Given McEwan's reputation for spare, sinuous writing and subject matter tinged with the macabre, Atonement, his eighth adult novel, is at first a puzzle.
It starts slowly, crammed with meandering detail to the point of feeling overwritten, an 18th Century novel set in 1935. We
hear of the Tallises, an upper middle class family on their country estate during a single hot summer day. There is thirteen year old
Briony, a budding writer; her sister Cecilia and brother Leon, in their twenties; parents, friends and young cousins; and Robbie, the charlady's son who gained a Cambridge First by
means of the family's patronage. Through this ensemble cast McEwan enters his narrative from many angles, scales its complex different
levels and explores Rashumon-like differing viewpoints of the same events. What happens seems deceptively humdrum, but we sense that
is all going to change and we are being cunningly seduced.
McEwan is all too consciously putting on a virtuoso writing performance, and he succeeds very well, weaving a beautifully intricate fabric of period detail and nuance,
that, unlike old black and white film which distances us from the past, instead immerses us in its sights, sounds and feel so we experience it as contemporary.
But inside this exquisite Merchant Ivory-with-words act there lies familiar McEwanesque preoccupations. The bittersweet quality of
first love. The danger and explosiveness of awakening sexuality. Suspense, sharpened and
elongated unbearably. And, presently, his central theme. Damage.
The awesome magnificence of damage, its contours traced with the precision of the finest filigree. Briony witnesses her first
literary effort, a play, fall apart, only then to stumble into a grander real-life drama where she plays a role intertwining fact and fiction, with fatal consequences for new lovers
Cecilia and Robbie. And at last we get it - that this catastrophe could only have happened in the past, with its different moral structures
and lack of forensic science. The fallout reaches into the years ahead, as we shift to Robbie's part in the Dunkirk evacuation. World War Two becomes fascinatingly re-minted by the same protracted deeply researched exactitude, and the wholesale carnage of war, lovingly described, registers as a
consequence of the earlier events. Briony, now grown up and working as a nurse in London, tends to the broken bodies of the victims, and
attempts to right those earlier wrongs.
The theme of a couple's love blighted by tragedy has featured in several of McEwan's past novels, and is a kind of blueprint to which he keeps returning.
In Atonement he has set it against the grandiose backdrop of historical event, much as did in The Innocent, and used the genre of the family saga to add further
weight and significance. But perhaps conscious of the tendency of sagas to tie things up too neatly, McEwan gives us an elderly Briony in
1999, and uses her literary take on events to absolve himself from the requirement to provide a conclusive ending. It is a shame, for Atonement is exactly the kind of narrative which needs such an ending. Its surface is dazzling, and
the middle section truly gripping, but whilst making fair comment on the difficulty - or impossibility - of completion, it itself feels unfinished.
© Roger Keen 2001 (originally published in The Third Alternative 29)
