Quests for Redemption
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction Quests for Redemption By Lynne Sharon Schwartz Good news: In a world turned surreal, realism in literature lives on, at least in Britain. Both Ian McEwan, prolific and experienced,...
...Atonement (Doubleday, 351 pp., $26.00) is a dense, unsettling meditation on the interplay of imagination and reality, uneasy partners that need yet injure each other as grievously as the couple in Black Dogs...
...Both are deeply attached to their mother, a finely drawn character who unfortunately can do little to propel the action except suffer, and this she does well...
...She sees Cecilia and Robbie standing at a fountain...
...Thirteen-yearold Briony, the youngest child, consumed by a literary imagination (she goes on to become a successful novelist), causes the damage that requires atonement...
...She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive...
...Briony bursts in and once more is baffled, imagining the worst...
...Not just the possibility but the necessity...
...McEwan's description of Briony's student training, especially her trial by fire when a convoy of wounded soldiers arrives at the hospital, is magnificent...
...He could not kill...
...It was unlikely, of course— highly unlikely—but there was nothing in the text forbidding such a thought...
...No purpose would be served if I told, either...
...I cannot be 18 again...
...So who can be saved...
...Back home, the awkwardness remains...
...Forget the ending fillip...
...Miller's flashback of Làszló and his brother keeping vigil at the deathbed is a nice touch of parallelism—the one brother meditative, the other fraught, very like Alec and Larry years later and miles away...
...Paul has his eye on the seductive Lola (shades of Lolita...
...Class divisions cast a dark shadow when the oldest brother returns with a guest: stupid, pompous, but attractive Paul Marshall, a budding business tycoon thanks to his Amo chocolate bars, soon to become a staple of the British troops...
...The tussle signals the opening moves of a love both are scarcely aware of...
...Given the task of defending his friends from the Russian soldiers, he found himself unable to fire his gun at the crucial moment...
...The specific acts of reparation are self-evident—recanting to the authorities, explaining to her family—but not until decades later can she find a way to make genuine atonement...
...In between rehearsals, Briony spies from a window the incomprehensible scene that changes her life forever...
...I hope he has not decided realism no longer suffices...
...After all, I cannot run the film backward...
...Or else he means to illustrate Briony's desperate, guilty need to force a happy ending in the one realm she can control...
...There did not have to be a moral...
...So what now...
...Instead Briony accuses Robbie, the social upstart: She "thinks" he is the man she sees running away...
...Why would McEwan spin such a rich and splendid story this way...
...He agrees to help despite the danger involved, though the letter he leaves for his lover shows his grave doubts: "Is this some dementia I am suffering from...
...Whatever it was a man needed in his nature to destroy another, he simply did not possess it...
...When the vase, a precious heirloom, breaks, Cecilia hunts for the pieces underwater...
...his plans for medical school are over, his life ruined...
...The play is something of a departure for Làszl...
...Instantaneously, she is transformed from a childish scribbler of hackneyed romance into a realist...
...Each sentence counts...
...And its vividness is exemplary, a brutal contrast to the serene country estate of Part I, where Briony has mused in privileged, sheltered leisure over how best to portray reality...
...But as in Laszló's play, "there [is] nothing in the text forbidding such a thought...
...More likely the process of novel-writing, the way life contorts into fiction, intrigues him as it does Briony...
...The rest is unforgettable...
...The Ancients believed in it...
...On the other side is Làszló Lâzâr, a 59-year-old playwright who left Hungary for Paris in 1956, after playing a minor and humiliating role in the abortive uprising...
...To make amends...
...By "comfort," I'm not suggesting that their visions are complacent or reassuring—far from it...
...Who was to say they did not in the end escape...
...Alec, for his part, is vague, inept—in a word, nerdy...
...The Child in Time (1987) presented a delicious dissection of the hypocrisies of Margaret Thatcher's government, and Black Dogs (1992) examined, with enviable objectivity, the usefulness of belief systems as embodied in a married couple—a religious mystic and a liberal positivist who can't live with or without each other...
...Ever since, Làszló has lived with that image, and with self-reproach...
...The first half of the book dwells on Briony's ambiguous accusation against Robbie and its immediate, devastating consequences...
...Làszló has more substance...
