Atonement by Ian McEwan
Wheeler, Edward T
THE LIES OF NOVELISTS
Edward T. Wheeler
English writer Ian McEwan has built his house of fiction in traditional patterns, seemingly avoiding forms of postmodern construction. In his novels,...
...Atonement is a most impressive book, one that may indeed be McEwan's finest achievement...
...McEwan narrates from a variety of perspectives and points in time...
...His unnerving fictional worlds indulge in fatal masochistic tastes: a corpse in concrete in the cellar, a spectral hound baying evil beyond the garden, or the ghost of a lost child calling out for return...
...Atonement presents itself as realistic fiction, yet begins with an epigraph from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey warning us that the young heroine is intent on misperception...
...The second of the novel's three parts, meanwhile, offers fictional rebuttal of the false accusation, as the victim of Briony's crime goes on to distinguish himself in the British Expeditionary Force's retreat to she composes her future self) and an atonement for what she did in the past...
...What is realistic about the novel is constantly undercut by our sense of a "made" fictional world elaborately constructed by the protagonist/narrator Briony...
...This novel shows how such seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at once...
...If she is to atone, it will be through her writing...
...but increasingly and self-consciously, it becomes an enveloping fabrication that must be maintained for consistency's sake...
...The act, the accusation, and the police procedural all happen off stage...
...THE LIES OF NOVELISTS Edward T. Wheeler English writer Ian McEwan has built his house of fiction in traditional patterns, seemingly avoiding forms of postmodern construction...
...As a result, we enter McEwan's house of fiction very much on the author's terms...
...In McEwan's hands, the intention and the act of the crime come from an imaginative impulse inextricably linked with the novelist's art...
...Dunkirk...
...Seen in the book's concluding third part as an elderly, successful novelist, Briony has a sense of audience that forces her to consider her reader's expectation- be it novel or statement sworn in evidence to the police...
...His latest novel, Atonement, is no exception...
...The novel takes up the nocturnal crime she commits in the garden of her English country home after the hottest day in the summer of 1935...
...As host, McEwan presents himself as guilty of the crime committed by his character, conflating fact and fiction, pushing us to consider the relationship between artistic imagination and truth of life...
...A challenging and brilliant work, it rewards careful attention to the writer's art...
...This, McEwan is at pains to elaborate, is initially done without malice...
...Atonement repeatedly emphasizes the adolescent protagonist's will to control her life...
...The reader is told there is a crime to be committed, and that in the future characters will look back on the occasion as the most significant in their lives...
...As impressive an evocation of World War II as one would wish to read, this section adds a remarkable new dimension to McEwan's range...
...How a trivial dinner party spikes to crisis is the tease...
...In her attempts to put on a play she has written, Briony casts an innocent family friend as child rapist...
...Wealthy, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis is blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a vivid imagination, seeing gothic horrors in apparent commonplaces...
...For Briony this is both a projection of what she wishes to be in the future (as a child whenchild when...
...The careful structuring of the work calls attention to its artifice and reminds us of two alternate assertions about what art does: Keats's Romantic assurance that artistic beauty is truth and Auden's disclaimer that poetry makes nothing happen...
...The narrative offers us retrospection and introspection, a looking-back on what Briony has done...
...In his novels, stories, and plays, McEwan has distinguished himself with ease of style, acute rendering of character, and remarkable images...
Vol. 129 • May 2002 • No. 9
