Ian McEwan's Atonement

Julie Ellam

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441135773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Continuum Contemporaries series gives readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years. This guide to Atonement features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the novel, a summary of the novel's popular and critical reception, a discussion of the recent film adaptation and a great deal more. If you are studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, you'll find this guide informative, intelligent, and helpful.

1.
The Novelist

Ian McEwan has had a long and successful writing career that dates from the mid-1970s. Since then, he has gone on to prove his versatility and although he is mainly known as a novelist and writer of short stories, he has also written two librettos, Or Shall We Die? (1983) and For You (2008), and the film scripts The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985) and Soursweet (1988), which is based on the Timothy Mo novel. The Daydreamer (1994) is a work of children’s fiction.

He has become a mainstay in British contemporary literature and each new publication is largely welcomed by the critics and his expanding readership. His fiction has become known for its displays of meticulous research and his novels are recognizable, especially since the late 1990s, for an economy of style. From the outset he was seen as a promising new talent and with his first publication, a collection of short stories entitled First Love, Last Rites (1975), he received a Somerset Maugham Award. His second work, In Between the Sheets (1978), which is another collection of short fiction, has a similar thematic use of violence while also maintaining a distance from its subject matter. Over the decades, his writing has been less willing to shock and he has evolved gradually into a writer with broad appeal. It is also of note that his novels are studied more at A-level than works by any other living British novelist (Mullan, 2007).

His work was highly regarded before the publication of Atonement (2001a), but this particular novel continues to stand out as one of his greatest achievements to date and is an exaggerated testament to how he is a rarity in the literary establishment. That is, Atonement highlights how he is both celebrated as a writer of literary fiction and also massively popular with the reading public. Since its original publication, it has been on national and international bestselling lists and has sold four million copies, which, again, is an unusual feat for a work of this type. The adaptation to film in 2007 has served to contribute to the novel’s high profile. It has brought about a further resurgence in sales and was republished as a tie-in with the film.

McEwan was born in 1948 in Aldershot and spent the early part of his childhood abroad according to where his father was posted by the army. In an interview with Kate Kellaway, he refers to how he ‘grew up with the “detritus of war” around him’ (Kellaway, 2001). He belongs to the generation that grew up immediately after the war and it was made a part of his life with the stories his father told him of his involvement in it and with the fact that his babysitters were corporals. This is significant in relation to Atonement given that his father used to tell him about what happened to him in the Dunkirk retreat.

From 1959 to 1966, he attended Woolverstone Hall, a state boarding school in Suffolk, and this is described by Matthew Kibble in Literature Online as a place where ‘working-class children from central London were taught alongside those who, like himself, came from military families’, and is a former school of writers such as Rudyard Kipling (Kibble, 2000). McEwan is quoted in John Mullan’s ‘Profile’ as saying he looks back at himself at this time as being ‘sort of depressed’ and ‘more or less obedient’ to the requirements of studying for his exams up to degree level. He reasons that this is understandable when one considers that his parents were 2,000 miles away in North Africa at the time. He says that his early fiction showed a ‘bold’ and perhaps too violent side that, he implies, was an outlet for the more introverted aspect of his personality in these younger days (Mullan, 2007). He is also on record as saying that he did not weep when he attended boarding school, but ‘just clammed up for four or five years’ (Deveney, 2005).

He went on to study English and French at Sussex University from 1967 to 1970. His parents were working class and both left school at the age of 14, and in an interview with Catherine Deveney in the New Scotsman he tells how proud his father was that his son went on to study at university. He sees his parents’ generation as a ‘wasted’ one, in that although his father was intelligent he was inevitably unable to go to university because of the need to earn a living (Deveney, 2005).

When tracing McEwan’s background to explain his success, his decision to take the then new MA in Modern Fiction and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (1970–1971) appears to be one of those pivotal moments that he favours so often in his work. The MA, which was founded by Professor Malcolm Bradbury and Sir Angus Wilson, has since been recognized as influential for many others, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright and Tracy Chevalier, but McEwan was the first: ‘The significance of the Wilson-Bradbury connection, in a broader literary-historical sense, is that McEwan comes out of a literary stable (so to speak), associated with the liberal identity in crisis’ (Head, 2007, p. 4). This point is proven plainly in his early fiction and with more confidence and complexity in later novels such as Enduring Love (1997), Atonement and Saturday (2005).