...his fluent, elegant precision would lend grace to any subject...
...What is most compelling about the novel is not its plot or characters, but the writing...
...it does not "share the bleakness or skepticism" of his previous work...
...in their different ways, both have made a shambles of their lives...
...Yet only a few hours later it is consummated ardently, if not ideally, against a shelf of books in the library...
...It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding...
...It takes an optimistic reader to believe her sons can attain any such solidity...
...She grasps her own early "confusion and misunderstanding...
...Hisbriefandsuccessful stay inBudapest recalls not only the distant past, but a more recent trip to Vienna, "to watch his mother die...
...And he is skillful enough to infuse his novel, which broods so relentlessly on death and decline, with a spirit of redeeming possibility...
...Again, the unknown outcome leaves us poised between hope and dread...
...The story is set in 1935 at an ugly English country house built on the site of an older, beautiful one...
...On the one side are Alice Valentine, terminally ill with cancer, and her sons, Larry and Alec...
...but when she's raped at night in the woods, no one suspects so rich and innocuous a stranger...
...Every setting, from Los Angeles to Paris to Budapest to the mild English rural landscape, is rendered with authority and persuasive detail...
...above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you...
...This is only fitting, for personal salvation is forever an open question...
...Its victims are her older sister, Cecilia, and Cecilia's lover, Robbie, a former servant's gifted son whom the Tallises have taken under their wing...
...The two sets of characters—in the west of England and in Paris—never meet...
...The action takes place on a canvas smaller than McEwan's and bisected like a diptych...
...each word is perfectly chosen...
...Not fair...
...Oxygen's analogous stories are told with economy but penetration, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts...
...Larry confesses to his mother (while she's unconscious) what a mess he's made of his work and his marriage, and seems resolved to change...
...The same outlook governs the destinies of Miller's characters...
...To wit: To atone at last for my awful deed, dear reader, I wrote the novel you have just read...
...The meaning of the scene that brings about such transformation is simple...
...Miller—whose earlier novels are Ingenious Pain (1997) and Casanova in Love (1998)—is a natural...
...On her mistaken testimony Robbie goes to prison...
...In the final pages, Làszló himself gets yet another chance to save a friend, the self-absorbed painter who waves loaded guns—and who hardly seems worth the risk...
...She has learned, to her sorrow, that "the simple truth that other people are as real as you" applies to life as well as to fiction...
...Andrew Miller knows this well...
...He is unhinged by his brother's dismal state when Larry arrives from California...
...Although Miller does little to make the child live on the page, her one salient trait triggers an ingenious and critical turn in the plot...
...All at once, seemingly at Robbie's command, Cecilia removes her skirt and blouse, steps into the fountain, ducks under, then quickly walks away...
...But what really happened...
...Then comes the one flaw: a 17page epilogue in the voice of Briony at age 77, which is an unwarranted excursion into postmodernism...
...Alec finally takes forthright action to help the suffering Alice...
...Both Ian McEwan, prolific and experienced, and Andrew Miller, a young author of two previous novels, offer new works that seduce, absorb, illuminate, and comfort...
...Larry, the once-promising older brother, now a laid-off soapopera star, broke, on drugs and drink, lives in California with his estranged New-Agey wife and their six-year-old daughter, who already leans toward kleptomania...
...McEwan, with eight novels, two story collections and several prizes to his credit, is always fresh and arresting...
...He had never questioned it...
...However tormented by the past, he is urbane, wise, gracious, generous to his young lover and his friends, especially to an unstable, narcissistic painter who likes to play with loaded guns at dinner parties...
...After Dunkirk, the repentant Briony seeks out Cecilia and Robbie, still steadfast lovers, in an attempt to right her wrong and clear his name...
...Cecilia and Briony, estranged from each other and their family since the debacle of Robbie's alleged crime, work as war nurses in London...
...At the fountain, they argue over filling a vase of flowers, he trying to help, she refusing the help...
...Her thinking is a blend of inference, conjecture, envy, and self-dramatizing—all the elements of an overheated adolescent imagination...
...Either way, his own process has been so successful that the reader is too invested in the story to care, so belatedly, about its armature...
...alternately on view," the trapped miners below and the rescuers above...
