For a long time Ian McEwan found himself trapped in the role
of a sensational writer caricatured by the British press as Ian
Macabre and the Clapham Shocker. The stories he wrote at the beginning
of his writing career First Love, Last Rites (1975)
and In Between the Sheets, and Other Stories (1978) - as
well as his first two novels The Cement Garden (1979)
and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) - described in clinical
detail the sexual and social aberrations of adolescent mentalities
whose voices offered him at the time "a certain kind of rhetorical
freedom" (McEwan, Ricks 526). It is extraordinary to consider
the distance McEwan has traveled in the intervening quarter century.
Atonement (2001) employs the narrative voice of a 77-year-old
English woman and focuses on a crucial period of British history
between 1935 and 1940. Instead of the closed claustrophobic inner
world of his early protagonists, Atonement ranges from
an upper class household in pre-War southern England to the retreat
of the British army to Dunkirk and to a wartime London hospital,
ending with a coda in 1999.
McEwan first effected his escape from an exclusively subjective
narrative perspective in his third novel, The Child in Time
(1987) in which the lost child of the title represents an outer
as well as inner world. This novel came after a gap of six years
during which McEwan had turned to drama as his principal outlet.
In particular The Imitation Game (1981), a play for television,
Or Shall We Die? (1983), an oratorio, and The Ploughman's
Lunch (1983), a film, reveal his awakened interest in the
world of politics and social action, in the nuclear threat, environmental
pollution, and the oppression of women. As he confessed to John
Haffenden in 1983, "England under Mrs. Thatcher leaves me
with a nasty taste" (187). Once he returned to fiction in
1987 every subsequent novel has had not just a private and psychological
component, but a public and historical one as well the government
commission on which Stephen sits in The Child in Time (1987),
the Cold War in The Innocent (1990), the ongoing influence
of racism and fascism in Black Dogs (1992), the short-sightedness
of the exclusively scientific, rational mentality in Enduring
Love (1997), and the corrupt world of political journalism
and publicly commissioned art in Amsterdam (1998).
At the same time certain continuities persist in his work. He
remains fascinated with the forbidden and the taboo, which he
continues to describe with non-judgmental precision. Further,
he entices the reader into sharing his voyeuristic obsession with
this material. As Rod Mengham observes, "The writer's and
the reader's deepest pleasure consists less in their sense of
ironic superiority to the benighted narrator than in the vicarious
delight of identification, which is rooted in finding the scandalous
secretly seductive and its apologists convincing" (207).
McEwan has explained his fascination with evil or illicit behavior
by arguing that this "projected sense of evil in [his] stories
[. . .] is of the kind whereby one tries to imagine the worst
thing possible in order to get hold of the good" (McEwan,
Hamilton 20). Atonement still embodies this premise, but
it employs a degree of self consciousness which far exceeds that
found in any of his previous novels.
I want to concentrate on the self conscious use of narrative in
Atonement, as this aspect has been seized on by
a minority of reviewers to criticize what they understand to be
an essentially realist novel that at the end inappropriately resorts
to a modish self referentiality. My reading of this novel is of
a work of fiction that is from beginning to end concerned with
the making of fiction. When we first meet its female protagonist,
Briony, at the age of thirteen, she is already committed to the
life of a writer. She ruthlessly subordinates everything the world
throws at her to her need to make it subserve the demands of her
own world of fiction. Brought up on a diet of imaginative literature,
she is too young to understand the dangers that can ensue from
modeling one's conduct on such an artificial world. When she makes
public her confusion between life and the life of fiction the
consequences are tragic and irreversible except in the realm
of fiction. She attempts to use fiction to correct the errors
that fiction caused her to commit. But the chasm that separates
the world of the living from that of fictional invention ensures
that at best her fictional reparation will act as an attempt at
atoning for a past that she can not reverse. Atonement,
then, is concerned with the dangers of entering a fictional world
and the compensations and limitations which that world can offer
its readers and writers.
Atonement has been greeted by most book critics as a masterpiece
that unexpectedly stayed at the top of the best seller lists of
the New York Times for many weeks. Almost all American
reviewers of the book have given it the highest praise possible.
The few reviewers (largely British) who have voiced major reservations
about the novel invariably focus on the concluding section in
which it is revealed that Briony, who became a successful novelist,
has been the author of the entire novel and has taken a novelist's
license to alter the facts to suit her artistic purposes. Despite
the description Briony gives in Part Three of Robbie and Cecilia
living together after his return from Dunkirk, we learn on the
penultimate page that Robbie died before he could be evacuated
from Dunkirk and that Cecilia was killed by a bomb three months
later. Lulled by the long Part One (which occupies half the book)
into the security associated with the classic realist novel, this
minority of reviewers dismisses the final coda as an instance
of postmodern gimmickry.
In other words, all these reviewers read Part One as a strictly
realist narration and fault McEwan for failing to live up to the
realist expectations that he has aroused during the first half
of the book. It is my contention that this entails a radical misreading
of the novel. The novel's epigraph, a quotation from Jane Austen's
Northanger Abbey, serves as both a warning and a guide
to how the reader should view this narrative. Austen's protagonist,
Catherine Moorland, who is reprimanded by Henry Tilney in the
quoted extract for her naïve response to events around her,
is the victim of reading fiction - the Gothic romances of her
day and failing to make a distinction between the fictive
and the real. McEwan ironically has the Tallis country house renamed
Tilney's Hotel as a sly tribute to this fictional precedent. McEwan
sees Northanger Abbey as a novel about "about someone's
wild imagination causing havoc to people around them" (Ali
59). Tilney's remarks to Catherine ("what ideas have you
been admitting?") can be applied equally fittingly to Briony
whose equally over-active imagination leads her to tell the crucial
lie. The difference is that Briony (who, we are told at the end
of section 3 of Part One will become a successful novelist over
the next fifty years) sets out to use fiction to attempt to make
amends for the damage fiction has induced her to cause in the
first place. Fiction-making originates and does not just conclude
this particular work of fiction.
The book proper opens with an ironic description, not of Briony,
but of the play she has written at the age of thirteen. It is
a crude melodrama with which Briony quickly becomes disenchanted.
The point is that we meet an instance of Briony's literary imagination
before we get to know her as a personality. She is an author first,
and a girl on the verge of entering adolescence secondly. The
literary self consciousness about which these British reviewers
complain is present from the opening page of the novel and serves
throughout the book to undermine the classic realist mode of narration.
