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Okay, so now we know that Atonement
hasn't won the Booker Prize, but Atonement has won the popular vote (even if
the publishers must feel slightly foolish in regards to their promotion of
this book - "Past Booker Winners from Random House" etc).
Atonement is a far better novel than McEwan's own Booker winning Amsterdam, and
so the publishers must have thought that they had a very good chance of winning
(although the bookies correctly opted for Peter Carey's The True History of the
Kelly Gang). The Booker Prize panel does have a tendency of
awarding the gong to writers they feel should win (and not necessarily for the
best book). Margaret Atwood has written some fantastic novels, and
although The Blind Assassin is very good, it is definitely not her best.
The same could be said for Ian McEwan's Amsterdam: Enduring Love was much
better, but McEwan won the Booker for his paltry follow-up. Maybe McEwan
has been trying to atone since then? Atonement has received a great deal
of praise, if only "because it's the kind of novel that wins the Booker
Prize", but other critics have suggested that he has done no less than
reinvent the novel. But can you really make the 'new' more 'new'?
The novel kicks off with a passage from Northanger
Abbey (for which I recommend the Everyman edition, edited by my cousin,
Elisabeth Mahoney), although Ian McEwan omits the scenes that prove that Jane
Austen created baseball. You immediately get the sense that this could be
a novel about a young girl on the cusp of womanhood who goes around in a state
of near paranoia, so vivid is her imagination. It helps Atonement very
much that Briony Tallis, the young girl in question, is a wannabe
novelist. She has migrated from fairy tales to plays, although her
playwrighting career is not destined to last very long (and there may be a few
playwrights out there who might gnash their teeth at McEwan's denigration of
their art). One immediately notices how polished the text is:
McEwan has worked very hard on Atonement, and it shows. Amsterdam closely
followed Enduring Love and was poorer in comparison. The longer gap
between Amsterdam and Atonement, and presumably the more labour that has gone
into it, really shows. Although the novel starts off in 1935, McEwan
seems to be aiming for the timeless, classic touch, rather than just period
detail.
Since it's 1935, most of the characters know that
something ominous is on the horizon. Jack Tallis is doing his best to
prepare for it, Emily Tallis doesn't want it to happen, and Paul Marshall, true
to his name, seeks to profit from it, by selling his Amo chocolate bars to the
Army. The name of Amo, of course, is derived from the Latin for 'I love',
but it sounds like Ammo and looks good in khaki. Briony has her mind
totally set on the play she's writing - The Trials of Arabella - and in this,
she seems just as opportunistic as Paul Marshal, as she seizes upon the
arrival of her cousins to stage her play, never mind that they are distraught
by the rather public divorce of their parents. It's here that Briony
first encounters the haughty Lola, the older sister of twin brothers Jackson
and Pierrot, who's even closer to womanhood. The twins, it turns out,
can't act for toffee, and Lola is indifferent. Also in the house is
Cecilia, Briony's sister, and Robbie Turner, the son of the family help, both
of whom have studied literature at Cambridge. Cecilia has always been a
bit patronising towards her younger sister's literary talents, but is unaware
of how potent Briony's dramatic skills have really become...
Atonement is a novel about 'meaning', in all the
perambulations of the word, especially since novels are always supposed to mean
something. This is where Ian McEwan is very clever, especially in the way
he shows how perceptions to change over time. If I read Atonement again,
then I'm sure that I will see new things in it. But central to the plot
is how limited and personal perception is. There's the young Briony
standing at the window, seeing the extraordinary scene of her sister Cecilia
stripping down into her undies in front of Robbie Turner, and diving into the
fountain. And there's yet another and another scene where Briony
observes, but does not see. That our perceptions can be so human, so
inaccurate, does tend to throw doubt on the whole nature of reality, and on the
very basis of human communication. A literary novel is evident of the
human desire to communicate at the highest level. Yet McEwan guides us
very carefully - he lets us see what Briony does not. Yet there's an
unsettling "B.T." within this book, and we're not talking about
telecommunications. One of the many themes of this book is the novel in
the twentieth century - we've already seen a little of how Briony herself
progresses as a writer. As Cyril Connolly might have put it, Ian McEwan
has put a narrative into the development of the novel. A lot of critics
have read this, and because they like logical conclusions, they believe and
state that Ian McEwan has reinvented the novel, and that he's finally found a
new valid model to replace that magic realism and Bloomsbury stuff. The
Author is not dead, since he was God all along, and had a neat line in
resurrection, is what they seem to be saying. Yet I would contend that
Ian McEwan has ended with a parlour trick along with a parlour entertainment.
