Atonement by Ian McEwan Doubleday, 351 pp., $26 IN 1971, at age twenty-two, Ian McEwan was Malcolm Bradbury’s first student in a new master’s degree program at the University of East Anglia in England–in what was then the very American subject of “creative writing.” Indeed, East Anglia’s program in literature probably would not have developed into a creative-writing degree if McEwan had not insisted upon submitting stories for his classroom assignments. He wrote a set of short stories for his master’s thesis, which was published in 1975 as “First Love, Last Rites” and won the Somerset Maugham Award. Since then, he has written “The Cement Garden” (1978), “The Child in Time” (1987), “The Innocent” (1990), “Black Dogs” (1992), “Amsterdam” (1997), and “Enduring Love” (1998). Along the way, he was short-listed twice for Britain’s most important literary award, the Booker Prize, and won it for “Amsterdam.” His latest novel, “Atonement,” tells the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose invented story of a rape sends her sister’s lover to prison–and of the “atonement” she must spend the rest of her life seeking. The book has quickly become one of the most widely discussed novels in years. Words like “masterpiece” and “triumph,” and phrases like “resurrection of the novel” and “first great book of the century,” have been lavished on McEwan’s effort. This much is certainly true: “Atonement” can’t be laid down once it’s been picked up, so artfully is the reader drawn into the pace of its prose and the details of its story. As usual, McEwan writes like an angel and plots like a demon. Yet the novel is, as the British term it, a “wind up,” a straight-faced and increasingly discomfiting manipulation of a victim (in this case, the reader). In “Atonement” McEwan has gone wrong–very wrong, for in the last two of the book’s 351 pages he completely destroys everything that has gone before. The problem may simply be that McEwan had written himself into a corner and saw no satisfactory way to complete his story. That’s bad enough, of course, for the author’s failure to come up with a real conclusion dissipates instantly all the plot tension and good will built up in the reader through page after page. But far worse is the way McEwan tries to get out of his problem. “Atonement” ends up abjuring all responsibility for what its author has evoked. Was there ever a great novel that concluded by saying, in essence, “I was only kidding–it was just a dream”? Someone needs to sit Ian McEwan down and make him read Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending.” Someone needs to make him look again at “Tom Jones,” “David Copperfield,” “Ulysses,” and “The Things They Carried,” to remind him how plots come to conclusions. Someone needs to wake him up. MCEWAN’S EARLIEST STORIES in “First Love, Last Rites” featured incestuous siblings, and actors who become so engrossed by their roles on stage that they actually have sex rather than merely performing it, and a sex criminal who nostalgically recalls his exploits. Such unsettling material soon earned McEwan his reputation as “Ian Macabre,” a title given to him by the British tabloids, which are fascinated by his interest in the freakish. In his first novel, “The Cement Garden,” parentless schoolchildren lose all trace of civilization and degenerate into a “natural” state: One is either reading science fiction or masturbating; another becomes a cross-dresser; and a third becomes a fascistic conformist. This book established McEwan as a natural for horror movies, and two of his novels have been filmed by major directors. Indeed, his second novel, “The Comfort of Strangers” (1981), couldn’t have had a better filming. The plot takes a handsome, somewhat passive and self-satisfied Englishman and his girlfriend, and puts them on vacation in Italy, where they fall into the hands of a sadistic Italian nobleman (played on screen by Christopher Walken with fine creepiness). BUT MCEWAN is not, in fact, a crude horror monger. His remarkable intelligence always pleases. He can write rings around most others writing in English today. He has a gift for calling up everyday life in spare, accurate detail–while at the same time evoking the potential menace in that detail if the story calls for it. He has a surprisingly witty appreciation of character types and the platitudes that drive them. And he has a gift for plotting so powerful that the reader is driven to finish the story no matter what horrors must be stomached along the way. What McEwan doesn’t have is much concern for character, and his characters can be distinguished from one another only by the places they occupy in his plots. Furthermore, what a character does, let alone what happens to the character, is totally a matter of accident–not even of fate, just of accident. This is unusual for a novelist. Fiction ordinarily presents us with a world in which everything is meaningful. A wound, a rape, a beggar: Anything depicted becomes relevant to a vision of the novel’s world. Thus, endings are ordinarily a product of the world presented in a novel and the protagonist’s character acting on that world. Endings are not really surprises; they are inevitable. That’s why one can read a good story or see a good movie more than once: One knows what will happen after the first reading, but one is captured by the elegance of its working