Figurines of fiction & Ian McEwan

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

Ivan Jim Saguibal Layugan, 20, is an incoming senior at the University of Baguio where he majors in English language and literature. He is the editor of the university publication and a past president of the Luzonwide Association of College Editors (LACE). He is one of 2011’s 35 Mga Makabagong Rizal: Pag-asa ng Bayan (Modern Rizals: Hope of the Fatherland) awardees.

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy. It was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. — Atonement by Ian McEwan

The writers who affect us most deeply are usually the ones we discover early — often in adolescence. We read differently then, with more passionate curiosity, because we are caught in the process of discovering who we are and what we might become.

My teenage book list (I never kept a reading list because I never wanted reading to be onerous — items to be checked off a list as if it was a chore like laundry or an essay-homework.) is composed of detective, science fictions, and mystery novels. Every night, I would be drenched in thick, cold sweat as I raced to determine who the killer was before the author revealed it through the denouement.

I was Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s works, and died with him in Curtain. I read all Sidney Sheldon books before college, and was discovering both prophetic and pragmatic haunts by H.G. Wells, Don DeLillo, Dan Brown, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Patterson, and the shelf-long bounty of horrors and chills by Stephen King in the school library. Always discerning and rereading, I always step upon new thresholds among book sales and shelves, or classmates’ collections and donations.

In my college freshman year, a friend told me that she stumbled upon an Ian McEwan in a bookstore. I first read Ian McEwan at 16 and have loved him since. His works, although not exclusively like the others I enjoyed because I can name-guess killers and culprits, are much in the same wavelength. Critics and readers dubbed him as Ian Macabre, and why not? His plots, equally chilling but quintessentially surprising, always left me hanging on my seat and unsettled.

His characters, all interesting and intersected in various and wretched ways, are always treated with careful descriptions and plausible backgrounds. Their lives, including their passions and professions, are always well described and relayed to create a flamboyant portrait to make the reader understand the character’s judgments, decisions, and motives.

It is in his The Child in Time that a writer of children’s books succumbs to the deep abyss of grief after his child is abducted. I watched how the parents’ relationship crumbled away, and witnessed the inimitable love for one’s child. I found no calm in The Comfort of Strangers, as a couple’s diminishing love sped away with their trip as they relied upon a stranger who twisted their lives. A millionaire and his mistress, a gullible pornographer, a guilt-ridden father and other fascinating personalities are focal points in McEwan’s short story collection, In Between the Sheets. And how can I forget his Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam and the best friends who kill each other after their ex-lover dies and leaves them in a daze of insecurity?

I rushed to the bookstore to find out which book was my friend referring to. In the middle of a long queue of classics and familiar authors and favorites like Mary Shelley, Saul Bellow, and even William Shakespeare, I saw him. His name never fails to startle me. I wonder at how two simple words can emit an air of menace and mystery, both decisive in the cover’s constitution and the contents’ solidity and power.

So I read Atonement one afternoon in the confines of my bedroom, after I paid with almost a week-long’s worth of allowance. It was a paperback edition, and I had never before allowed myself the luxury of purchasing a book with a week’s expense. But leafing through the first pages of the book, I experienced almost immediately that clarifying moment of recognition that a reader has only a few times in life. Here was a book that summoned and spoke to all of me.

At this distance of time, I cannot pretend to understand the full nature of my younger self’s response, but at least three things drew me to McEwan’s prose: its honesty, its characters that drew the world for me, and its intelligence.

His fiction seldom defies time; it cooperates. And the characters are simple people with disparate capabilities pitted against seemingly insurmountable tests. Another writer might well talk about a newlywed’s dilemma in their honeymoon in one chapter, but only Ian McEwan can make it the universe for one novel, as with his On Chesil Beach.

In Atonement, he preserves emotion with an ample supply of intellect. Most works today fail to interweave these contradictory impulses. McEwan, however, writes with unwavering certainty and compassion, so that his characters are left in the drama while the reader is engrossed in a mental debate. In reading Atonement, I would review parts and write in the margins if I were to keep up accurately with the actions of the characters — Briony Tallis, the budding writer; her sister Cecilia and lover Robbie Turner (suitably portrayed by the ubiquitous Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in Joe Wright’s movie version).

But what do you know? I am also a starting writer myself, and it is through these books that I tried to acquire an unyielding point of view. My life is not a perfect one, and there are a lot of people whom, like Briony herself, I have tried to decipher but misinterpreted. I am not sure if the secrets which I am privy to also deserve the brittle pages of a manuscript to give impartiality to their existence and evasiveness, but I personally hold in myself the belief that my hands are the instruments in giving others’ stories justice.

The verisimilitude in Atonement can never be missed, for the characters step off the pages in rational and respective ways. Everyone plays a vital role in provoking the conflicts, and their qualities and anxieties are all contributory to the tragic but sugar-coated conclusion.

No one is required to love McEwan’s characters (his latest book Solar has a pompous, disagreeable protagonist, in my opinion). I myself cursed Briony with every passing page, and would have happily rewritten the ending, that portion aptly classified as “London, 1999.” No one cares if she lived long enough to transcend the war and walk the halls of London in modern times. Her choices are predominantly unforgivable, and her ability to atone through fiction is not a beautiful reality, although it has an appropriate fairness. It is just as fiction has always been — unreal, unwritten, but undermined.

My relationship with McEwan was not only urgent and intense. It also proved permanent. As I grew up, with his books piled on my bedside already dog-eared and the spines creased, I have never encountered a time when rereading his works was tiresome or bland. There are moments when I still feel a tear drop on my chin by revisiting the chapters of his works, as if the mere act would change the endings.

I am glad we crossed paths in my younger years. His fiction laid out for me the purpose and importance of creating what is not only real but essential. I have and will always imbibe other writers and a million works more. I am enjoying other writers but no one will replace what Ian McEwan has left in my heart and soul as a young reader. His characters are in my league now, and we are in one order. I will be graduating college soon and we will write, Briony and I and the rest. Soon, when I realize my own voice in writing, I will also attempt to find ways to refine what this reality hinders in us — our own world, our own time.