Dominic Head gives further biographical details of this period and outlines how in 1972 McEwan joined the hippie trail to Afghanistan. In 1974, he moved to Stockwell from Norwich and became involved with the New Review, which became a magnet for other emerging writers such as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Craig Raine. At this time, he was also awaiting the publication of First Love, Last Rites and working on In Between the Sheets in pursuit of a writing career (Head, 2007, p. 4).

Early fiction

McEwan’s writing career from this period into the 1980s is significant because of the use of violence, obscenity and taboo-breaking subject matter. Morality is twisted or rejected, as in the story ‘Homemade’, which is included in First Love, Last Rites and was his first publication after being accepted by The New American Review. This is where the adolescent first-person narrator decides to lose his virginity by raping his 10-year-old sister, Connie, and the story begins at the end with her crying. It goes on to detail how he learns to become an adult with Raymond, who is a year older, and begins to think of his virginity as a ‘malodorous albatross’ (McEwan, 1991, p. 29). This chilling tale succeeds in being as shocking and disturbing as appears to have been intended.

The eponymous short story, ‘First Love, Last Rites’, is set over the period of a summer and is also preoccupied with the development from adolescence into adulthood. The first-person narrator and his girlfriend, Sissel, hear noises behind the skirting board and the last rites refer to the death of the rat that they have heard, which the narrator refers to as ‘our familiar’, as well as the end of their youth (McEwan, 1991, p. 96).

McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), is an unsettling take on family life and culminates in sibling incest after the four children are orphaned. When they are left alone, their circle tightens in a harsh parody of the institution of the family and it is only disrupted by the outsider, Derek. In McEwan’s interview with Deveney, he explains how this novel is about ‘absent parents’. He also says how it addresses the sentiments he had while growing up in which he wished his parents would ‘somehow painlessly melt away’ as this would leave the ‘ground cleared’ for him (Deveney, 2005). This daydream echoes the Freudian formulation of the family romance, where the child imagines being free of his or her parents, and is connected to the process of growing up and separating from the once idealized parents. The orphaned child has been a significant figure in literature as he or she is then given a freedom and independence from parental (and societal) control.

The Comfort of Strangers (1981) is his second novel and is set in an unnamed city that can only be Venice. The narrative follows two tourists, Colin and Mary, as they become caught up in a relationship with Robert and Caroline. Just as The Cement Garden refuses to offer a traditionally moral perspective of the family, The Comfort of Strangers destabilizes the truism of a loving relationship as it represents sado-masochism rather than dismisses it. Because it refuses to simply criticize violence it is an unsettling work, as the concept of collusion in the perpetration of violent acts is placed in the foreground (again) and the readers are entrusted to evaluate if it is possible to be complicit as a victim. In terms of questions of morality this is a problematic debate, as there is the implication that there is a choice taken in being a victim, and also the suggestion that it is possible to take pleasure from this too.

By engaging with taboo subjects such as incest and sadomasochism rather than only condemning them, McEwan has earned the reputation of a controversial writer, and in the past has been known by the moniker ‘Ian Macabre’ and as an enfant terrible of contemporary British writing (Kellaway, 2001). Some may say this view was confirmed in 1979 when the production of Solid Geometry (which he adapted from a story taken from First Love, Last Rites) was halted by the BBC on the grounds of obscenity. The storage of a penis in a jar is the standard cited reason for this censorship, but, as Kiernan Ryan points out, the smashing of the jar and the obvious ineffectuality of the member is also an allegory for questioning patriarchal dominance (Ryan, 1994, p.29). The screenplay was later published in The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (1981) and refilmed and screened on Channel 4 in 2002. Ryan regards the adaptation as significant when looking back over McEwan’s early career: ‘Solid Geometry emerges with hindsight as a kind of bridge between McEwan’s first three books and the new territories mapped in The Imitation Game’ (Ryan, 1994, p. 27). He goes on to imply that this play version highlights a movement towards demonstrating an interest in feminism, and possesses a wider understanding of sexual politics than has previously been seen in McEwan’s writing.