McEwan has said, "I sometimes feel that every sentence contains
a ghostly commentary on its own processes." (McEwan, Begley
59). In this respect McEwan shows himself to be a writer of his
time, one whose fictions necessarily leave a trace of their own
production.
Catherine Belsey refers to Emile Benveniste's distinction between
"discourse" and "histoire" in Problems
in General Linguistics to illustrate how in classic realist
fiction "the events seem to narrate themselves" (Benveniste
208), whereas discourse assumes a speaker and a hearer. Accordingly
the "authority of [the classic realist novel's] impersonal
narration springs from its effacement of its own status as discourse"
(Belsey 72). From his earliest collections of short stories Ian
McEwan has consistently drawn attention to the status of his fiction
as discourse by alluding to or parodying traditional literary
genres, thereby forcing the reader to take note of the presence
of a self conscious narrator. He has described each of his early
stories as "a kind of pastiche of a certain style [. . .],
its origins were always slightly parodic" (McEwan, Hamilton
17). Similarly most of his novels, according to him, allude in
some way to existing genres The Cement Garden is
"an urban Lord of the Flies" (Smith 69); The
Innocent added to and subverted the spy genre (McEwan, Hunt
47); The Comfort of Strangers draws on the sinister setting
of Venice established by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice;
his play for television, The Imitation Game, was indebted
to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (Haffenden 175); and
"Amsterdam is an Evelyn Waugh tribute novel,"
McEwan told Ambrose Clancy (E1.)
So it is no surprise to learn that McEwan modeled Atonement
on the work of "Elizabeth Bowen of The Heat of the Day,
with a dash of Rosamund Lehmann of Dusty Answer, and, in
[Briony's] first attempts, a sprinkling of Virginia Woolf"
(McEwan, Begley 56). At least one reviewer has seen a parallel
between Atonement and Bowen's The Last September
(1929) "with its restive teenage girl in the big house"
(Lee 16). Elizabeth Bowen also directly influences the form the
final novel takes. After reading Briony's first neo-modernist
attempt to give fictional shape to the events of 1935 submitted
to Cyril Connolly at Horizon, Bowen reacts by first thinking
the prose "'too full, too cloying,'" but with "'redeeming
shades of Dusty Answer'" (Rosamund Lehmann's first
novel of 1927 about a young girl's growing up). Cyril Connolly
voices Bowen's final criticism of the modernist obsession with
consciousness at the expense of plot by reminding Briony that
even her most sophisticated readers "retain a childlike desire
to be told a story" (296). Briony's rewritten Part One owes
its mounting tension to Bowen's criticism passed on to Cyril Connolly
and the example offered by Bowen's earlier novel.
Virginia Woolf acts both as a positive and negative influence
on this novel. Talking about Atonement McEwan states that
he "was wanting to enter into a conversation with modernism
and its dereliction of duty in relation to what I have Cyril Connolly
call the backbone of the plot" (McEwan, Silverblatt). Comparisons
have been made between this book and Woolf's Between the Acts
"in which a group of well-bred characters gathers for a family
pageant against the backdrop of impending war" (Cowley Features),
and Woolf's To the Lighthouse the dinner scene of which
is parodied by "the disastrous roast meat dinner fed to sweltering
guests" in Part One (Kemp Features). As was the case with
his use of Bowen, McEwan offers his reader internal evidence of
Woolf's influence (this time deleterious) on the young Briony's
narrative style when she is pictured reading Woolf's The Waves
between nursing shifts. Under Woolf's modernist spell, Briony
decides that characters "were quaint devices that belonged
to the nineteenth century" and that plots "too were
like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn"
(265). McEwan has said that in Briony's first piece of fiction
that reflects this modernist bias, "Two Figures by a Fountain,"
"she is burying her conscience beneath her stream of consciousness"
(McEwan, Silverblatt), indicating how for him the ideology of
modernism (especially its prioritization of stylistic innovation)
has hidden moral consequences. Compare Briony's critique of her
early draft of the novel: "Did she really think she could
hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown
her guilt in a stream-three streams-of consciousness?" (302).
Style, she discovers, really does have ethical implications.
In interviews McEwan has cited at least two other literary connections.
Talking of his schooldays, he recalled "reading [L. P. Hartley's]
The Go-Between and being very struck by that novel
of a child moving between the two lovers carrying notes back and
forth. This novel [Atonement] owes something to that"
(Ali 59). Other similarities between the two books include the
hot summer setting, the dividing issue of class and the confusion
of a child confronted with adult sexuality. In another interview
McEwan talked about his use of an adult narrative voice in Atonement:
"I didn't want to write about a child's mind with the limitations
of a child's vocabulary or a child's point of view. I wanted to
be more like [Henry] James in What Maisie Knew: to use
the full resources of an adult mentality remembering herself"
(McEwan, Cryer B6). In other words McEwan wanted to give as much
prominence to the discourse as to the histoire or story.
Like Leo in The Go-Between and Maisie in What Maisie
Knew, Briony is a child who becomes involved in an adult sexual
relationship that she is ill equipped to understand. The narrator,
however, has all the experience and understanding of a lifetime.
By invoking within the text to an earlier literary genre or movement,
McEwan draws attention to a continuous tension between the narrative
and its narration.
MvEwan's enduring concern with the act of narration in Atonement
surfaces equally in his frequent use of intertextuality. Robbie,
for instance, quotes Malvolio's lines from Twelfth Night
"'Nothing that can be can come between me and the full
prospect of my hopes'" (123). The quotation acts in an anticipatory
fashion, warning the reader that Robbie is likely to prove similarly
deluded. During his trek to Dunkirk Robbie quotes with similar
aptness from Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats": "In
the nightmare of the dark, / All the dogs of Europe bark"
(190). In this instance intertextuality is employed to establish
a connection between the microcosm of the lives that Briony has
disrupted and the macrocosm of a world at war. In fact Atonement
is replete with numerous allusions to other writers and books.
