Graham Greene-ish. A 25 year old British man who has lived with his parents up until now is sent to work on a secret tunnel in 1950s Berlin, a joint project between the British and Americans. He falls in love with a divorced German woman who introduces him to sex and love. Their relationship is threatened first when he rapes her (having tasted power and wanting more of it) and again when her ex-husband turns up and he feels pressured to be the strong man he has never been.

The prose only sometimes achieves the clarity and beauty which make McEwan one of my favourite writers. But I see in this novel interesting roots for later themes or scenes - Leonard rehearses a letter in much the way Robbie does in Atonement; the descriptions of Berlin resonate with those in Black Dogs; the couple have not so a disastrous wedding night as in Chesil Beach, but a disastrous engagement night for completely different reasons which still manage to tear the couple apart. Indeed, the ending of the novel is - SPOILER ALERT - quite similar to Chesil Beach.

7/10

I got there early, but the seats were already filled up and there I was outside the tent in the sun again, and when he came my myopic eyes could only make out a blur. He was a good speaker, but his voice was rougher than I imagined. I thought he’d have the same smoothness as his prose, a sort of aristocratic eloquence, but it wasn’t that kind of voice.

He read from his work in progress, a climate-change novel which sounds brilliant so far, full of those McEwan tics, timeframe and style that I love so much. He covered about five minutes of narrative-time in twenty minutes of reading.

A woman taking an ego trip asked him if it was possible to write happiness, because (she claimed) Saturday was a failure.

‘I did it,’ he replied graciously, ‘and you didn’t like it.’

I disliked a lot of the questions throughout writer’s week. They seemed to be divided between the self-serving, the loony , the wannabe writers looking for The Secret - and, I must admit, the good. ‘Don’t let the public near a microphone. They’ll say all kinds of stuff.’

The woman saying how it was unfashionable to talk about the afterlife. All the boring old men who made speeches. We didn’t come to hear you!

I’m a grumpy old man. I believe in everyone having a voice, but I don’t necessarily like the outcome.

This panel had Paul Auster, John Kinsella (my PEAC teacher’s cousin!), Margo Lanagan and Matt Rubenstein.

None of the writers particularly liked the question, and it was amusing to see them deconstruct it. Lanagan and Kinsella were both amusingly opinionated. I liked  Kinsella’s rabble-rousing excitability and his earnest ideology - ‘I am a vegan pacifist anarchist’ - but it didn’t go down well with the older book-club set sitting near me.

Auster was brilliant. He said there was only one truly subversive thing - clarity. And I agree with him entirely. I love clarity too, a transparent book where the words aren’t calling attention to themselves but you’ve just found yourself immersed in the narrative world. It’s what’s similar about Auster and my second favourite writer, Ian McEwan.

Auster said at one point ‘I live in such a solitary world. I’m just trying to do my work. I don’t have an awareness of the literary world.’ He talked of his indifference to critics and fame and I thought of his years living ‘hand to mouth’ working on translations and starving. For him, writing is about one person talking to another, two strangers meeting in intimacy. Well, I’m a stranger to him, but he’s not a stranger to me.

Auster’s only rule : ’swift and lean’. He said profound things on the spur of the moment in answering questions and he was private yet generous. He didn’t want to be there, but he was making the most of it and delighting me.

The rest of the world got to see Atonement months ago, but its official release in Australia was yesterday, Boxing Day. The Windsor Cinema - just metres from my house - had sneak previews last weekend, and so I got to see it a few days before most of Australia.

Of course, the film didn’t live up to my experience of the novel - but I was still impressed. (There was no chance of it being an equivalent experience, because for me the strength of Ian McEwan’s writing is his description of thought processes and emotions - something that can only be represented externally in a film.)

• The film has the novel’s elegance and intelligence.
• The actor playing the young Briony is perfect. She has a slightly haughty face, yet still likeable; she does precociousness so well.
• Keira Knightley was good as Cecilia but not brilliant. She didn’t have the subtlety I was expecting, the depth behind her words. I often felt like she was talking too quickly. But this might be the effect of the book moving so slowly, giving us each character’s thoughts around each line they deliver.
• The scenes were often excellent, especially the tired troops on the dirty beach at Dunkirk in the midst of the shambolic retreat. The ruined holiday town was perfectly evoked.
• Leon, Cee’s brother, wasn’t good natured enough. The novel’s so clear on his jollyness and generosity.
• I was worried that the war scenes would be extended and become the focus (when they were my least favourite part of the book) - but they weren’t; they were actually shortened.

