*Spoilers
lie ahead like the wounded and the dead on Robbie’s road to Dunkirk.*
If there’s
one thing I’ll take away from reading 100 English-language fiction novels in a
row it’s that literary tastes vary as widely as there are readers in this world. Books that have made me dizzy with their
language and story have been reviewed by others with scorn and distaste. Novels that have been merely ho-hum to me
have 3 pages of splash quotes behind their cover and a trail of 5-star reviews
on Goodreads in which reviewers gasp for breath to express how gorgeous they
think the writing is. We all engage in
fiction in different ways, demand different things from the stories we read,
and delight in different literary conventions.
We all use the words character, plot, narrative, poetry, movement,
realism, and the like, but what is a fully-developed character to me, is a
cardboard cutout to you, and vice versa.
And our feelings about any
given novel, as they are with all art forms, are so strong that someone else’s
emotional reaction makes no sense to us.
How can they like this?! How can
they not like that?!
Atonement
is the first novel by Ian McEwan that I have read, and according to the pages
of excerpted quotes of “international acclaim” that opens my edition it is the
finest of his novels, a masterpiece written by a top novelist at the top of his
game. When I hit the half-way point,
which is where Part I comes to a close, I read the pages of praise and turned
to Ann, my wife, and said “the second half of this book must be amazing,
because the first half was . . . fine.” I
endured Part II, mostly enjoyed Part III, and liked the epilogue. McEwan is obviously an accomplished writer,
and I found his prose perfectly competent.
I didn’t read anything that sent me running to my computer to share
passages with friends, nothing that made me ache or shudder. To those who found that aching-shuddering-deliciousness
in McEwan’s prose, I am so glad you found something you love.
The
characters were excellent, and I liked the division of the novel into its
parts. I liked the formal structuring of
the first half of the novel, the pre-war piece that covers the events of a
single day. I liked that that formal
structure took a hit with the coming of war as chapter numbers fell away. I was accepting of the love story of Cecilia
and Robbie, though their mad 15-minute love affair seemed a little ludicrous to
me, a way to put in a large movement in the plot while maintaining Aristotle’s
Unities. That that brief love-affair
would survive four years of prison and a year of war seemed even more ludicrous
to me, but I was willing to accept it for the sake of the story. Of course, one of the major themes of the
novel is the mysterious boundary between reality and fiction and the godlike
creative powers of the storyteller, so it is perfectly in keeping with that
theme to create star-crossed lovers who have no time to even know who they love
but all the time to keep loving them.
In the end,
it is this theme that lies beneath the story that I found truly engaging, once
that theme became clear in the last 40 pages of the novel. The notion of authorial invention is of
course made plain in the opening section through Briony’s character and through
the unintentional lie that shapes everyone’s future, but it seemed to have been
put aside for the entirety of the second section in which Robbie trudges the 20
miles through French countryside to Dunkirk.
In my reading, this was the section that I found difficult to move
through, not because the subject matter was difficult or because the writing
was weak, but because there was no clear purpose for being there. Events happen, but nothing that feels
particularly significant. The men are
allowed shelter and food for a night. Every
last trace of a woman and her son are removed from the earth by a bomb. An RAF man is nearly killed by an unhappy
mob. A pig is saved. Things happen but nothing seems particularly
important or meaningful. Coming back to
that section after finishing the novel, I now see that McEwan was exploring
another aspect of his theme here. The
narrative structure of import in this second section is found in the letters
between the lovers and in Robbie’s inability to narratively control the war
around him. The lovers are careful to
construct their daily reality for each other and for themselves in order to
create a world in which the two of them can live together when they meet again. Robbie’s fevered dreams are likewise a type
of storytelling in which Robbie seeks forgiveness from those who have not
survived the war’s brutality. Throughout
the novel, we see that stories are first born from reality, but then they
supplant reality with their own truths.
And as Briony reflects in the final chapter, in time, when all the
participants have died, it is only the story’s voice that will remain and only
its truth that will live on. That’s a
fantastic theme to explore in a novel, and I really enjoyed the way that McEwan
brought it into focus in the final 40 pages of Atonement.
So the
writing was solid, but not especially inspiring to me; the love story was
ludicrous and thin, but there if you really wanted a love story; and the final
focus of the novel was interesting and thought-provoking. I didn’t find anything particularly
interesting in the form or presentation of the story, but nor were there any
prominent faults. Obviously others have
fallen in love with this book, but having spent some time with it, I am happy
to shake hands and move on and meet other literary loves.
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