out. McEwan’s endings, however, are always arbitrary. Take “The Child in Time” (1987), for example. The book displays all of McEwan’s electric energies. Set in the near future, it focuses on a horror feared by all parents–that their child might become separated from them and be harmed. Here, a three-year-old girl is abducted from her father, Stephen Lewis, after he has taken her out of his shopping cart so that he can lay groceries on the checkout counter. We hear about the abduction in piecemeal flashbacks a few years later while Stephen (he and his wife having separated under the strain) is alternately stupefied by drink or scanning the streets of London for his daughter. The reader is thus pushed into fearful anticipation of new details about the abduction and the possibility that the child has been murdered. At the same time, the reader is pushed to hope that the daughter will be recognized and recovered. This double anticipation makes for a tense read. The reader’s worry is reinforced by the novel’s being set in a London full of political corruption. The prime minister promotes Stephen’s friend as a successor, but the friend is descending into a second childhood. Begging children–licensed by the government–suggest the lost daughter. And while he is driving the nervous reader down these anticipatory roads, McEwan puts his protagonist on a government board that is writing “The Authorized Child-Care Handbook,” an official publication for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Lines from the handbook serve as increasingly severe chapter headings–putting forward, for example, that there is “evidence to suggest that the more intimately a father is involved in the day-to-day care of a small child, the less effective he becomes as a figure of authority.” From all this, the reader expects the novel’s plot to arrive at a comprehensive ending. But what we get from “The Child in Time” is simply an arbitrary finish: Stephen had gone to see his wife in order to measure the state of their estrangement. She was remote, but they had had intercourse out of loneliness and frustration. The novel ends with her telling him she is about to give birth, and they reunite to bring up their new child. Where is their lost daughter? Where is the consequence of their characters? What were all those references to children throughout the novel aiming at? We never know. STARTING with his first short stories, McEwan has developed a strain of sophisticated social satire, and it sits surprisingly well in his macabre chronicles, helping them to become real in political and historical time. Questioned in an interview about his interest in “diseased minds” and with “diseased and unsettling societies,” McEwan replies that “it is all after the event.” “It turns out that what I’ve written is unsettling, but I don’t sit down to think about what will unsettle people next. . . . I honestly was very surprised. My friends, most of whom had had a literary education, seemed to take for granted the field of play in the stories; they had read Burroughs, Celine, Genet, and Kafka, so that lurid physical detail and a sense of cold dissociation did not stun them. I was not aware of any pattern, and each story seemed to me at the time of writing to be a fresh departure, often with very trivial rhetorical ambitions.” But now, with “Atonement,” McEwan’s rhetorical ambition seems to be to write an old-fashioned “great” novel. All the proper characteristics are there: “Atonement” concerns a whole family on the eve of a large war and the difficulties of growing up into that world of war. The novel begins on a summer day in 1935 at an English country house (although McEwan doesn’t make the house a Merchant-Ivory stately mansion; indeed, he is typically satirical about the furnishings and provenance of the house) where the Tallises are gathering after Oxford University lets out for the summer holidays. The father is absent upon government affairs in London (and, it transpires, in the arms of his mistress). But the house is filled with siblings, their friends, their homeless cousins–and the key figure, a daughter named Briony Tallis. Briony is thirteen years old, para-pubescent, and confused about “romance,” although she is writing a play on the topic. Throughout the novel, she remains the voice of the writer and expresses in her many thoughts about writing the development of enthusiasms and disappointments common to any writer who thinks about the craft. “Briony” is a girl’s name in Britain, like “Heather,” taken from the name of a plant–in this case a thorny vine whose roots were used as a cure for the “hysteria” of menarche in earlier ages. (The names in “Atonement” are the closest McEwan comes to modern symbols.) The adolescent Briony becomes the one who will construct McEwan’s “Bildungsroman”–a classic novel of growing up. A bookish child, she misinterprets the erotic tensions in the house, in particular the tensions between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner. She dramatizes and draws on novels and romances to convince herself that Robbie is a rapist. In a fever of indignation, she reports he has raped their young cousin, and everyone believes her (the “victim” keeping silent for her own reasons). Briony thereby sends Robbie to prison, separates Cecilia from her lover and from the rest of the family, and consigns her own grown-up self