The ending

The most significant change was the ending, but I thought it was a good change.  Briony actually publishes her version of Atonement, the one with the happy ending, whereas in McEwan’s novel she can’t publish while the Marshalls live for fear of litigation.

Briony’s appearence as an aged woman on the talkshow manages to encapsulate so much sadness, time and wisdom. It’s a compressed version of the epilogue that is nearly as profound as the original. I thought Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as the old Briony was brilliant.

9/10

Spoiler alert 

Atonement manages to work as both a compelling narrative with popular appeal - the sort of novel you can recommend to people who don’t read literary fiction - and as an extended exploration of life and the nature of writing itself.

Compelling narrative 

The compelling narrative comes from a strong plot and masterful control of detail. It is a love story, but a love story told mainly from the perspective of the person who has come between the lovers.

McEwan gives us two very attractive characters in Robbie and Cecilia - both young, intelligent and vibrant people. We want them to love each other, we want them to be happy.

Yet Briony is likeable in her own way too. A precocious and brilliant child who is on an awkward cusp of maturity and immaturity. Her desire to make life more dramatic, to make it black and white, good and evil leads her to decide that the rapist she saw running away from Lola must be Robbie.

Reading it the second time and knowing what was to come, I was tensely aware of all the small details that were piling up, sending events down the path that would lead to Robbie going to jail for the rape and being separated from Cecilia.  What would have happened if he hadn’t added the impulsive postscript about his sexual desire for Cecilia? Or even if he’d sent the right note, the corrected one? Would he still have ended up in that passionate tryst in the library which Briony interrupts?

What if Briony hadn’t read the note? Would she still have thought Robbie a sexual maniac?

What if the twins hadn’t run away and everyone gone to search for them? Would there have been no opportunity for Paul Marshall to rape Lola?

There are what-ifs in any narrative, but McEwan handles them so well, piling them precisely and expertly.

In part two as Robbie trudges through France trying to get home to Cecilia, the narrative drive is simple and strong: his survival, which would have been suspenseful in any case, is made even more so by the knowledge that Cecilia is waiting for him and their love has been so cruelly interrupted by years in jail.

In part three, we follow Briony as she works in the wartime hospital, ‘atoning’ for her crime by forsaking her dreams and trying to help others. The narrative drive comes from the fact that just like her, we don’t know what’s going on, whether Robbie made it, until, at the end of the section and the end of the novel as she wrote it, she visits Cecilia and Robbie is there with her.

An exploration of life and writing 

Everything shifts with the revelation in the epilogue ‘London, 1999′ that the preceding novel has been written by Briony Tallis, and that in ‘real life’, Cecilia and Robbie both died in the war. It breaks my heart. I’ve gone soft; I would rather things ended where they did and I didn’t have to think of the happy ending as a fiction within the fiction.

But it’s a profound epilogue. Full of wisdom about the experience of being old and looking back on life. And full of insight into writing itself.

Briony writes in first person, asking herself whether writing can be atonement, whether by creating happiness for Robbie and Cecilia she has atoned for her crime. The answer is ambiguous. The problem is that the writer is the god of her novel, and so there’s no-one higher to appeal to, no-one to forgive her for what she’s done.

Thus the final scene as the dying Briony witnesses the play that was never staged with all her family around her has a special poignance. It’s realistic about the consolations that are available in life.  Even if there’s no undoing what’s done, there’s still moments like these of joy and love. Not a happy ending, but a happy scene at the end of a profound life.

I’ve just finished re-reading part two of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Having got of prison early in exchange for enlisting, Robbie’s in the midst of wartorn France, with death and atrocities all around him. He’s retreating to the coast and trying to focus on Cecilia waiting for him across the channel.

It’s a strange juxtaposition after the single atrocity in the midst of the civilisation of the manor in the first section; McEwan never takes us quite where we expect.  

Towards the end of the section is the key to the connection:

But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no-one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there wasn’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts… You killed no-one today? But how many did you leave to die?(261)

The tide of blood in war, the constant atrocities, drown out that one atrocity, that one event that changed everyone’s lives back at the manor. When we learn, later on, that it’s Briony writing this, the juxtaposition of her crime and the war might make us think her innocent by comparison. Or at least dilute the magnitude of what she did. (Of course, she can’t forgive herself that easily but she’d like to.) 