For instance Robbie's collection of literary works is listed in
some detail, ironically reflecting the ideology of F R Leavis
that he had absorbed in Cambridge at first hand. He reflects smugly
in a highly stylized passage: "he would be a better doctor
for having read literature. What deep readings his modified sensibility
might make of human suffering [. . .] Rise and fall-this was the
doctor's business, and it was literature's too." The narrator
adds tellingly: "He was thinking of the nineteenth century
novel" (87) that is, of a mode of fiction that ignores
its own status as discourse. Ironically the reader is simultaneously
being alerted to what that mode omits in this instance - the reality
of sudden death and haphazard suffering that Robbie encounters
in the retreat to Dunkirk.
That irony, like the irony present in the references to Malvolio
and Auden, is one feature that distinguishes McEwan's citations
as intertexts as opposed to sources. The numerous allusions to
other texts warn the reader not to treat Atonement as a
classic realist text. Both Kristeva and Jacques Derrida argue
that any text seen as intertext entails productivity. What they
mean by that is that once a text establishes its interdependence
on other texts its signification proliferates, Atonement
offers particularly clear instances of what Kristeva claims are
some of the different ways in which a text, in relating to other
texts, becomes productive of further meanings, ways such as rereading
and displacement. McEwan's novel is most obviously a rereading
of the classic realist novel of the nineteenth century, just as
it is a displacement of the modernist novel, particularly as instanced
in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. It is no
coincidence that Robbie, seeking to excuse his sexually explicit
note sent by mistake to Cecilia, thinks of appealing to "a
passing impatience with convention" that he associates with
"a memory of reading the Orioli edition of Lady Chatterley's
Lover" which had been banned in England in 1928 (124).
Like Mellors, Robbie comes from a lower class than Cecilia (cf.
Lady Chatterley). In fact this Freudian slip of Robbie's is indebted
to another book as well. Because he had left the innocent version
of his note to Cecilia on an illustration of the vagina in Gray's
Anatomy, he had associated the handwritten polite note with
the "bold spread and rakish crown of pubic hair" in
the book, while his obscene typewritten draft lay clear of any
intertextual contamination on his table (89).
Atonement makes another ironic literary allusion to an
even earlier English novel, Richardson's Clarissa. Arabella,
the melodramatic heroine of the thirteen-year-old Briony's playlet,
shares Clarissa's sister's name and thereby places "The Trials
of Arabella" within a literary tradition of sentimentality
and sensationalism, while inevitably lacking the psychological
complexity of the original. Cecilia is spending the vacation after
graduating at Cambridge by reading Clarissa, which Robbie
considers psychologically subtle and she boring. Their disagreement
over this text helps determine the reader's response to the rape
which takes place later the same day and which is sprung on the
reader with none of the lengthy preparation that Richardson provides.
This instance of intertextuality appears to incorporate both terms
that Kristeva uses to define intertextual productivity rereading
and displacement. Seen in the perspective of the novel as a whole,
Lola's rape, unlike that of Clarissa, which leads to her death
and Lovelace's damnation, is the prelude to a long and socially
successful marriage cemented by Lola's and Marshall's determination
to keep the identity of the rapist a secret while either of them
is alive. Lola's worldly manipulation of the advantage the rape
has given her over her rapist acts as a form of social intertextuality,
anticipating the laxer sexual morality of the later twentieth
century. An additional effect that such ironic references to other
literary texts have in McEwan's novel is to act as a continuous
reminder that the entire book is the final literary artifact of
Briony, a professional author.
In the case of the novel intertextuality relates an individual
work to others that constitute the genre of fiction and that have
contributed to the conventions that produce meaning in fictional
narrative. It is significant just how many other works of literature
Atonement has suggested to its numerous reviewers. The
rape reminds one reviewer of the incident in the Marabar caves
in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, but without the
retraction (Dyer 8). The cracked and mended Meissen vase of Part
One reminds another reviewer of Henry James's The Golden Bowl
(Lee 16). Yet another reviewer discerns McEwan making a nod to
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (Caldwell E3), and
a fellow reviewer describes McEwan's mixture of allusions to the
genteel country house pastoral and the brutalities of sex and
war by suggesting, "It is as if [. . .] the contents of McEwan's
stories had been explicitly daubed on the walls of Brideshead
Revisited" (Dyer 8). The novel has also been compared
to an Agatha Christie country house thriller (Adair 10), Nabokov's
Lolita with its sly allusion using Lola as the name of
the raped nymphet (Baker 5), and Margaret Atwood's The Blind
Assassin that used a similar metanarrative device of an elderly
female narrator revealed as such near the end (Updike 80).
In addition to intertextuality McEwan makes use of other narrative
devices to alert his reader to the status of his text as a literary
artifact. For instance there is his modulation of prose styles.
In the long Part One McEwan chose to write in "a slightly
mannered prose, slightly held in, a little formal, a tiny bit
archaic" with which he "could evoke the period best"
(McEwan, Silverblatt). In Part Two, writing about Dunkirk, he
chose "to write in a choppier prose with shorter, simpler
sentences" (Ali 59), a style that is reminiscent of Hemingway.
As he explained, "on the battlefield the subordinate clause
has no place" (McEwan, Silverblatt). In the final coda he
employs a contemporary voice, one that is acutely self-conscious
and aware of its own act of narration. For instance: "I've
always liked to make a tidy finish," says the elderly Briony,
simultaneously referring to her life and her life's work (334).
Although there is only one narrative voice that turns out to be
that of Briony, the aging novelist, McEwan employs what Gérard
Genette calls variable internal focalization in Part One, that
is, narrative where the focal character changes (whether the narrative
voice changes, on not it doesn't in Atonement). In
the case of Atonement, it is first Briony, then Cecilia,
then Robbie, and so on. McEwan employs this particular "modal
determination" (Genette 188) partly to distinguish his narrative
from the classic realist novel's association with an omniscient
narrator (Briony's lie came from positioning herself as such a
narrator in her fictionalized scenario of events), partly to demonstrate
Briony's, the adult narrator's, attempt to project herself into
the thoughts and feelings of her characters, an act which we will
see is crucial to her search for forgiveness.
