Ian McEwan's remarkable new novel Atonement is a love story, a war story and a story about the destructive powers of the imagination...It is, in short, a tour de force … The novel, supposedly a narrative constructed by one of the characters, stands as a sophisticated rumination on the hazards of fantasy and the chasm between reality and art … There is nothing self-conscious or mannered about Mr. McEwan's writing. Indeed Atonement emerges as the author's most deeply felt novel yet – a novel that takes the glittering narrative pyrotechnics perfected in his last book, Amsterdam, and employs them in the service of a larger, tragic vision.
It is certainly his finest and most complex novel. It represents a new era in McEwan’s work, and this revolution is achieved in two interesting ways. First, McEwan has loosened the golden ropes that have made his fiction feel so impressively imprisoned...and second, McEwan uses his new novel to comment on precisely the kind of fiction that he himself has tended to produce in the past … I doubt that any English writer has conveyed quite as powerfully the bewilderments and the humiliations of this episode in World War II. After more than twenty years of writing with care and control, McEwan’s anxious, disciplined richness of style finally expands to meet its subject … Atonement ends with a devastating twist, a piece of information that changes our sense of everything we have just read….This twist, this revelation, further emphasizes the novel’s already explicit ambivalence about being a novel, and makes the book a proper postmodern artifact, wearing its doubts on its sleeve, on the outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators.
Here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel – irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit – that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago. Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust … McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma – for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities … If it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and Atonement your novel.
Ian McEwan has produced a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama … The writing is conspicuously good; and this goodness turns out to be, eventually, a subject of criticism in a droll show of artistic self-reference, although in the meantime it works an authentic spell … The novel's bloody illustrations of the horrors of war compel assent and pity, and yet, such is the novel reader's romantic nature, it is the lovers that keep us turning the page; theirs is the consummation we devoutly wish. Our wish is granted...in its tenderness and doubleness and final effect of height, in its postmodern concern with its own writing, and in its central topic of two upper-class sisters in the period between the world wars.
McEwan is under the influence of what can only be called a heat wave…[Atonement] confirms me in the belief that there is no one now writing fiction in the English language who surpasses McEwan, and perhaps no one who equals him … Atonement is at once incredibly lucid and forbiddingly dense. Every sentence is pellucid, yet every sentence is fraught with weight. As surely as if he had tied a chain around your waist and wound it through a powerful winch, McEwan pulls you toward the novel's climax and denouement, but there can be no rushing to get there … It is a story about class and war and crime and betrayal and penance, about all of which McEwan writes with abundant authority, and it is – as we realize toward the end – in and of itself an act of atonement, but above all it is a love story.
We have before us so fine and controlled a stylist that we may imagine we cannot ask for more; surely these are pleasures enough … Briony is a storyteller: she undertakes to shape and describe the world around her with, significantly, a pretense of objectivity...If Briony and McEwan are in some measure indistinguishable in this novel (and only in the novel's conclusion do we discover how profoundly this is so), there remains, owing to McEwan's subtleties, a distance between them, a distance that articulates itself in a new raggedness of form and in a self-conscious insistence on the novel's story-ness … There is nothing storylike about these visions, nothing tidy, no narrative advantage to their telling. Reading McEwan's work, we often find it impossible to slow down, so powerful is the pull of ‘What next?’
McEwan shows how accidents of history can elevate private shame and error to the world-historical plane … It isn't, in fact, until you get to the surprising coda of this ravishingly written book that you begin to see the beauty of McEwan's design – and the meaning of his title…Atonement's postmodern surprise ending is the perfect close to a book that explores, with beauty and rigor, the power of art and the limits of forgiveness. Briony Tallis may need to atone, but Ian McEwan has nothing to apologize for.
The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't do … McEwan's knowledge of the inner workings of these characters is so piercing that you can't help feeling sorry for them; only God should have such intimate knowledge … These disparate parts, alike only in their stunning effectiveness, combine to produce a profound exploration of the nature of guilt and the difficulty of absolution. As she clears the fog of adolescence, Briony must confront the destructive power of her fiction, even while pursuing its redemptive possibilities … We're each of us, McEwan suggests, composing our lives. And in those stories we can illustrate ‘the simple truth that other people are as real as us ... and have an equal value.’
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is a dark, sleek trap of a book. It lures its readers in with the promise of a morality tale set in an English country manor in 1935. There will be a crime, we learn, and so far the novel’s furnishings are at once cozy and exciting...Once we’re caught in his snare, though, McEwan takes us deep into far more menacing territory … Of the lies people tell themselves to make life more palatable, however, some are more dangerous than others. Briony’s coming of age involves a hard lesson in the difference … The question about atonement goes back to the root of the word: it means to be ‘at one,’ and sometimes refers to the sacrifice by which Jesus united man and God. A human being who becomes God in the act of creating fiction, though, is only all-powerful within that fictional world.
We generally think of accidents as events we cannot control, but is an event accidental if it occurs because we fail to control it? … Accidents and unanticipated occurrences happen to the Tallis family in tragic-comic proportions … McEwan courageously employs a ‘gotcha’ ending in Atonement...the device works beautifully because it comes directly and credibly from the novel's constructed reality … In this great exploration of accident versus moral choice, there are surely no accidental word choices. McEwan's writing is lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.
