Atonement

Atonement
by Ian McEwan
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I try not to read too much about these books before I read them.  Afterwards I might go back and see what the critics thought or what the author said about the novel or at least read the page on Wikipedia, but I like to form my own opinion first.  The first third or so of most books is a game where I'm trying to figure out what kind of book it is, what the author is trying to say, and why he wrote the book.

Through that lens, it seemed like Ian McEwan was messing with my head.  As I read the first section of Atonement (the part labelled "Book I"), I kept seeing setups of what kind of story this way.  A silly misunderstanding over an accident as Robbie and Cecilia broke the vase?  No, Cecilia just fixed it, good as new.  The semi-autobiographical story of a writer's development, as a paragraph reveals little Briony's future history as an author?  No, let's forget about that for a few hundred pages.  The story of Robbie's unrequired love?  No, it just takes a couple dozen pages to reveal the love is requited after all.  Is the not-yet-seen husband having an affair, and that's going to be a big reveal?  Well, he is, but no, it isn't.  His wife Emily is well aware Jack's not staying in a hotel when he has to work late in the city, but doesn't care.

But just when I thought the novel was going nowhere, that it was just an exploration of the form, teasing me with hints of stories, McEwan staggered me with a right cross.  Books II and III, which focus on Robbie's experience as an infantryman in World War II and Briony's nursing career in a wartime hospital, respectively, are devastating.  There's a scene between Briony and a wounded French soldier where you can see the tragic ending coming from pages away it does nothing to cushion the blow.  The effect is, I imagine, calculated to approximate the effect of a war, with all of the melodramatic prose describing 11-year-old Briony's despondency over the disruption of her play seeming very silly compared to 18-year-old Briony dealing with real matters of life and death.

The novel then takes a meta twist towards the end, and ultimately the book stands as a statement on the life-destroying and life-preserving powers of fiction, and the God-like qualities an author possesses while wielding a pen.  Atonement is a great book that will be kicking around in my brain for a long time to come.