a quality which its supporters tend to
praise as clarity. It goes without saying that evaluations of this kind say
more about the evaluators than about their object of evaluation. Still, it is
true that the New Atheist polemics tend to be, by their very generic nat-
ure, tart-tongued and reductive.
Saturday is not reductive. As was demonstrated through a close reading
of two passages, the novel contains philosophical subtexts that, ranging
from consumerism to communism, tend to support atheist worldviews in
spite of their conflicting nature; however, at the same time, the novel de-
constructs the certainty with which many of the New Atheists have made
their claims. Whereas Perowne’s thoughts on Rosalind’s relationship with
her mother are inspired by a Freudian understanding of religion, which
has enjoyed much appraisal by New Atheist writers, Perowne’s proneness
to misinterpret events points to a subtle criticism of this worldview. In
fact, the epistemological gesture of the novel as manifest in Perowne’s mis-
interpretation is that of scepticism or relativism, respectively.
This ambiguity has not passed unnoticed by critics who have labelled
Saturday as a New Atheist novel. In the place of these critics, I would like
to quote Bradley and Tate. As these authors remark, “the novel carefully
hedges its bets”.106 What has, to my knowledge, not been taken into ac-
count in this context is that Perowne is not depicted as epistemologically
superior to his surroundings. His thoughts might give him away as a
“New Atheist Everyman”,107 but he is in no way depicted in terms of the
supremacy which underlies much of the New Atheist writing. Perowne,
remarkable as his altruism is, is no superman. In fact, there is very little
heroic about him. Perowne is an intelligent, though rather average, well-
to-do-neurosurgeon, who prefers a game of squash to political commit-
ment.
It is certainly true that McEwan has lent his support to the New Atheist
movement and his novels have in turn been praised by New Atheist pro-
ponents. However, despite the stylistic and ideological similarities between
much of his essayistic and fictional writing, the latter has always avoided
a straight-forward ideological position. In fact, as a result of their complex
aesthetics, his novels – especially Enduring Love, Atonement and Saturday
– tend to exemplify the post-structuralist claim of the endless deferral of
meaning. Considering that New Atheism has shown little respect for post-
modern relativism, this is indeed remarkable and further relativizes a
straightforward labelling of Saturday as a New Atheist novel.
106
Bradley and Tate 2010, 33.
107
Impasto 2009, 15.

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GRAZ JOHANNES WALLY

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Ian McEwan’S Saturday as a New Atheist Novel? A Claim Revisited

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1. WHAT IS NEW ATHEISM?

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The beginning of the New Atheist movement is usually marked five

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of humanity from mythology turns New Atheism into a story of enlight-

2. CONTEXTUALISING SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL

2.1. MCEWAN AND THE NEW ATHEIST MOVEMENT

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2.2. EMPATHY AS THE BEGINNING OF MORALITY AND THE DANGER OF

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pletely wrong”38 is not a peculiarity of Atonement or “Only Love and

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2.3. SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL

Saturday, too, is set in an apocalyptic, post-9/11 world, where, as one

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3. SCEPTICISM AND CONTRADICTORINESS IN SATURDAY:

3.1. THE STORY OF ROSALIND’S EMANCIPATION:

Towards the end of Part I of Saturday, Perowne, lying in bed nestled up

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only the Indo-Germanic race is capable of civilisation is an illusion. More-

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as a religious conflict may serve as a case in point. Although Dawkins

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3.2. THE OPENING SCENE OF SATURDAY:

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contrast to the ‘god-man’ Perowne, Baxter is on three occasions called si-

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4. CONCLUSION: SATURDAY AS A NEW ATHEIST NOVEL REVISITED

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GRAZ JOHANNES WALLY

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