...each image feels newly minted, as when Alec greets Larry with a hug at the airport and feels "Not just the fizz of tension in his brother's body, but that smell of unhappiness, like a room in a house where children have been punished...
...Do you think, my friend," one character asks in a letter, "that it is possible to put things right...
...As a result of his inaction, his friend and lover, Peter, lay dead in the street...
...But their painstaking exploration of private dilemmas in the midst of public turmoil validates the struggle to find coherent meaning...
...A genre romance with typical heroine, villain and rescuer, it is to be performed by three visiting cousins—15-year-old Lola, already sexually wily, and her younger twin brothers...
...If Larry wasn't 'Larry' any more, who was Alec...
...As the huge enigma of adult behavior is borne in on her, "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...
...McEwan's finger is always on our pulse, so to speak: The narrator of Black Dogs ponders "whether our civilization at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief," a question that at this pass appears to have been answered...
...I know there's always a certain kind of reader," Briony goes on, "who will be compelled to ask...
...In desperation, Larry is about to turn to pornography...
...McEwan even drops a few words recalling the final page of Charlotte Bronte's Villette: "It is only in this last version," says Briony, "that my lovers end well, holding hands...
...Not until late in the novel do we discover what has been dogging Làszló for 40 years...
...The characters of Andrew Miller's Oxygen (Harcourt, 336 pp., $24.00) are similarly engaged in making up for past deeds or changing a regrettable course by a redeeming act of will...
...Just when hope seems abandoned, one miner makes a last rally, as up above a rescuer with a pick does the same...
...It concerns an East European mining disaster, and like the novel, has "two sets...
...Cecilia and Robbie have grown up together and have just finished their years at university, where they avoided each other, finding their easy childhood friendship turned awkward in a setting where class barriers—that perennial ingredient of British fiction—are divisive...
...Strictly speaking, this long section is not essential to the moral tale of injury and atonement, but it is narrated with such fierce verisimilitude—the wretched, bedraggled, fearful, hungry soldiers (their Amo bars long consumed) running from the strafing of German planes— that it justifies itself...
...What more telling definition of himself could he hope to find other than being what Larry was not...
...She imagines writing the scene she's witnessed: "Her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains...
...In 1940, having been released to serve in the infantry, Robbie, embittered but valiant, trudges through the French countryside to reach the Channel and home...
...How was he to understand himself now...
...At the start, to celebrate her adored older brother's return from London, Briony, the family's gifted darling, has written a play...
...What purpose would be served if...
...The Balkan politics are somewhat hazy here, but clearly Làszló is meant to be serving a just cause...
...Never mind...
...In residence is the Tallis family...
...Laszló's chance to salvage his own life comes in the form of a group of Albanian activists who ask him to smuggle a suitcase of money to Budapest, for arms against the Serbs in Kosovo...
...I relish literary sleight-of-hand as much as the next one, but with a novel which for 330 pages gives no hint it is that kind of game, I become "a certain kind of reader...
...Whether his theme is political, philosophical or domestic, he brings to it moral consciousness and educated skepticism, in shapely, intricate sentences George Eliot would have admired...
...Briony, with her dry-ice nature, is not unlike Bronte's heroine, Lucy Snowe, except she pursues her dreams more aggressively...
...In Miller's hands, Alice's unhappy marriage to an alcoholic, even the gruesome facts of her illness, acquire a kind of lyricism, filtered as they are through the awareness of a woman who has kept her identity intact despite the ravaging of her body...
...Her imminent death is forcing her sons to confront their failures and wrong turns...
...this entails an obligatory Hollywood scene of heroin-snorting and cavorting with stoned teen-aged sex kittens...
...The act was beyond him...
...What can be rescued...
...the second half leaps ahead five years to the War and the ignominious British retreat from Dunkirk...
...The father is away m London doing something obscurely connected with the approaching war and being unfaithful, and the mother is a patient Griselda, accepting, ineffectual and migraine-ridden...
...What connects the halves of the picture is Laszló's new play, Oxygène, which Alec Valentine is translating from French into English...
...To atone...
...Whether that pair can redeem their lives is less certain...
...That remains a worthy aspiration, both writers remind us, even if the results are forever out of reach...
Vol. 85 • March 2002 • No. 2
