Manny's review of Atonement (original) (raw)

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Manny's Reviews > Atonement

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Atonement
by

1713956

** spoiler alert ** There are many reviews already of this book, and I did wonder whether the world needed any more. But I disagree so strongly with some of the opinions expressed that I'm afraid I have to exercise my right to reply. Two things in particular stand out.

Let me deal with the simpler one first. Some people seem appalled that the author is putting the guilt for this dreadful tragedy on the shoulders of a young girl. She didn't know what she was doing, they say; she was too young to understand the import of her actions, and we shouldn't hold her responsible. Well, it seems to me that this is completely beside the point. The novel, we finally learn, has been written by the girl herself. She's giving herself the blame for what happened. She's evidently spent her whole life wondering why she behaved the way she did, and she still doesn't really know. She's just trying to get the story as straight as she can, mainly so that she can understand it herself, and I found her efforts extremely moving. If anyone is claiming that people don't behave this way, all I can say is that their view of human nature is so different from mine that it'll be hard to have a meaningful conversation on the subject.

So now the second and more controversial part. Many reviewers dislike the post-modernist aspects. They complain that McEwan is taking a perverse pleasure in tricking the reader into a view of the story which is finally revealed as incorrect; that he's playing the unreliable narrator card out of sheer willfulness. Again, I completely disagree. I don't think these aspects of the book are irrelevant or peripheral; I think they're at the very core of it, and are what make it a great piece of literature. McEwan shows us a girl who becomes an author precisely because she wants to expiate the dreadful feelings of guilt she has suffered all her life. He lets her explain how it happened, in what we eventually discover is a book within a book. And the truly awful thing is that she can't do it. She cops out with a fake happy ending, because she still can't face what she did.

I don't think this is a trick; I think he's saying something about the very nature of writing. Many, many writers are like Briony. They write to absolve themselves of their guilt, but in the end they don't say what they want to say. It's too horrible to write down. They skirt around the issues, and end up presenting them in a more favourable light. If they're lucky, they may finally reach an age when they are so far removed from what happened that they can tell the story straight. This is what Briony does in the postscript, and I don't find it far-fetched. To take just one example, the first I happen to think of, look at Marguerite Duras. All her life, she kept thinking about her first love affair, and it coloured most of what she wrote. It was only when she was nearly 70 that she could set it down as L'Amant.

Before the events of the fountain, Briony was indeed just a little girl; all she could write was the amusingly mediocre Arabella. Afterwards, she had something that was worth saying, though it took a long time to figure out how to do that. When she'd completed her task, she was able to get back to the one she was engaged in when she was interrupted: I love the circular structure, which ends with Arabella being staged 60 years late. Of the many infuriating changes in the movie version, I think I was most annoyed by the removal of this key scene.

Wood burns, observes Monty Python's logician, as he gives an example of an incorrect syllogism; therefore, all that burns is wood. Similarly, the fact that much trickery is post-modern does not imply that all post-modernism is trickery. This is a great and heart-felt novel.

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Reading Progress

July 1, 2007 –Finished Reading

December 6, 2008 – Shelved

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