Making It Up

Atonement explores fiction's power to make things right.

by John Freeman

Atonement By Ian McEwan Doubleday, 448 pp., $26

There are four different definitions for the word “atonement” in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, ranging from the tangible (“reconciliation”) to the metaphysical (“the exemplifying of man’s oneness with God”). In his latest novel, Ian McEwan probes the complex anatomy of these various meanings with the tale of a novelist who tries, through fiction, to make amends with the past.

The lengthy opening sequence of Atonement sets a beguilingly familiar stage. We are at a dinner party. The year is 1935, and the Tallises, an upper-middle-class English clan, have gathered to celebrate the homecoming of their eldest son, Leon, as well as their daughter, Cecilia, a student at Cambridge. Briony, the Tallis' petulantly intelligent third child, has written a play for the occasion, and several cousins have arrived from the north to star in her cast. All that's missing is Mr. Tallis, who is away -- as usual -- on business.

McEwan cycles through this intriguing bunch, introducing each to us as if we, too, are to dine with them and might benefit from some background information. What is so charming about this extended scene is not its familiarity -- dinner parties, after all, are a mainstay of Victorian fiction -- but the uncanny access it provides to the characters' interior lives.

Not since the 19th century has a writer stepped in and out of his character's minds with such unfettered confidence. As a result, when a simple accident occurs -- Cecilia encounters her lover, Robbie, by a fountain, and in a tussle they break a treasured family heirloom -- we immediately understand this simple event is bound to be misinterpreted by someone in the party.

Not surprisingly, Briony, ever watchful for "material" for her next play, observes the exchange from an upstairs window. Although precociously talented with language, there is much the girl has to learn about adult life and the nuances of romance. In her naivete, she believes she has witnessed something sinister. This misinterpretation is her first true fiction, and it sets off a chain of events that leads to her fingering Robbie for a crime he did not commit. Only when she is an adult, and a novelist, does she grasp the magnitude of her lie.

Novels about the quandaries of writing usually have a hermetic quality, but McEwan is a kind of literary pied piper; through the panache of his sentences he can woo a reader into exploring just about any subject, some of them unpleasant. In A Child in Time, he probed the secret fear every parent nurses about his or her child coming to harm. And in The Comfort of Strangers, he revealed the dark tint to extramarital longings. Here, McEwan's quarry is more theoretical, but the book does not suffer. Atonement is layered like a cake, and each layer rewards. The outermost crust tells the story of Briony's attempt to reconcile with her sister. Beneath that, there is Robbie's own atonement -- prison, and then a tour of duty at the battle of Dunkerque -- a horrific experience that proves there are things in life for which there is no redemption.

Finally, by dramatizing Briony's lifelong attempt to write herself out of a childhood lie, Atonement exposes writing to be a kind of imperfect expiation for life's failures. Since a novelist plays god, "[t]here is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her." What Briony did not understand as a child, and what this novel so movingly tells us, is that by supplanting god on the page, a writer assumes god's responsibility for justice, as well as the weight of god's grief.