Nicholas Clee on why a writer's work can sometimes be above criticism

Something unusual happened to Ian McEwan in the New York Review of Books a few weeks ago. His novel Saturday, before that the subject of almost universal praise, suffered not just a bad review, but a 4,000-word, scene-by-scene demolition. Saturday was "a dismayingly bad book", the reviewer wrote; its characters were "like the dim stars of a lost galaxy", and its politics were "banal". To read the novel was to be subjected to "a neoliberal polemic gone wrong".

The author of this piece was John Banville, one of the handful of writers in Britain and Ireland who can consider themselves to be in McEwan's league. Banville himself referred, in dismay, to "the ecstatic reception Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike", attributing it to the post-9/11 atmosphere of the novel and to the glib consolation of McEwan's plot.

Leaving aside the question of whether McEwan's vision in Saturday is really so feeble, one can agree that he is a writer with precisely the talent to encapsulate our 21st-century fears. As Banville observed, the image of the death-bringer emerging from a clear blue sky might have come from McEwan's fiction. In other words, his time has come; and when that happens, criticism is disarmed.

The phenomenon is only tangentially related to literary merit - although, in McEwan's case, it was stimulated by the publication of his particularly fine previous novel, Atonement. It is marked by a tone of awestricken respect from reviewers: received opinion neuters its prose. In the theatre, David Hare enjoys it; in cinema, Pedro Almodovar; in music, James MacMillan; in the visual arts, Damien Hirst. It is not a good thing to lose. Once-fashionable playwrights such as Peter Nichols suddenly find that they cannot get their new plays staged. Other artists may be more fortunate in finding outlets for their work, but then get savage maulings from the critics, in whom a hatred of those to whom they have been in thrall has been waiting for a chance to express itself. The film director Spike Lee is a victim of this syndrome; so are Ian McEwan's contemporaries Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. Julian Barnes, the other novelist with whom McEwan is most often linked, may also find that the critics, if they do not take to his next novel, Arthur and George, will outline their reservations with particular bite.

I am not saying that McEwan's current status is merely a matter of fashion. He is, as Banville acknowledges, a very good writer. But I do think that there surrounds some artists a respect that borders on pusillanimity. Saul Bellow enjoyed this balmy critical climate for most of his long career; Seamus Heaney does, too. For others, it can come and go. There have been times when Amis, Barnes and Rushdie have all enjoyed the praise that McEwan gets now. He was the one who made the judges' list for the Man Booker International Prize; a few years ago, the omission of Rushdie in particular from that list would have been regarded as extraordinary.

When I was a Booker Prize judge in 1993, two novels were especially hard to ignore: Remembering Babylon by David Malouf and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. We shortlisted the first, but not the second. I am happy to stand by those judgements, and by the judging process; but I admit that we paid more attention to these books than to others with less fashionable credentials. There were certainly entries that, had the mood been different, would have had better chances of recognition. For example, there was an outstanding novel by John Banville.

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