If critics really believe that what McEwan is doing is all that particularly
novel, then they'll get a nasty shock if they ever come across the similar
resolution to James Hoggs' 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner'. Atonement is a fantastic, highly stylised read, with a potent
erotic charge, and highly ambitious - but McEwan has not reinvented the novel -
he's just written a fantastic book.
Authortrek rating: 9/10
Kevin Patrick Mahoney
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Chapter one - an
extract printed in the Guardian
Northanger
Abbey - more about the Jane Austen novel that kicks off Atonement
Rabindranath
Tagore - a bio of the writer mentioned on p. 7
What
Means the Fish Symbol - mention Quintus Tertullian p. 7
Evanesce -
a definition p. 16
Bernini's Triton -
a picture (see p. 18)
Rugosas -
more about the Rugosa Hedge p. 19
Sir
Nikolaus Pevsner - see p.19
Adam-style
house - gives you an idea of what one looks like p. 19
Adam
Style - named after architect Robert Adam
Meissen
Porcelain - see p. 23
A Brief
History of Meissen Porcelain - mentions Horoldt p. 24
Nicholas Revett -
see p. 72
Stuart
and Revett and the Acropolis
T S
Eliot - see p. 82
Versailles,
the Envy of Europe – mentions Andre Le Notre p. 84
The Last
Critic? The Importance of F R Leavis - see p. 91
The
Village by Crabbe -p. 93
The
Village - read the poem
W H
Auden - a bio
Barsac
AC - Oz Clarke's view on this wine p. 128
nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect
of my hopes - is from Twelfth-Night Act 3 Scene 4 - p. 131
Lady
Chatterley's Lover - see p. 132
Heal's -
where Corporal Nettle worked before the war p. 196
In the nightmare of the dark, All the dogs of Europe
bark - p. 203 from 'In Memory of W B Yeats' by W H Auden
Joe
Lyons tea house - p. 204 is mentioned here
Griselde -
p. 204 - this seems to be a reference to The Clerk's Tale from Chaucer's The
Canterbury Tales
Cyril
Connolly - a bio - see p. 212
Cyril
Connolly - another bio
Traditional
Scottish Songs: Wee Deoch an Doris - the source of the 'It's a braw
bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht' quote p. 218
Mass Evacuation
from Dunkirk - mentions Lord Gort p. 221
RAMC -
p. 223 is the Royal Army Medical Corps
Messerschmitt Bf
109G-10 "Gustav" - a wepage about the fighter that strafes
Robbie Turner in the evacuation from Dunkirk p. 223
divagation -
a definition p. 224
Operation
Dynamo - mentions the Bergues-Furnes Canal p. 225
The Friends of
the Green Howards homepage - see p. 239
"In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing
fountain start" is another quote from 'In Memory of W B Yeats' p. 242
"Oh,
when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave" - p. 262
this comes from A E Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad'
Volunteer Aid
Detachments - p. 274 - VADs
Basil Liddell Hart -
see p. 288
Basil
Henry Liddell Hart - another bio
Bye
Bye Blackbird - the lyrics p. 289
Piazza Navona -
p. 314 Bernini was the architect, but the Triton fountain is in the Piazza
Barberini
Dusty
Answer - p. 314 was written by Rosamund Lehmann
An
extract from The Swan in the Evening - Rosamund Lehmann, graduate of
Girton, speaks of Dusty Answer - she could almost be the model for Briony, with
accusations that she was writing about people she knew
Elizabeth
Bowen - a bio
Balham
Tube Station - p. 348 an eyewitness account of the disaster
Royal
Bethlem Hospital: Bedlam - p. 353 is mentioned on this page
Spotty
Handed Villainesses - in this entertaining lecture, Margaret Atwood,
winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, ruminates on the novelist as God theme, as
Briony does
The Death of the
Author as an instance of theory - John Lye discusses all the theories
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