I was surprised recently to notice that I had never written about Atonement--could've sworn I had. Ian McEwan's masterpiece is one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite novelists. I've written about Saturday and On Chesil Beach... but I've neglected his best and most famous work. Now that the novel has been made into an intriguing film adaptation (See above), I thought it would be a good time to write about Ian McEwan's Atonement.
This novel is a masterpiece of novel form and feeling. The story is set during World War II. It tells the story of Cecilia Tallis and her family, and her tortured love affair with Robbie Turner. Cecilia's family employs Robbie's mother as a housekeeper, and allow her and Robbie to live in a cottage on their property. Cecilia and Robbie grow as friends, and as Robbie reaches young adulthood her father takes responsibility for Robbie's education. Robbie and Cecilia are friends as they grow up, and they predictably fall in love as they reach adulthood. Robbie struggles with his feelings for Cecilia and writes her a note expressing his sexual frustration, a note which he intends only as a psychological release for himself. The note manages to fall into the wrong hands, however, and his true feelings are exposed.
Eventually Robbie and Celia express their feelings, but the interference of Celia's younger sister Briony creates problems for them. The book turns on a tragic false accusation, to which Briony's testimony is central, when Robbie is accused of rape. In spite of his denials, he is sentenced to prison. When the war begins, Robbie is permitted to enlist to commute his sentence. Cecilia, believing absolutely in Robbie's innocence, becomes estranged from the rest of her family and moves to London.
The remainder of the novel documents Robbie's incredible march to the English Channel with German guns at his back. Any further summary would spoil this novel's denouement, including its shocking ending, once which moved this reader to tears-- silly, childlike tears.
McEwan is credited with psychological astuteness worthy of Austen, and this novel is no exception. His characters are beautifully and carefully drawn. Like McEwan's other novels, he is fascinated with how the lives of ordinary people are transformed by tragedy, with the necessity of men and women to carry on in spite of the permanent, unreversable alterations caused by profound psychological trauma. But McEwan's work is hardly predictable; the tragedies he explores can take the form of random death or violence, natural effects of age and disease, or as in the case in this novel, simple acts of misunderstanding that, when they go uncorrected, ruin people's lives. Atonement is not only about perseverence, but about dreams and hopes, about how art can help to ease the pain of tragedy, and about as the title suggests, how we make up for the pain we cause in others' lives through our own ignorance. In Atonement, however, art is not only the means by which we recover our meaningful lives, but in Briony's case, her imagination is the cause of her pain as well. Set in the background of World War II the novel reminds us of the destructive ends to which the creative imagination can be put as well as its healing effects.
Links:
My features on McEwan's latest, last summer's On Chesil Beach, and the fantastic Saturday
McEwan's site
Review by Laura Miller in Salon
Atonement the movie home page
Expanded excperpt
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Sunday Reading: Atonement
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Sunday Reading: Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach
I've never read a novel about premature ejaculation, at least until now. In Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach a climax serves as, well, the climax and anti-climax at the same time, the high point of the slender novel but the low point of a doomed and unconsummated marriage that never survives the honeymoon on the English Channel. Without giving away too much of the plot, that's essentially a summary of the sensitive and intricately crafted novel by one of England's masters.
The novel tells the story of Edward and Florence, a young couple in 1962. Typically for McEwan, the historical moment of the novel is significant. In this case, the novel takes place at the tipping point between the buttoned up Victorianism of traditional England and the heady 1960's decade of sexual liberation. McEwan is a novelist who specializes in the precise description of the inner life, but the historical moment informs it. This is one way in which he is different from a writer like Austen, whose novels take place almost outside of history and seem universal because of it. But McEwan fastens the characters to a particular time and place almost like an insect pinned to a mounting board. In Saturday, for example, the particular Saturday in question is the day of the massive anti-war protests in London, and the questions of violence and war are the weighty questions the novel addresses. In the current novel, the historical moment is less exact, but still carefully articulated in the narrative.
Florence is the daughter of a successful entrepreneur and an Oxford don, Edward the son of a working class family. His father is a school teacher and his mother a harmless woman detached from reality. Their past and courtship make up one thread of the novel, while the events of their wedding night make up the other.
McEwan's familiar plot elements are present here, such as personal tragedy, regret, and personal violence. Edward has a habit of getting into fistfights, again a reminder of Saturday, with its brutal physicality. But the novel is much more reminiscent of Atonement. McEwan's fiction has a tendency towards the sentimental, and his 1998 masterpiece is a tearjerker, building as it does towards towards the narrator's revelation of her complicity in the tragedies that have unfolded for her sister and her lover. His novels build towards powerful and unexpected emotion, which some readers might find heavy or manipulative. Same here with On Chesil Beach. The final pages of the novel build like the crescendo of a great symphony, with beautiful prose and rising emotion that may seem a little over the top, a little heavily painted. But it's a satisfying read, with gorgeous prose and emotion which, while perhaps melodramatic, is emotion that the reader can share in, feeling that characters McEwan has created deserve our caring about them.
On Chesil Beach has not been released yet in the U. S. I hate to say too much about it before anyone has had a chance to read it. While the novel isn't as good as Saturday or Atonement, it's a satisfying and lyrical novel, well worth the 28 pounds I spent to send it here from the UK.
By the way, how much is a pound?!
I'll have more to say when this novel is released in the U. S.
Link to my earlier review of Saturday
McEwan on being in the public eye following accusations of plagiarism.
Here is an excerpt. In the following passage, you can see the difficulties the couple is having with their physical relationship. Edward is awkward and pushy, Florence is cold and unapproachable, treating the physical nature of love as a duty rather than a pleasure. The passage below prefigures in many ways (as McEwan more or less announces figuratively in the final sentence) the novel's, and the relationship's, end. McEwan's clinical prose mirrors the clinical approach Florence takes to kissing and touching her husband.
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her. Her own tongue folded and recoiled in automatic distaste, making even more space for Edward. He knew well enough she did not like this kind of kissing, and he had never before been so assertive. With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her. His left hand was pressed flat above her shoulder blades, just below her neck, levering her head against hi. Her claustrophobia and breathlessness grew even as she became more determined that she could not bear to offend him. He was under tongue, pushing it up against the roof of her mouth, then on top, pushing down, then sliding smoothly along the sides and round, as though he thought he could tie a simple up and over knot. He wanted to engage her tongue in some activity of its own, coax it into a hideous mute duet, but she could only shrink and concentrate on not struggling, not gagging, not panicking. If she was sick into his mough, was one wild thought, their marriage would be instantly over, and she would have to go home and explain herself to her parents. she understood perfectly that this business with tongues, this penetration, was a small scale enactment, a ritual tableau vivant, of what was still to come, like a prologue before an old play that tells you everything that must happen.
