Atonement by Ian McEwan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan is by far the best book I read in 2013. There is a fluid ease to the language, and to the events that unfold in the first half, unlike almost any novel I had encountered. A few books by Gabriel García Márquez come close.
In the first 175 pages, McEwan carries the reader through one summer day in 1935. What might have remained an ordinary day on a Surrey estate becomes, by the section’s end, a life-shaping catastrophe, as if Shakespeare’s pen had touched the edges of the story.
Three early notices still hold:
“Resplendent… Graceful… Magisterial… Gloriously realized.”
— The Boston Globe
“A work of astonishing depth and humanity… It is rare for a critic to feel justified in using the word ‘masterpiece,’ but [Atonement] really deserves to be called one.”
— The Economist
“In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, Atonement made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature’s humanizing possibilities.”
— Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times
Not enough books like this one reach the market.
Part I: one day in 1935
The novel runs about 351 pages. Part I stays with three people from morning to the next morning: Briony Tallis, Cecilia Tallis, and Robbie Turner.
Briony is thirteen, precocious, and already certain she understands the adult world. Robbie is not a hired hand. He is the son of Grace Turner, the family’s charlady, a Cambridge man whose education was paid for by Briony’s father. Cecilia, just down from Cambridge, has known him all her life. Briony is shocked into the adult world when she sees Robbie and her sister, Cee, first at the fountain and later that evening in the library.
She is already losing the smaller world she preferred:
“If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance” (p. 34).
A little later she admits, in a clear foreshadowing of the mistake she is about to make:
“Briony had her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong” (p. 37).
To be honest, I know a few people like Briony, people who seem to get “everything wrong, completely wrong.” Leave them be. They have their own walls and demons.
From an upstairs window Briony watches her older sister strip and dive into the fountain. She decides Robbie has forced Cee to reveal herself. In the library she walks in on the two of them. Again she reads attack where the reader has already been shown desire. This is the scene through her eyes:
“At first, when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw nothing at all. The only light was from a single green-glass desk lamp which illuminated little more than the tooled leather surface on which it stood. When she took another few steps she saw them, dark shapes in the furthest corner. Though they were immobile, her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a hand-to-hand fight. The scene was so entirely a realization of her worst fears that she sensed that her overanxious imagination had projected the figures onto the packed spines of books. This illusion, or hope of one, was dispelled as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. No one moved. Briony stared past Robbie’s shoulder into the terrified eyes of her sister” (p. 116).
What makes the design so strong is that McEwan has already given us Robbie and Cecilia from the inside. After years of stepping around the truth, they finally say the three words that bad art and bad faith never quite cheapen:
“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she had been the one to say them first” (p. 129).
For many pages the book feels like a love story that might open into an epic. McEwan, and Briony, have other plans.
Misreading, and the cost of it
Briony’s misperceptions hang over the whole household. McEwan is also exact about rooms, objects, and the thoughts people do not say aloud. Cecilia hesitates in a doorway:
“[Cecilia’s] breathing slowed and her desire for a cigarette deepened, but still she hesitated by the door, momentarily held by the perfection of the scene—by the three faded Chesterfields grouped around the almost new Gothic fireplace in which stood a display of wintry sedge, by the unplayed, untuned harpsichord and the unused rosewood music stands, by the heavy velvet curtains, loosely restrained by an orange and blue tasseled rope, framing a partial view of cloudless sky and the yellow and gray mottled terrace where chamomile and feverfew grew between the paving cracks” (p. 19).
Robbie, imagining the doctor he might become, does not yet know the night ahead of him:
“What deep readings his modified sensibility might make of human suffering, of the self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck that drive men toward ill health! Birth, death, and frailty in between… he would press the enfeebled pulse, hear the expiring breath, feel the fevered hand begin to cool and reflect, in the manner that only literature and religion teach, on the puniness and nobility of mankind…” (p. 87).
That night Robbie is arrested for the rape of Lola, Briony’s fifteen-year-old cousin. Briony is the chief witness. She has seen a man’s shape in the dark and names Robbie. As the police car pulls away, Grace Turner is still shouting: “Liars! Liars! Liars!” (pp. 174–175).
That is the end of Part I. Parts II and III should be read, not summarized. There is also Joe Wright’s 2007 film, with James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Saoirse Ronan. See it if you like. Read the novel first. Atonement is an achievement in structure, sentence, and moral consequence. A strong recommend.
Note: Page numbers follow the U.S. edition of about 351 pages. Wording in other printings may vary by a line.