McEwan also draws attention to the constructed nature of the narrative
by employing parallel or symmetrical motifs. Marshall's rape of
Lola takes place by the eighteenth century, crumbling, stuccoed
Greek temple in the Tallis grounds with its "row of pillars
and the pediment above them" (68). The wedding of Marshall
and Lola turns out to be at a London church that looks "like
a Greek temple," especially its "low portico with white
columns beneath a clock tower of harmonious proportions"
(304). Separated by five years, the rape and marriage are brought
into shocking juxtaposition by purely narrative means. The last
occasion on which Briony encounters the Marshalls at the end of
the book takes place outside the Imperial War Museum which echoes
the other two buildings in being based on Greek temple design
and featuring columns and a portico. Behind the neo-classical
facades that come to represent the "mausoleum of their marriage"
(307) lurk respectively ruin, a joint lie, and the destructive
memories of a war from which Marshall made his fortune. Other
repetitive motifs include "The Trials of Arabella" that
frame the narrative as well as crudely anticipating the action;
Cecilia's call Come back when Briony has had a bad dream
(72) later used in different though parallel circumstances (249,
330); and a recurring psychological motif, Briony's two competing
characteristics her passion for order and her powerful imagination
which not only cause her to lie but which are responsible
for the form taken by her "fifty-nine-year assignment"
(349), the narrative she works on between 1940 and 1999.
Part One is also characterized by frequent use of narrative anticipation,
or what Genette calls temporal prolepsis. Genette claims that
Western narrative tradition tends to use this device sparingly
because the "concern with narrative suspense that is characteristic
of the 'classical' conception of the novel [. . .] does not easily
come to terms with such a practice" (67). Positioning itself
as partly opposed to Western narrative tradition, Atonement
makes frequent use of anticipation in Part One. For instance,
section 13 opens: "Within the half hour Briony would commit
her crime" (146). Anticipations like this of future events
in the plot are meant to represent the mature Briony's response
to the criticisms offered by "Cyril Connolly." She retains
the lyricism of her first draft, "Two Figures by a Fountain,"
while reassuring her readers (including Elizabeth Bowen and CC)
that she is not neglecting the "underlying pull of simple
narrative" (295). But the narrative in this instance
is as much concerned with the business of narrating these events
satisfactorily as it is with the unfolding of them. Turn back
to the thirteen-year-old Briony's immediate reaction to witnessing
the scene by the fountain and the narrator's use of temporal prolepsis
makes it obvious that Briony is going to have to spend much of
her life working at the description of this scene before she can
achieve the final multiple focalization of it from three characters'
perspectives:
This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world
in which frogs did not address princesses, and the only messages
were the ones that people sent. It was also a temptation to run
to Cecilia's room and demand an explanation. Briony resisted because
she wanted to chase in solitude the faint thrill of possibility
she had felt before, the elusive excitement at a prospect she
was coming close to defining, at least emotionally. The definition
would refine itself over the years. She was to concede that she
may have attributed more deliberation than was feasible to her
thirteen-year-old self. At the time there may have been no precise
form of words; in fact she may have experienced nothing more than
impatience to begin writing again. (37-8)
In the center of this passage lies the anticipation of the numerous
stages or drafts through which this narrative was destined to
pass before it reached its final form as we read it. At the same
time that prolepsis is sandwiched between two passages preoccupied
with the act of narration itself.
To draw attention to the narrative process is not an act of self
indulgence on the part of the metafictional novelist, as suggested
by a few of this book's reviewers. It is central to the book's
concerns. In the first place when novelists force us to understand
the constructed nature of their characters they invite us simultaneously
to reflect on the way subjectivity is similarly constructed in
the non-fictional world we inhabit. McEwan says, "I look
on novels as exploratory, forms of investigation, at its broadest
and best, into human nature" (McEwan, Cryer B6). Further,
as Patricia Waugh argues, "Contemporary metafictional writing
is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing
sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world
of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices,
impermanent structures" (7). In this sense the use of metafiction
in the book serves to undermine the naturalization of social and
economic inequalities that especially characterized British society
in the 1930s.
Take for instance Robbie, son of the Tallises' cleaning lady.
The difference in social class is responsible for the early misunderstanding
between Robbie and Cecilia. She mistakes his removing his boots
and socks before entering her house for an act of exaggerated
deference, "playacting the cleaning lady's son come to the
big house on an errand" (26). She has imbibed this sense
of social difference from her class conscious mother, Emily. Emily
resents the fact that her husband has paid for Robbie's education,
an act which she characterizes as "a hobby of Jack's [. .
.] which smacked of meddling to her," that is of upsetting
the "natural" order of things (142). The result is Emily's
encouragement of Briony in her childish lie. As Cecilia writes
later to Robbie in France: "I'm beginning to understand the
snobbery that lay behind their stupidity. My mother never forgave
you your first" (196). But tellingly she goes on in the letter
to assume that Danny, the working class son of Hardman the handyman,
must have been the real rapist. Using a text within the larger
narrative text, McEwan subtly suggests the invidious nature of
a class system that permeates even those seeking to reverse its
effects and works to protect the upper class rapist from exposure
throughout his lifetime. I have also shown the way McEwan denaturalizes
the way in which Marshall asserts his sexual power over the temporarily
orphaned "vain and vulnerable Lola" (306) by the use
of a literary motif (the temple) that draws attention to its own
construction.
Another way in which fiction draws attention to its fictionality
is by insisting on the particularity of the story it is relating
while at the same time implying a connection between the private
world it is evoking and the public world inhabited by its readers.
This is true of all fiction. But metafiction tends rather to display
than seek to hide the inherent contradiction in the writer's attempt
to both persuade us of the particularity and yet universality
of the characters and events described. Instance the way McEwan
uses the Meisen vase to imply connections between the specific
incident of its breakage and a number of wider fractures in the
narrative and the world its depicts. At the most intimate level
the vase suggests the fragility of Cecilia's virgin state which
is about to be as abruptly destroyed by a struggle between herself
and Robbie as is the vase. The vase next enters Briony's first
attempt at fiction, "Two Figures by a Fountain," and
becomes associated with her incorrect interpretation of the events
leading to its rupture. Briony's testimony both in court and in
her first narrative draft is as fragile as the mended vase, as
McEwan subtly suggests when describing her initial determination
of the identity of Lola's attacker: "the glazed surface of
her conviction was not without its blemishes and hairline cracks"
(158). Both the vase and the novel as whole represent a fragile
aesthetic form that can easily fall apart. During the War it is
finally shattered, just as the Tallis family's way of life is
shattered by historical events that cause its extinction. This
takes one back to the first description of the vase: it was a
gift awarded to Jack Tallis's brother Clem during the First World
War that, despite wartime conditions, survived and was brought
back to the Tallis family after his death in action. Valuable
as it is, Jack Tallis wants it to be used: "If it had survived
the war, the reasoning went, then it could survive the Tallises"
(23). In other words the vase is a fragile object that has miraculously
survived two centuries of use (as has the structured society that
the Tallises represent), that is directly identified with the
family through Uncle Clem. Its fracturing and eventual destruction
imagistically anticipate those of the family and the pre-War society
to which both belong.
