Chronicle of a Tempest Foretold: Confrontations with the Barbarian in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

As a response to the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing War on Terror, Ian McEwan’s Saturday captures the collective anxiety in post-millenium Britain over external threats intruding into private spaces. Following debates over its political stance, interpretations of the novel have generally split along two paths. While one focuses on the divide between the humanities and science, thus downplaying the novel’s political dimension, the other attempts to re-anchor the reading inside a political framework to better examine the challenges Britain faces amid the backlash of globalization. Politicalness is indeed an inseparable aspect of this fiction, and by pinpointing its intertextuality with a proper prototype, it is possible to trace the roots of contemporary political tensions in a broader historical context. Through a comparison between Saturday and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, this article argues that the post-9/11 crisis is not an entirely new political syndrome, but rather the continuity of a systematic political violence inherited from the age of colonial expansion.