I found this part less compelling, less insightful than the first part, but then the first part is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.

Spoiler alert

Few books make me feel so deeply as Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I’ve just finished re-reading the first part, and I’m devastated again.

As the party waits for Robbie to return and be arrested, we watch it through Briony’s eyes and it’s so very frustrating because I long to know about Cecilia’s rage at her note being shown around to everyone and her passion for Robbie. I long to know what Robbie is thinking. Such a heartbreaking scene: him coming out of the mist at dawn having found the lost boys, expecting a hero’s welcome, and instead this stony faced line of people waiting with angry hatred for him.

And in feeling so angry at Briony, we forget the worst sin committed here: Paul Marshall’s rape of Lola and then the cowardly warmongering snob’s silence as an innocent man is arrested for the crime. What an evil human being! This novel affects me so much that I hate him as I read, I hate the way he’s got between Cecilia and Robbie, the way he’s destroyed Robbie and Lola’s lives.

McEwan casts this villian so well by giving Marshall plausible pomposity and this delicious detail of him being the gleeful inventor of that disgusting counterfeit – compound chocolate – and his desire for war so that the demand for his chocolate increases.

McEwan is a writer who has such superb control and pacing. He knows how to create narrative hunger in the reader, and yet once he’s done this, he also knows the precise speed at which to release details to us to keep us enthralled and desperate for more.

Some people I respect a lot find the first part slow and boring. I wonder if this is because their experience of the world is too different to McEwan’s. For me, McEwan so precisely gets to the experience of being alive when he talks of his characters’ motivations and thoughts that I don’t mind if a perfectly ordinary day occurs. However, I also am always aware that some menacing event that’s about to change everyone’s lives is hanging in the air.

I’m re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement ahead of the release of the film on Boxing Day. It’s an exquisite treat. Each sentence is so well constructed, so revealing of some truth of experience, that I feel guilty reading it quickly. It’s like an extremely expensive meal that can’t even be replicated if you had the money: there are only a couple of books this good in the whole world and you can only read them so many times.

McEwan, my second favourite writer, and Auster, my first favourite writer, will both be speaking at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. And I won’t be there. Like a fool, I hesitated, scared to ask for time off work when I was just starting a new job, and the event is sold out. It feels like a dream that first they could be speaking at the same event in the same country as me and second that I missed out.

McEwan’s In Between the Sheets collection was published in 1978. Some of the stories are typical of his early transgressive work. Others point the way forward to the brilliance of his later career. ‘Two fragments’ is one of the latter.

In twenty pages it manages to tell a whole novel worth of things. It is so compressed, so ripe, so well-developed. The characters feel alive, with years of past and maybe years of future.

His picture of a dystopian London is chilling in its tiny, well realised details. Homeless people use a massive fountain in the public area as a toilet. The everyday experiences of life go on: Henry wakes from a dream; his daughter asks him questions about her body.

Henry has compassion, an unsentimental compassion so unadorned in its telling, helping a Chinese man move a wardrobe, and it’s this that makes me think of his later work.  Because I think he has become such a compassionate writer.  And you never would have thought it reading his first short stories or The Comfort of Strangers.

Saturday is written in third person; Sunday in first person. The two halves complement well, leaving a rounded taste in my mouth.  

On the basis of this dystopian story, I think McEwan could have become one of the greatest SF writers ever.  (Child in Time is further evidence.) Instead, he trod his own singular path which I am so grateful for.

Great review of the collection here: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/16/040448.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6982091.stm

I’ve been enraptured with Ian McEwan since I discovered him last year (about twenty years after the rest of the world.) So I’m very glad he’s been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize with On Chesil Beach. It’s an excellent novel(la); one of the saddest I have ever read. I think it depicts the anxieties of newlyweds so well and shows the way the rest of one’s life hangs in the balance on one’s wedding night. Or at least the way it feels. I wonder what influence his own marriage breakdown had on his choice and treatment and themes.

Even if it wins,  the travesty which will remain is that Atonement didn’t win the Booker seven years ago. It is far, far superior to Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang -  a good but fatuous and minor comic work. (And I say this as an Australian!)

I’m not alone in thinking that McEwan’s own Booker winner - Amsterdam - is one of his minor works. A very readable thriller with moments of intense insight spoilt by  a contrived ending.