Atonement
Atonement by Ian McEwan
I have decided to begin this blog with my thoughts on Atonement. Although it is has now been a few weeks since I finished the novel, it seems like the appropriate place to begin this record of books because it is one that has lingered with me after I finished the last page.
The first half of the novel deals with the events that take place at the Tallis family home on the hottest day of summer in 1935. These events are described through the perspectives of various different characters, who all come to different conclusions about the significance of these events because none of them understand them in the same way. (Because of this narrative technique, I found the novel to be highly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway.) The way that McEwan reveals what happened on that hot summer’s day is where the suspense of the novel lies, because as you look at the same occurrence through the eyes of different people, you get closer to the truth of what happened. Or do you? Part of what I loved about the novel was the way it deals with the issues of truth and reality because it demonstrates that all we know is shaped by our perceptions.
Part II then jumps ahead five years to 1940 to examine the effects of the now 18-year-old Briony Tallis’s misunderstanding of what she saw on that summer’s day, and the crime she commits because of it. I found this to be a rather jarring leap into the future because of the accompanying shift in style; however, I adored the meta-fictional commentary McEwan employed with this change in style.
I think that this novel has quickly become one of my very favourites, and in addition is one I wish I had written myself.
It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clarity of the light of a summer’s morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow’s flight over water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. She had read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change. To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do it within a symmetrical design – this would be an artistic triumph.