In Atonement the narrative forces the reader from the start
to recognize that this is not simply the story of one pre-Second
World War family in southern England, but a cross section of British
society at that critical moment of time before the War changed
everything. At the beginning of section two of Part One Cecilia
looks from their house to the view it affords, "giving an
impression of timeless, unchanging calm which made her more certain
than ever that she must soon be moving on" (18). That paradox
is extended as the narrative unfolds to cover every aspect of
the Tallis family's existence. As one reviewer expresses the oxymoron
at the center of this book, "The atmosphere is one of innocence
oppressed by knowledge" (McEwan, Hitchings 4). Briony teeters
at the brink of adolescence, just as Lola "longed to throw
off the last restraints of childhood" (306). The novel invites
us to see these two girls as symptomatic of the state of Britain
and the West at this period of history. Lola and her twin brothers
are "refugees from a bitter domestic civil war" (8),
which makes them avoid even the mention of the dreaded word "divorce,"
"[l]ike rearmament and the Abyssinia Question" (9).
The private is linked to the public by the figurative use of the
word "war" that calls attention to its polysemantic
usage.
In 1935 the West was suffering from a collective myopia in the
face of the rise of fascism which only a minority on the political
left seemed prepared to confront. Robbie is typical of the collective
delusion at that time with his fantasies of a future life spent
as a family doctor and spare time reader. The West is about to
be hurled into a war that will usher in a radically different
postmodern era to which this narrative, completed in 1999, belongs.
Robbie's fall is caused by another's lie, reminding at least this
reader that Europe's fall into war followed lies of a far more
serious order by Hitler. Robbie's old life is brought to a sudden
and traumatic end. As he reflects during the fallback to Dunkirk,
"A dead civilization. First his own life ruined, then everybody
else's" (204). Part Two (the Dunkirk segment) retrospectively
casts the private family relationships of Part One into a quite
different social and historical light. The cozy isolation typified
by the Tallises' country estate could be thought to parallel Britain's
deluded feeling of invulnerability under Chamberlain from Hitler's
escalating aggression across the Channel. As McEwan told one interviewer,
"private deceptions and national deceptions are not entirely
disconnected" (Haffenden 186). The final coda with its additional
revelations about the worldly success of the Marshalls and the
conversion of the privileged Tallis country home into a hotel
suggests to me the way fiction can make visible the inequalities
in society that ideology works to conceal.
McEwan has said that he is "interested in relationships not
only for what they do in themselves, but how they absorb outside
pressure, influence politics and, again, history" (McEwan,
Hunt 48). He would appear to share with Edward Said the belief
that works of literature are not just texts but participate in
"worldliness." What Said means by worldliness is "the
restoration to [. . . ] works and interpretations of their place
in the global setting" (164). While McEwan certainly subscribes
to this position, in Atonement life also often imitates
fiction, giving recognition to the central role that narrative
plays in all our lives. Briony and Robbie both shape and are shaped
by narratives. When he first realizes that he has fallen in love
with Cecilia, Robbie reflects: "He had spent three years
drily studying the symptoms, which had seemed no more that literary
conventions, and now, in solitude, [. . .] he was worshipping
her traces [. . .] while he languished in his lady's scorn"
(79). His change in circumstances and outlook is described as
that from a critic of literature to a Petrarchan lover in a sonnet.
One does not have to be an aspiring author like Briony to find
oneself imitating the world of art. Thus Robbie expresses his
decision to train for the medical profession in wholly fictional
terms: "There was a story he was plotting with himself as
the hero [. . .]" (85). When Robbie is in prison his correspondence
with Cecilia is restrained because the prison authorities have
diagnosed him as morbidly oversexed and therefore not to be over
stimulated. "So they wrote about literature, and used characters
as codes" (192). Literature has here entered deeply into
the fabric of Robbie's and Cecilia's lives.
Of course Briony is the prime example of the way art shapes her
life as much as she shapes that life into her art. From the start
her powerful imagination works to confuse the real with the fictive.
Her observation of life around her is conditioned by the fictive
world that holds her in its grip. She understands that "the
imagination itself was a source of secrets" (6). Writing
literally intrudes on her life when she rips open Robbie's shocking
love letter; but her interpretation involves exchanging one literary
genre for another: "No more princesses," she concludes;
"she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened
and would need her help"(106-7). When she stumbles upon Robbie
and Cecilia making love in the darkened library, the "scene
was so entirely a realization of her worst fears that she sensed
that her overanxious imagination had projected the figures onto
the packed spines of books" (116). Appropriately it is from
books (of the lurid, gothic kind) that her "reading"
of the scene originates. Briony is shaped by a lurid imagination
that originates in the books she has read. Thinking of her mother's
impending funeral, she indulges in a typical literary fantasy
in which "the scale of her tragedy" would awe her friends
(151). The young Briony suffers from an inability to disentangle
life from the literature that has shaped her life. She imposes
the patterns of fiction on the facts of life. To complain about
the metafictional element in the book is to fail to understand
that we all are narrated, entering at birth into a preexisting
narrative which provides the palimpsest on which we inscribe our
own narratives / lives. What McEwan's foregrounding of the metafictional
element does is to compel the reader to face the extent to which
narration determines human life.
Narration is an act of interpretation. Interpretation opens the
possibility of misinterpretation, of what Lacan terms méconnaissance
or mis-recognition on the part of the ego, "the illusion
of autonomy to which it entrusts itself" (6). Briony at thirteen
suffers from just such an illusion, a certainty in her own judgment
that brings tragedy to some of those closest to her. As a novice
writer she might even be thought of as belonging to Lacan's imaginary
order. Her misinterpretation of the adult symbolic world is the
product of her childhood reading habits in which she read herself
as Her Majesty the Ego, to misquote Freud. Her first crucial misreading
is of the scene between Cecilia and Robbie at the pond. When she
first observes them she decides from their formal posture that
Robbie must be proposing marriage to her sister. Briony reflects:
"She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter
saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her"
(36). But when Cecilia jumps into the pond Briony is perplexed
at this disordered narrative sequence: "the drowning scene,
followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal"
(36-7). When she returns to the window after the two figures have
left the scene she feels liberated from the impenetrable facts:
"The truth had become as ghostly as invention" (39).