Of his next main novels, there is a continued examination of the effects of horrific incidents on the main protagonists, as well as an increase in confidence in his storytelling techniques. In The Child in Time (1987), for instance, Stephen and his wife are observed as they suffer the grief that comes with the abduction of their child. Irony is also heaped on as Stephen is an accidentally successful children’s author and a member of the Official Commission on Child Care.

The Innocent (1990), which is set in Berlin in the 1950s during the Cold War, is both a thriller and love story. The idea of the loss of innocence is a central concern and this is examined through its central protagonist, Leonard Marnham. Black Dogs (1992) remembers the lasting effects of the Second World War through the horror generated by the eponymous dogs and also returns to Berlin after the wall comes down. This was followed by Enduring Love, which begins momentously with a tragedy involving a hot-air balloon and goes on to cover the theme of obsession most notably when Jed Parry stalks Joe Rose. Science is another key theme, and this is made central because of Joe’s work as a populist science writer.

The Booker Prize-winner Amsterdam (1998), which beat off other contenders such as Master Georgie (1998) by Beryl Bainbridge and Breakfast on Pluto (1998) by Patrick McCabe, begins with the funeral of Molly Lane and introduces three of her former lovers. The underlying theme of euthanasia is brought in at this early stage and provides the means for the final element of black comedy. It is commonly thought by critics that this is one of McEwan’s weaker novels and has been regarded, therefore, as an unlikely one to win the Booker (Lyall, 1998). Both The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs were shortlisted in previous years, and it has been touted that McEwan was given the prize for Amsterdam as a consolation.

More recent fiction

Since then, Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach (2007) have also been shortlisted for this award, and McEwan has been named twice as a contender for the Man Booker International Prize (in 2005 and 2007). He has also been the recipient of numerous other awards, such as the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 2003 for Atonement and the Whitbread Novel Award for The Child in Time. As if to confirm his stature as a highly thought of British author, and perhaps to confirm his place in the establishment now, he was also awarded the CBE in 2000.

Over the decades, his writing has moved from placing a covert rather than overt psychological pressure on his characters and readers. In 1994, Ryan argued the case that claims of a vast change in McEwan’s writing should only be made cautiously: ‘The focus of McEwan’s did shift dramatically after The Imitation Game. But the temptation to reduce his development to an exemplary tale of moral maturation or artistic depletion needs to be resisted. Such simplified accounts of his trajectory obscure the continuities and contradictions of his work’ (Ryan, 1994, p. 4).

Following Ryan’s reasoning, a sweeping account of his oeuvre would only be detrimental to the individuality of each of his works, but one only needs to compare Atonement, Saturday or On Chesil Beach with The Cement Garden to see a more developed use of characterization and intricacy of structure in each of these later works. It is also necessary to remember that Ryan’s point was made in the early 1990s and so he did not have the luxury of seeing the considerable change in McEwan’s later style. It is not that his earlier writing was immature, but the point stands that a desire to please with more complexity has taken over from the desire to shock, and this is evident when considering his trajectory. McEwan states in ‘The Ghost in My Family’ that his ‘heart sinks’ at what he now calls his ‘staring-at-the-wall fiction’ and now wants to create a ‘realised world’ (Appleyard, 2007). At this point, he says he feels he has greater clarity as a writer than he did in the 1970s and is more able to expand on his ideas. This gradual shift in perspectives has come about with a more ambitious view of the possibilities available. On Chesil Beach, for example, is a pared-down tale of a doomed marriage that does not survive the honeymoon, and although it retains some of the now-familiar McEwan bleak worldview as well as looking at the effects of a single, momentous action, its style is elevated from his earlier work.

Atonement is less willing to challenge taboos than his earlier novels, but it still maintains the same overhanging threat that has been a consistent feature over the years. In ‘A Version of Events’, Robert MacFarlane explains how because of this it is still recognizably McEwan’s: ‘While the explicit morbidity of, say, In Between the Sheets (1978) or The Cement Garden (1978) has receded in his more recent work, the air of imminent calamity remains. This is powerfully the case in the opening part of Atoneme...