to a purgatory of expiation–the “atonement” of the title. As this section ends, comprising about one third of the book, Briony lies in bed contemplating that “tragedy was bound to bring” her together with Cecilia. It doesn’t. We next see Robbie Turner five years later when he and two other enlisted men are fleeing the advancing German army on the outskirts of Dunkirk. At the same time, Briony is a student nurse at a hospital in central London, attempting through the gruesome work of nursing wounded soldiers to atone for her crime. McEwan barely glances at the years in between–let alone at Robbie’s arrest, trial, and incarceration or at Briony and Cecilia’s intra-family quarrels, or at any character development. Thus, when asked at eighteen why she came to believe there was no rape, Briony simply replies, “I grew up.” There is a whole other “Bildungsroman” in this remark, but McEwan turns out not to be writing the traditional “Bildungsroman.” MCEWAN’S INTEREST in the macabre finds its proper locale in war. Besides exquisitely detailing blood and brains spilling out of fallen bodies–whether on the battlefield or in the hospital–McEwan rises to an empathy that is warmer than his usual nonchalantly objective look at the horrible. When Robbie is lying injured and dazed at Dunkirk waiting for a boat to take him back to England, he decides he must “go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plow, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths” by his failure to move them out of the line of Luftwaffe strafing. Corporal Nettle hears him muttering in his dazed sleep and wakes him to stop his noise and give him some water. Robbie “tried to lift his head and found that he couldn’t.” Nettle “raised [Robbie’s] head and put the canteen to his lips.” “The water tasted metallic. When he was done, a long steady oceanic swell of exhaustion began to push him under. He walked across the land until he fell in the ocean. In order not to alarm Nettle, he tried to sound more reasonable than he really felt. ‘Look, I’ve decided to stay on. There’s some business I need to see to.'” This is in the grand tradition of men at war but so meticulously written that Robbie is clearly delusional in his heroic stoicism–a case of the writer eating his cake and having it too. McEwan’s dry wit is also much in evidence. As a student nurse, Briony must learn her craft before she tends to the wounded themselves. “This was the time of hygiene lectures, and of practicing blanket-baths on life-size models–Mrs. Mackintosh, Lady Chase, and baby George whose blandly impaired physique allowed him to double as a baby girl.” With “unthinking obedience,” Briony must learn to carry “bedpans in a stack” and remember “a fundamental rule: Never walk up a ward without bringing something back.” Like all McEwan’s work, “Atonement” is tensely plotted. We must wait to find out if a wound will kill Robbie or even if he will be taken off by boat from Dunkirk–just as Briony at the hospital constantly wonders whether Robbie has been killed in the war or will live so that she can at least set the record straight. The book is almost over before we are permitted to learn that Cecilia and Robbie are finally reunited and Robbie is vindicated. But then McEwan unexpectedly converts the story of Cecilia’s and Robbie’s later years into a novel that Briony is writing and rewriting. Although everything in the second part of “Atonement” is presented as though it happens on the same plane of reality as what happened in the first part, Briony tells us on the next-to-the-last page of the novel that “It is only in this last version [the novel we are reading] that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. . . . The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonements when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? . . . I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet.” How can this be? Cecilia and Robbie are characters just as real as Briony–indeed Cecilia is Briony’s sister, and Briony has betrayed Robbie. It is as if at the end of “Hamlet,” Hamlet were to come on stage and tell us that the deaths of Claudius and Ophelia were a figment of his imagination. In a kind of lunacy that one supposes he imagined was like Ionesco’s absurdity, McEwan destroys the structure he has set up and tells us it was all fiction. But we knew it was fiction. That is why we were reading it: to enter a world in which things are worked out, however severe the working out may be. THE ART OF FICTION is not whether fiction ends happily or sadly but how it does so. No one anticipates that Hamlet will live happily ever after, but we do anticipate that the ending will belong on the same plane as the story that has gone before. McEwan has set us up for a novel of consequence–a novel in which character is consequence–and then he makes it inconsequential. McEwan could, if he wished, have written a novel of arbitrariness. But he has written what pretends to be a novel of significance, and then stuck an arbitrary and weak ending on it, like a novice writer who doesn’t know how to close what he’s begun. The attempt to pass this off as an aspect of the creation engaged in by the writer Briony is completely unsuccessful. A wind up is a wind up. McEwan’s “sense of cold dissociation” this time extends to his readers. Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.