She is free to interpret the scene as she pleases.
Once she opens Robbie's explicit note to Cecilia, which she is
too young to process, she is forced to reconsider her interpretation
of the whole scene. "With the letter," she reflects,
"something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been
introduced, some principle of darkness" (106-7). Like Poe's
purloined letter, this letter that Briony has purloined acts as
the signifier that determines her subjectivity. Like the Queen
as seen by Lacan in the first scene of Poe's story, the letter
places her willy-nilly in the imaginary order. She convinces herself
that Robbie is what Lola calls a "maniac" (112) and
what she calls "the incarnation of evil" (108), and
that her sister is threatened and in need of her help, a scenario
which places the mirror image of her ego at the center of the
story. So when she convinces herself that Robbie is the figure
glimpsed running away from Lola in the dark, it is her novelist's
need for order that clinches it: "The truth was in the symmetry
[. . .] The truth instructed her eyes" (159). Fiction determines
fact for her.
But she is far from alone in misinterpreting human behavior. Cecilia
misinterprets Robbie's removing his shoes and socks as an attempt
to distance her (26, 79), just as Robbie misinterprets Cecilia's
undressing at the pond, taking it to be a deliberate effort to
humiliate him (75). (Both misinterpretations are caused by the
class system). Cecilia also mistakenly assumes that her brother
Leon will want a hot roast. Even Jackson unjustifiably accuses
Briony of hating the twins (93). Is not this succession of misinterpretations
of the facts aimed at McEwan's implied reader? Is it not intended
to prevent the reader from misinterpreting the long Part One as
a classic realist text? To do so would be to become one with the
childlike thoughts and actions of a Jackson or a Briony, or to
show the same lack of experience that Cecilia and Robbie show
at this early stage of their adult lives. The alternative is to
assume that Briony's naivete is an invention of her older authorial
self, but the effect would still be to discourage the reader from
participating in her misinterpretations of events, while simultaneously
questioning the "veracity" of the older narrator's account
offered in Part One.
Every time a character misinterprets the situation it proves to
be the consequence of a projection on his or her part onto another
character. It is particularly ironic that Briony understands for
the first time the need to grant others their own unique feelings
and thoughts when she first witnesses the scene by the pond. "It
wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy,
it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure
to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you"
(38). Later that evening, shocked by the contents of Robbie's
note, Briony forgets her new insight and tells her lie which at
the time is less a lie than a misconstruction of the adult world
she has been observing with the predatory eye of an aspiring novelist.
For the novelist, "Order must be imposed" (108), and
order requires the elimination of "the confusion of feeling
contradictory things" (109); it requires the aspiring writer
in her to turn Robbie into "a villain in the form of an old
family friend" (148). It is the writer in her that induces
her to identify Robbie as Lola's attacker. "All she had to
do now was discover the stories, not just the subjects, but a
way of unfolding them, that would do justice to her new knowledge"
(150). Forcing life to conform to the aesthetic orderliness of
art can have actual tragic consequences.
Five years later Briony realizes that what caused her to write
Robbie into her story as a villain was both an excess of imagination
and a failure of imaginative projection (into the other). Writing
about the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 for the Guardian,
McEwan observed, "If the hijackers had been able to imagine
themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they
would have been unable to proceed. [. . .] Imagining what it is
like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity"
(Cremins 19). This belief lies at the core of all McEwan's fiction
and explains its apparent amoral stance (a stance that the mature
writer, Briony, comes to share once she has learnt the need to
respect the autonomy of others in her work). He has said that
for him novels are not about "teaching people how to live
but about showing the possibility of what it is like to be someone
else. [. . .] Cruelty is a failure of imagination" (Kellaway
3). It is this kind of imagination that Briony spends the rest
of her professional life seeking to acquire. The novel that we
read and that took her adult lifetime to write is her attempt
to project herself into the feelings of the two characters whose
lives her failure of imagination destroyed. Having mistakenly
cast them in a story that totally misrepresented them, Briony
seeks to retell their story with the compassion and understanding
that she lacked as a thirteen-year-old girl. In turning "Two
Figures by a Fountain" into Atonement, in exchanging
the primacy of the authorial ego for an empathetic projection
into the feelings of others, Briony is abandoning the imaginary
for the symbolic order. The narrative is driven by her unconscious
desire to win back the love of a sister who in fact died back
in 1940. All she can do after Robbie's and Cecilia's deaths is
to pursue that desire along the chain of her narrative.
The writing of Atonement, which vividly imagines a reunion
of Cecilia with Robbie after his return from Dunkirk (where in
fact he died), is the form that Briony's atonement takes. It is
a fictional and imaginative attempt to do what she failed to do
at the time project herself into the feelings and thoughts
of these others, to grant them an authentic existence outside
her own life's experiences, to conjure up what it must have felt
like for the wounded Robbie to participate in the retreat to Dunkirk,
and for Cecilia to be forcibly separated from him and estranged
from her family. She recognizes that such an act of atonement
"was always an impossible task," that the "attempt
was all" (351). Yet, as McEwan said to one interviewer, "When
this novel is published [after her death . . .] these two lovers
will survive to love, and they will survive spontaneous,
fortuitous Cecilia and her medical prince right out of the
little playlet she was trying to write at the age of thirteen.
They will always live"" (McEwan, Silverblatt). Briony's
novel is her literary attempt at reparation for the damage she
inflicted as a child. The only way she can bring Robbie and Cecilia
back to life is by using her imagination to imbue them with a
fictional life that allows her and her readers to experience their
initial hope and the subsequent despair which Briony's earlier
ill imagined fiction had caused.
The status of the coda "London, 1999" is uncertain.
