Ian McEwan: Atonement

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

Traditional stories have a simple narrative structure, building like a wave approaching a shore, gathering pace and momentum as it crests and reaches a thundering climax.

Life is seldom like that. The momentous, calamitous events in our lives are unforeseen even if, in retrospect, it seems incredible that we didn't see them coming.

Life more commonly places events first and leaves us struggling with the consequences: we find ourselves gasping on the beach with an immediate memory of foam and confusion and merely inferring the orderly, inexorable advance of a wave preceding it.

One of the things that has propelled Ian McEwan to the top of the class of practitioners of contemporary fiction is the way in which he, too, reverses the order of traditional narrative structure. His novels begin with the climax, casting the reader without ado into a Situation, a whirl of events, a maelstrom of tensions; then come the aftermath and resolution.

In Atonement, his eighth and finest novel yet, McEwan creates several situations within the first 50 pages, each of which generates its own, excruciating suspense.

The overarching Situation is (what else?) a family gathering, the lead-up to a dinner at the country seat of the Tallis family on a sweltering summer's day in 1935. The Tallis family are all present, apart from the head of the household, who everyone knows is in London either doing his bit in the Government's preparations for war or passing time with his mistress.

His wife, Emily, is there, fighting off a migraine. Leon is coming up from London, Cecilia has come down from Cambridge. The youngest, 13-year-old Briony, is working on a play that she and her cousins, the Quincey children, will perform to the company.

Also expected for dinner are Leon's friend, Paul Marshall, and the gardener's-son-made-good, Robbie Turner.

Glancing out her window, Briony sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and immerse herself in the fountain as Robbie looks on. She is not sure what she has witnessed, but she senses at once that it signifies the end of her childhood. She believes that something unspeakable is going on, and she's right, even if it turns out she is looking in the wrong place.

This misunderstanding is the first in a series that creates a slide to catastrophe: by the end of the evening, three lives have been blighted by Briony's actions.

The novel picks up the three protagonists in this tragedy several years later. Robbie is in the Army, and the Army is retreating in disarray toward Dunkirk. Cecilia has become a nurse, and is waiting for him.

Briony, too, has become a nurse, and by now she has grown up sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the injustice she has done to Cecilia and Robbie, and she feels she must atone.

Then, just as it seems the novel is nearing a conclusion the reader can live with, it deals a final blow, as softly delivered as it is brutal in effect.

Atonement is about the relationship between reality and fiction. It is Briony's imagination that so tragically alters reality; it is her gift for fiction that gives her the opportunity for atonement. But the novel is also a reminder that you, the reader, are as powerless to control the events in fiction as you are, in reality, to alter the past.

In the wake of calamity, it is human nature to imagine better turns of events, happier endings; but the tragedy of the human condition is that imagination has no purchase on history. If you come to an Ian McEwan novel seeking escape from a world where this is so, you will not find it.

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, $59.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.