 Atonement (2001)
I'm on an unstoppable Ian McEwan kick, intent on reading all his books sooner rather than in some eventual fantasy future when you can just plug a firewire cable into your head and download books straight into your cybernetic brain. No, McEwan's books are there to be savored and treasured, hopefully long after humans evolve into invisible wireless consciousnesses.
Who will be left to read books then? It doesn't really matter, as long as my thought-cloud can settle on the pages every once in a while and recall the fat old body I left behind and its fumbling fat fingers struggling to hold up a book which was often too heavy for its weakened, flailing arms. Really, 600 pounds was too much weight for my skeleton to bear. Yet getting there was divine.
There's really no other author I can think of who consistently matches McEwan's wit, depth and humanity – although, arguably I've never been as consistently fanatic about any other writer. Even my cherished Kazuo Ishiguro seems a little musty these days. But McEwan's work lingers in my head for months and years after reading it.
The trend continues with Atonement, a novel that plays with themes of guilt, redemption, and the destructive and healing power of the imagination.
The book starts in 1935 outside London, where burgeoning 13-year-old writer Briony Tallis witnesses a series of private interludes between her older sister Cecilia and the grown son of the family maid, Robbie Turner. For Cecilia and Robbie, the interactions result in the awakening of long ignored emotions between them. But Briony, in her fevered pre-adolescent dramatist's mind, constructs a totally different, and deeply sinister interpretation.
Briony's fantasy, and her desire to be a fairy tale heroine of her own creation, lead to a horrible incident that shatters the extended family and in effect destroys everyone's lives, with implications that span more than 65 years.
The book takes an excruciating time to get going, and I almost lost faith in McEwan for his extended passages about the quality of light, descriptions of the family estate and so forth.
But it was well, well worth the opening slog. About maybe 75 pages in, just prior to the central incident, the pace picks up and the book becomes un-put-down-able. And, without giving anything away, the astounding final chapter is heartbreaking and lovely in totally unexpected ways.
Atonement is as much about writing and the writer's God-like restructuring of the world, as it is about actual atonement and redemption. McEwan subtly tracks Briony's education as a novelist from the moment she first discovers her literary power to the point where she realizes how powerless and weak she—and her fiction—really is.
What's so incredible about the book is that only after reading the final line do you fully realize (if you've been paying attention) what McEwan's been up to – why the first part is so slow and lingering on seemingly unimportant details, why the second part so intense and high in drama and plot, why the conclusion so melancholy. Because Atonement doesn't just show Briony's development as a writer, it actually is her development as a writer. And yet, it's not. But maybe it is. That's the beauty of McEwan's understated genius.
He's a master literary trickster – the trick in Atonement is revelatory but subtle enough to be lost on the average beach reader who just wants to read a damn good book. And it builds throughout the novel so that, when finished, you want to go back and read the whole thing (or parts of it) again.
And best of all, Atonement includes the best, most dramatically relevant use of the word "cunt" I've ever seen. I shite you not.
Review by Crimedog |