The novel appears to end with the end of Part Three followed by
"BT London, 1999." The coda that follows is unsigned
and could be taken as a diary confession or extraneous commentary
on the novel proper. This concluding section of the book is both
open ended and dark. In the penultimate paragraph Briony opens
up the possibility of a further revision when she plays with the
possibility of writing a new draft that would finally allow the
two lovers to forgive her: "If I had the power to conjure
them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still
alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling
at The Trials of Arabella? It's not impossible" (351).
But the imminent onset of vascular dementia together with her
painfully acquired honesty makes this fantasy unlikely to be realized.
Then there is the shattering on the penultimate page of any suspension
of disbelief that may have persisted in the reader's mind to this
point of the narrative: Briony's revelation of the two lovers'
deaths stands in stark contrast to the orderliness of the story
Briony concocted as a child.
A novel of the late twentieth century cannot subscribe to the
simplified wish fulfillments of classic realist fiction. "The
development of nuclear weapons," McEwan has said, "shows
the dissociation of science from feelings," of outer and
inner worlds we inhabit (Haffeneden 182). World War Two, that
introduced the world to mass ethnic cleansing, the Cold War and
the permanent threat of nuclear deterrence, appears to have elicited
mainly aesthetic structures that reflect the complexity and horror
of life in the second half of that century. It is a time in history
when the Marshalls, who, equally guilty, lack Briony's conscience,
use the War to make their fortune and are then treated as public
benefactors. Compared to Briony, they "have no remorse, no
need for atonement" (McEwan, Silverblatt). Responding to
the criticism that his endings are too pessimistic, McEwan has
said, "I never did trust those novels where, for all their
dark insights, or that they ended in a funeral, there was always
someone walking away and bending to pick up a flower" (Cohu
8). Atonement ends not just with the revelation of the
deaths of Robbie and Cecilia, but with the diagnosis of Briony's
vascular dementia and her refusal to have the lovers forgive her
even in her fictional account of their survival - proof that in
her literary act of atonement Briony has finally learned how to
imagine herself into the feelings of others.
Yet, as McEwan admits, Part Three "has about it both an act
of cowardice [. . .] but also it's also her stand against oblivion
she's seventy seven years old, her tide is running out very
fast [. . .] She does not have the courage of her pessimism. [.
. .] She knows that when this novel is finally published [. .
.] she herself will only become a character" (McEwan, Silverblatt).
Is Briony's work of fiction an evasion or an act of atonement
or both? What exactly does she mean when she says that atonement
"was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the
point" (351)? Is she implicitly recognizing the contradiction
at the heart of her narrative the impossibility of avoiding
constructing false fictions around others at the same time as
one is required to enter imaginatively into their lives? Or is
McEwan suggesting that the attempt is all we can ask for, an attempt
that is bound to fail, but that can come closer to or stray further
from the reality of others? Robbie's and Cecilia's happiness cannot
be restored to them by an act of corrective fiction. Nevertheless
the attempt to imagine the feelings of others is perhaps the one
corrective that we can make in the face of continuing human suffering.
The novel ends on a note of ambiguity. Yet an appreciation of
ambiguity is just what would have prevented Briony from indicting
Robbie in her first fictionalized narration of these events.
1. Jonathan Yardley's response in the Washington Post
can be taken as representative: Atonement "is the
finest book yet by a writer of prodigious skills. [. . .] there
is no one writing fiction in the English language who surpasses
McEwan, and perhaps no one who equals him" (BW1). This is
an extraordinary claim that is echoed by other reviewers' consistent
references to Atonement as "masterly" (Hitchings
4), "magisterial" (Caldwell E3), "the Great British
Novel" (Merkin R3), a "flat-out brilliant new novel"
(Wiegand 1), and so on.
2. "A frustrating ending," concludes Caroline Moore
in the Sunday Telegraph (12). Fellow novelist Anita Brookner
wrote in the Spectator that she found the ending too lenient:
"Elderly and celebrated, Briony expunges the guilt from which
she has always suffered, whereas she might have fared better to
have told the truth in the first instance [. . .]" (44).
Writing for the Weekly Standard, Margaret Boerner is more
strident: "In a kind of lunacy that one supposes he imagined
was like Ionesco's absurdity, McEwan destroys the structure he
has set up and tells us it was all fiction. But we knew it was
fiction" (43). It is that supposition about the nature of
the structure that betrays the source of most of this criticism.
Writing for The Times, Jason Cowley is most explicit about
what kind of structure these dissenting voices take it to be:
"[. . .] too many of the dilemmas and tensions that are established
in the first half of the book are left unresolved. We are told
briefly about Turner's prison years and about Cecilia's break
from her family, but never shown them" (17).
3. To distinguish the narrating subject from the subject of narration,
Emile Benveniste posited in Problems in General Linguistics
that narration falls along "two different planes of utterance."
When narration calls attention to its act of narration as an "utterance
assuming a speaker and a hearer," with the speaker attempting
to influence the hearer in some fashion, it functions as discourse.
When, however, "events that took place at a certain moment
of time are presented without any intervention of the speaker,"
the narration functions as histoire. Benveniste 206-9.
4. In his interview with Adam Begley for The Paris Review
162 (2002): 31-60, McEwan said that in an earlier draft he wrote
a biographical note for inclusion at the end of the book, which
read as follows: "About the author: Briony Tallis was born
in Surrey in 1922, the daughter of a senior civil servant. She
attended Roedean School, and in 1940 trained to become a nurse.
Her wartime nursing experience provided the material for her first
novel, Alice Riding, published in 1948 and winner of that
year's Fitzrovia Prize for fiction. Her second novel, Soho
Solstice, was praised by Elizabeth Bowen as 'a dark gem of
psychological acuity,' while Graham Greene described her as "one
of the more interesting talents to have emerged since the war.'
Other novels and short-story collections consolidated her reputation
during the fifties. in 1962 she published A Barn in Steventon,
a study of domestic theatricals in Jane Austen's childhood. Tallis's
sixth novel, The Ducking Stool, was a best-seller in 1965
and was made into a successful film starring Julie Christie. Thereafter,
Briony Tallis's reputation went into a decline, until the Virago
imprint made her work available to a younger generation in the
late seventies. She died in July 2001."
