Ian McEwan's latest novel, Atonement, which was published, released, nominated for a Booker Prize, and denied that Booker Prize - all before its release in the US - was well worth the wait.
McEwan is a master of his own riveting structure. Those familiar with his work know to expect a reasonably blissful set of characters into whose lives a single moment will leave a dreadful scar. That moment, whether letting a child out of one's sight in the grocery store at the wrong instant, letting go of the rope that might have tethered the runaway balloon, or agreeing to enact euthanasia for the friend whose eccentric mindset you can no longer gauge,
will be without the ease of clear-cut fault, but will wage a war of guilt and resentment on the entire cast.
Certainly this is the case with Atonement, as well, although the novel also marks the decided growth of McEwan as an author and a social critic.
Atonement is the story of the Tallis family, which begins on a blistering day at the family's English countryside estate in 1933. There is an Austen-like charm and austerity to this clan and their decaying estate. Leon is the eldest of the children, a good-natured workaday banker, who refuses his father's offers for better opportunities. Cecilia, fresh from Cambridge, feels the liberating power of the educated woman in the 1930s, and the frustration that those around her do not sense it at all.
Young Briony, thirteen, and lost in her thoughts, spends the happiest moments of her life in fantasy, depressed at the mundane reality she must face when daydreams disappear. Her cousins, fresh in town from the wake of terrible domestic squabbles, are coming to terms, with little help from this bunch, with the obscenity of divorce.
The children's parents are aloof and grim, lacking warmth, decency, and the least parental instinct, but in this strange household, in which everyone is silently trapped in their own thoughts, the behavior goes seemingly unnoticed.
It is Robbie, among the children, who owns the privilege of a Cambridge education, and decent parenting. He is, however, the son of the family housekeeper, whose education was footed by Mr. Tallis, and there is an ominous sense of resentment among the rest of the quiet tribe.
McEwan's moments alone with these characters in the first half of the book (nearly half a book devoured before that anticipated hideous moment!) provide the forum for his strongest writing. Each of these family members has been drawn together for a wickedly hot day at this palatial estate, but each silently weaves a dream of escape..... Leon from a life of privilege, Cecilia to any remote port, Briony to her daydreams, the cousins back home, Robbie to med school, Mr. Tallis to his mistress, and Mrs. Tallis to a time when she saw a greater range of hope for the fate of her children.
Atonement is an extremely patient narrative, which paints a picture of the 1930s British countryside in the style of Jane Austen, then turns up the heat (literally and figuratively), as the menace simmers beneath the thoughts of these complacent characters.
The second half of the novel is more Tim O'Brien than Jane Austen, and while McEwan delivers a terrific blow by blow account of the British escape from the doomed warfields of France, this half of the novel lacks some of that wonderful, soulful insight of the first half.
McEwan loves to tackle enormous tragedy, and then, with a master's eye turned on the human heart, deconstruct the process of loving, hating, fleeing, embracing, turning inward, and lashing outward that becomes his subjects' fate. His prose is concise, sometimes almost clinical, and though his prose may read a little spare for some, his insights into the patterns of the mind due to the troubles of the heart put him a notch above his peers.
Sixty years from the beginning of the novel, we find our protagonist searching for something, still guilt-stricken, still searching inwardly. No matter the struggles, suggests McEwan, no matter the time, atonement is a most delicious solution to the tragedies of a lifetime. Whether from another or from within one's own self, however, atonement may also prove as elusive and mystifying a connection as one could ever hope to make.
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