Just sorting that out now. I'm wondering whether to pitch it to my publisher as well.

JB

Good luck.

Yellow Dog was written by Martin Amis. Black Dog is Stephen Booth. McEwan wrote Black Dogs… and, no, I haven’t read any of them, although I do have Booth’s in my unread pile – mainly because of the black dog connection in The Winter House (another shameless plug!)

JB, I assume you mean Robin Wade? It’s amazing how often that name crops up on WW, mostly complimentary. He does strike me as one of the good guys.

Good luck

Dee

Dee, thank goodness there's someon on WW who keeps up with contemporary fiction. It's certainly not me. I should have remembered it was Martin Amis, because I remember feeling a touch of schadenfreude at the butchering it got, and I wouldn't have for McEwan.

Emma

I'm just reading Saturday now and I'm struck by how McEwan strives to write in a realist style. He seems quite obsessed with getting every last detail on surgical procedures (to the detriment of the prose). Whatever he writes about is meticulously researched. He even mocks magical realism through one of his characters. But I think his pedantic painstaking research reduces his own work. I'm sure many of you will disagree but his writing seems forced, almost as if he is saying, hey look at how much I've researched this, isn't this so realistic? Almost as if he is writing in an uber-realistic style. Realism seems to be in vogue at the moment which is surprising given the commercial success of fantasy-based novels.

I totally agree with what you've said about Saturday, I couldn't read more than a few pages and his obsessive detail in the descriptions of surgery were, I think, the epitome of self-indulgent writing.

I also agree with Emma's assessment of 'Atonement', which I loved and loathed in almost equal measure.

Hated 'Enduring Love', too, although something in McEwan's writing kept me reading to the end. When he's good, he's very good indeed.

There's another another kind of writing that could be called 'self-indulgent' :

'The poet Jo Shapcott used a nice phrase recently about confessional writing :'chasing your own ambulance', she called it. '

It's a quote from Hilary Mantel's account of recovery from surgery in The London Review of Books. I read it on the way to the cinema and was so gripped that I sneaked into the loos to finish it .

The front page says 'Hilary Mantel meets the Devil', a reference to the hallucinations brought on by morphine, but it's her account of the effects of physical and mental disability on the writer that's fascinating. She says Virginia Woolf was a 'wuss' for tamely obeying her doctors when they forbade her from writing:

'somehow, I could always contrive to get my pen in my hand, howver far it had rolled'

Self indulgent? Possibly. But great stuff!

Sheila