Playing god is not for amateurs

Atonement
By Ian McEwan
Vintage UK, 372 pages
Available at National Book Store

"How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?"

This is the dilemma facing Briony Tallis, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Atonement, Ian McEwanís latest and most ambitious novel.

Briony is the kind of precocious British girl who writes, casts, acts in and stages her own plays on summer lawns. Poised between innocence and experience – between believing in her artistic endeavors and finding them childish and limited – Briony spies her older sister Cecilia and a neighbor, Robbie Turner, arguing by a fountain one hot summer day in 1934. Cecilia inexplicably strips off her clothes and dives into the fountain; Robbie watches, transfixed:

What was less comprehensible, however, was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey. It was extraordinary that she was unable to resist him. At his insistence she was removing her clothes, and at such speed. She was out of her blouse, now she had let her skirt drop to the ground and was stepping out of it, while he looked on impatiently, hands on hips. What strange power did he have over her. Blackmail? Threats? Briony raised two hands to her face and stepped back a little from the window. She should shut her eyes, and spare herself the sight of her sister’s shame. But that was impossible, because there were further surprises. Cecilia, mercifully still in her underwear, was climbing into the pond, was standing waist deep in the water, was pinching her nose – and then she was gone.

What follows is a moving (and cautionary) tale about perception and truth, and how dangerous fiction can be in the wrong hands. Briony, unaware of the actual events precipitating Cecilia and Robbie’s mysterious meeting, decides to abandon playwriting and write short stories instead (for a girl whose latest literary work is entitled The Trials of Arabella, a lovers’ meeting seems infinitely more interesting material). She imagines the story behind the encounter, and how to render it in fiction: how to capture the multiple viewpoint narrative used so effectively by Virginia Woolf at the time.

But she learns that playing God is not for amateurs.

Atonement is McEwan’s most fully-realized novel yet: a page-turner that examines questions of fiction and truth; a richly-detailed, carefully-researched period piece that captures the horrors of war; a convincing and affecting love story; and a tale of how people cope with the consequences of their actions before an ambiguous universe.

On display is McEwan’s usual flair for the perverse, such as Robbie’s hastily-scrawled letter to Cecilia (a single blunt word of which precipitates key actions in the story). There’s also a creepy chocolate manufacturer on hand with a taste for little girls. If McEwan has a consistent theme in most of his novels, it is transgression, and how some transgressions are less valid than others before God. Assembling a cast of friends and relatives at the Tallis home on a broiling summer day, McEwan takes deliberate ease in revealing the gaps between their dignified appearances and their true thoughts and motives.

This would be enough – a literary tribute to the technique of Woolf and the early Modernists, perhaps. But McEwan also wants to keep those pages turning. He serves up a gripping, three-part story that achieves more honest engagement with its characters than most of his earlier work. Consequently, there’s a slow, sinuous coil of dread lying at the heart of Atonement. And McEwan is perverse, deliciously perverse. What other modern-day novelist leaves the fate of a central character hanging on page 265, dragging out the reader’s tension until the very last pages? (Something Dickens was particularly good at in his day.)

With one eye toward the crafting of the story – Briony’s preoccupation on that hot summer day – and another eye toward the bloom of passion between the two young lovers, McEwan is in full control here. He pushes the narrative through World War II, detailing the effects of war on ordinary men trying to survive the extraordinary (his account of the British evacuation at Brighton is vivid and compelling) and the further effects on the Sisters of Mercy: student nurses who must cope with the shattered lives of soldiers.

Stripped of his trademark black humor and wit, Atonement simply finds McEwan writing at his best, heading straight for the heart. It’s hard not to be moved by a story which could easily have become wartime melodrama. In fact, this is part of the novelist’s point, moving the reader’s expectations back and forth like a nearly invisible marker until the final dénouement. It’s not giving too much away to say it’s Briony who strives toward the condition of the title. She spends her life looking for answers, finally falling back on what has always served her best: fiction.

There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always the impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

And what a lonely, harrowing attempt it is. And how exhilarating.