5. Intertextuality is a term Julia Kristeva coined from her reading
of Mikhail Bakhtin. As she argues in Revolution in Poetic Language,
"If one grants that every signifying practice is a field
of transpositions of various signifying systems (an intertextuality),
one then understands that its 'place' of enunciation and its denoted
'object' are never single, complete and identical to themselves,
but always plural, shattered [. . .]" (111). Kristeva claims
that all texts are composites of other signifying systems, not
the end product of a number of discernible sources. Roland Barthes
explains: "to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences'
of a work is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations
which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet
already read: they are quotations without inverted commas"
(160).
6. Derrida argues: "To write is to produce a mark that will
constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn"
(180). Kristeva explains the implications of this concept when
she writes that a text constitutes the "junction of several
texts of which it is simultaneously the rereading, accentuation,
condensation, displacement and depth" (Tel Quel 75).
7. In his ground-breaking "Discours du récit"
in Figures III, Paris: Seuil, 1972, Narrative Discourse,
trans. Jane E Lewin, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980, Gérard Genette
distinguishes three major categories for the study of narrative
tense, mood and voice. By distinguishing between narrative
perspective or focalization (who sees the story) and narrative
voice (who recounts the story), he was able to expose the way
the previous use of "point of view" was confusing because
it failed to distinguish between focus and voice. He goes on (189-90)
to differentiate narrative with zero focalization (cf. the omniscient
narrator), from narrative with internal focalization which itself
can be fixed (one focal character), variable (more than one focal
character taking turns), multiple (the same event focalized from
successive characters' perspectives), and from external focalization
(where no character is permitted to know his or her own thoughts).
8. See Sigmund Freud, "Creative Writers and Daydreaming,"
1908, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works,
London: Hogarth, 1940-68, Vol. 9, where he claims to recognize
in every hero in the fictional work of imaginative writers "His
Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and every story."
9. The term "implied reader" was coined by Wolfgang
Iser in The Implied Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1974, from the term the "implied author," introduced
by Wayne C Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1961, rev. 1983. Like Booth's, Iser's implied reader
is a construct which belongs to both the text and the reader.
It combines the prestructuring of the text to generate meaning
and the actualization of potential meaning during the act of reading.
10. I would like to thank Michael North at UCLA for his helpful
suggestions after reading an earlier draft of this essay.
Adair, Tom."The Follies of Youth." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Scotsman 22
Sep. 2001: 10.
Ali, Omer. "The Ages of Sin." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan, and Interview. Time
Out 26 Sep. 2001: 59.
Baker, Phil. "A Note of Apology." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Daily Telegraph
15 Sep. 2001: 5.
Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." Image
Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath.
New York: Hill, 1977. 155-64.
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London, New York:
Methuen, 1980.
Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans.
Elizabeth Meek. Coral
Gables:U of Miami P, 1971.
Boerner, Margaret. "A Bad End." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Weekly Standard
7. 32 (2002): 43.
Brookner, Anita. "A Morbid Procedure." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Spectator
15 Sep 2001: 44.
Caldwell, Gail. Rev. of Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Boston
Globe 17 Mar. 2002: E3.
Clancy, Ambrose. "He Triumphed Outside of the Mainstream."
Los Angeles Times 17
May 1999: E1.
Cowley, Jason. "Telling Tale." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Times (London) 22
Sep. 2001, Play: 17.
Cremins, Robert. "Coming to Be at One." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Houston
Chronicle 21 Apr. 2002: Zest 19.
Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context.' Glyph
1 (1977): 172-97.
Dyer, Geoff. "Who's Afraid of Influence." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan.
Guardian 22 Sep. 2001: Sat. Pages 8.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method.
Trans. Jane E. Lewin.
Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1980.
Haffenden, John. "Ian McEwan." Novelists in Interview.
London, New York: Methuen,
1985. 168-90.
Hitchings, Henry. "Once Upon a Time Before the War."
Rev. of Atonement, by Ian
McEwan. Financial Times 15 Sep. 2001: Books: 4.
Kellaway, Kate. "Review: Interview: At Home with his Worries."
Observer 16 Sep.
2001: Review 3.
Kemp, Peter. "A Masterly Achievement." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Sunday
Times (London) 16 Sep. 2001, 9.46.
Kristeva, Julia, in Sollers, Phillipe, et al [Tel Quel]. Théorie
d'ensemble. Paris: Seuil, 1968.
---. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller.
New York: Columbia UP,
1984.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
Lee, Hermione. Rev. of Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Observer
(London) 23 Sep. 2001:
Review 16.
McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
---. "The Art of Fiction CLXXIII." Interview with Adam
Begley. Paris Review 162
(2002): 31-60.
---. "I Thought I was Going to Screw it Up." Interview
with Will Cohu. Daily Telegraph
22 Sep. 2001: 8.
---. "A Novelist on the Edge." Interview with Dan Cryer.
Newsday 24 Apr. 2002: B6.
---. "Points of Departure." Interview with Ian Hamilton.
New Review 5. 2 (1978): 9-21.
---. "Blood and Aphorisms." Interview with Adam Hunt.
Ariel 21 (1996): 47-50.
---. "Adolescence and After." Interview with Christopher
Ricks. Listener 12 Apr. 1979:
526-7.
---. Interview with Michael Silverblatt. Bookworm. KCRW,
Santa Monica, California. 11
Jul. 2002.
Merkin, Daphne. "The End of Innocence." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. Los
Angeles Times Book Review 10 Mar. 2002. R3.
Moore, Caroline. "A Crime of the Imagination." Rev.
of Atonement, by Ian McEwan.
Sunday Telegraph 16 Sep. 2001: 12.
Ryan, Kiernan. "Sex, Violence and Complicity: Martin Amis
and Ian McEwan." An
Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in
English since
1970. Ed. Rod Mengham. Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 1999.203-218.
Said, Edward. "The Politics of Knowledge." Raritan
11. 1 (1991). Rpt. in Contemporary
Literary Criticism. Ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer.
4th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. 158-65.
Smith, Amanda. "Ian McEwan." Publishers Weekly
232. 11 (1987): 68-9.
Updike, John. "Flesh on Flesh." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. New Yorker 4 Mar
2002: 80.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious
Fiction. New
York: Routledge, 1984.
Wiegand, David. "Stumbling into Fate." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan. San
Francisco Chronicle 10 Mar. 2002: Sun. Rev. 1.
Yardley, Jonathan. "The Wounds of Love." Rev. of Atonement,
by Ian McEwan.
Washington Post 17 Mar. 2002: BW1.
Copyright 2002 Brian Finney