Reading behind the lines by Natasha Alden

Author:Natasha Alden [Alden, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, General
ISBN: 9781526102614
Google: t225DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2015-11-01T02:55:22+00:00

3

‘In the beginning was the word; and

to that it came back in the long run’:

Briony Tallis and Atonement1

Atonement, published in 2001, is Ian McEwan’s ninth novel.2 Having established a reputation for sensational, viscerally shocking prose in the mid-1970s, he has gone on to write novels about ‘big events’; sudden tragedies, incomprehensible trauma. Atonement, then, is something of a change of direction: unlike Enduring Love or Black Dogs it doesn’t begin with abrupt disaster, and is also set in unfamiliar territory – a country house in Surrey, in the 1930s.3 The tone is also different, being mannered, even cloying at times, and lacking the sense of amorality and darkness with which McEwan is more frequently associated.

McEwan’s writing moved away from the tightly restricted worlds of his early stories to a more social and political focus in the 1980s and 1990s. His novels The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love and Amsterdam all engage with public concerns as well as private lives.4

It would seem, initially, that Atonement continues this move towards a more open fictional world – the narrative moves between very different situations and narrators, and covers sixty years. However, in many ways Atonement is as closed, and claustrophobic, as The Cement Garden or The Comfort of Strangers; despite its range, at the end of the novel it becomes clear that we have seen the results of one person’s obsession, and have inhabited their minds, their obsession, without even knowing it.5

Atonement is divided into four sections, one set in the mid-1930s, two set in 1940 and one set in 1999. At the end of the final section, it is revealed that the previous chapters are all, apparently, written by Briony Tallis (the chief protagonist) who, by Part Three, we know to have been working on a series of drafts of a novel.

Part One of Atonement begins in a large late-Victorian country house, in the heatwave in the summer of 1935. The house is home to the Tallis family, headed by Jack, a senior civil servant making mysterious plans for the possibly impending war. Jack is often absent (at work or with his long-term mistress), while his wife Emily spends much of her time isolated in a darkened room, dogged by migraines. Their oldest child Leon is something of a flaneur, likable and disinclined to take life seriously. As the novel begins, he is imminently expected home with his rich but stupid friend, the businessman Paul Marshall. Cecilia, the older daughter, is wondering what to do with herself now she has left Cambridge. Briony, the youngest child, is utterly unlike her siblings; formidably focused, her ‘controlling demon’ is a desire ‘to have the world just so’.6 This manifests itself not only in a military tidiness, but in a passion for writing. The family group is completed – uneasily – by Robbie Turner, who, like Cecilia, has just graduated from Cambridge. Robbie is the son of one of the servants of the Tallis family; his education has been a hobby of sorts for Jack.

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