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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A series of childhood mistakes set our characters down winding paths propelled by fate and questionable decisions. Can forgiveness ever truly be found? Are we worthy of it?

Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, this beautiful hardcover edition of the bestselling "tour de force" (The New York Times) is a profound—and profoundly moving—exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.

By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life.

In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In Atonement he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London’s World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999.

Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375712470
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 06/17/2014
Series: Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series
Pages: 424
Sales rank: 153,147
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

IAN MCEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Hometown:

Oxford, England

Date of Birth:

June 21, 1948

Place of Birth:

Aldershot, England

Education:

B.A., University of Sussex, 1970; M.A., University of East Anglia, 1971

Read an Excerpt

Excerpted from the Introduction. Please note the Introduction contains spoilers. First-time readers are advised to read the introduction after the novel.



I N T R O D U C T I O N



Fiction is, above all others, the art of artifice: it demands the conjuring, from mere marks on paper, of entire felt worlds, of things and of people, of their spoken exchanges and interior emotions and thoughts. Ideally, it is, paradoxically, the deployment of artifice in the service of truth, aiming to reveal as accurately as possible the profound and complex experience of being human and alive on this planet.

But as both writers and readers are aware, stories have their own logic and needs, too: they must sometimes transcend ‘the bleakest realism’, as Briony Tallis calls it in Atonement, in order to fulfill some broader truth. A novelist is always engaged in the complex dance between the real and the ideal, manipulating and re-ordering detail into a comprehensible and hopefully meaningful narrative that may be, as George Eliot called it, ‘the nearest thing to life’, but that is emphatically not life itself.

From the opening pages of Ian McEwan’s masterful 2001 novel, Briony Tallis – just thirteen in the book’s first section, set in 1935 – reflects upon these mysteries. Frustrated with her first play, The Trials of Arabella – of which we are privy to some splendidly mawkish lines – she contemplates returning to her first passion, the story: ‘a story,’ she decides, ‘was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.’ She goes further, with a childish presumptuousness that would cause consternation among semioticians: ‘Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled . . .’

This faith in the telepathic transparency of language will prove both Briony’s undoing and her power. Atonement stands in contradiction to Auden’s famous assertion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’: if anything, the conviction of Briony’s storytelling makes too much happen; even as it will prove ultimately incapable of altering reality. At McEwan’s hands, Auden’s line might be rephrased, more accurately, as ‘poetry both does and doesn’t make things happen’.

Certainly, this novel makes its readers feel intensely. McEwan’s literary gifts are lavish, as great as those of any writer alive today, and there is something apparently almost cavalier about his deployment of them. He can create for us a vision of a summer’s evening:


In the early evening, high-altitude clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung about the giant crests of parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses took on the colours of the sky.



With equal intensity, he can summon roast potatoes so vivid we can practically taste them:


Cecilia moved round behind Betty to see what everyone else could see – a huge blackened tray recently pulled from the oven bearing a quantity of roast potatoes that still sizzled mildly. There were perhaps a hundred in all, in ragged rows of pale gold down which Betty’s metal spatula dug and scraped and turned. The undersides held a stickier yellow glow, and here and there a gleaming edge was picked out in nacreous brown, and the occasional filigree lacework that blossomed around a ruptured skin. They were, or would be, perfect.


Or again, in a wholly different register, he can bring us to scenes less familiar, and intensely less comfortable, such as the chaos of the British retreat to Dunkirk, early in the Second World War:


After minutes of noisy crunching over glass, there was sudden silence under their boots where the road ended in fine sand. As they rose through a gap in the dunes, they heard the sea and tasted a salty mouthful before they saw it. The taste of holidays . . . But the actual beach . . . was no more than a variation on all that had gone before . . . He saw thousands of men, ten, twenty thousand, perhaps more, spread across the vastness of the beach. In the distance they were like grains of black sand. But there were no boats, apart from one upturned whaler rolling in the distant surf. It was low tide and almost a mile to the water’s edge. There were no boats by the long jetty. He blinked and looked again. That jetty was made of men, a long file of them, six or eight deep, standing up to their knees, their waists, their shoulders, stretching out for five hundred yards through the shallow waters.



This, of course, is the least of the horrors of war that McEwan’s characters – and hence his readers, too – must encounter. To relive these surreal scenes is, in its way, a generalized act of atonement, a bearing witness and a recollection of what, in its details, war actually is. As Robbie Turner, the soldier through whose eyes we experience the retreat, reflects, ‘Who could ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village names and the dates for the history books? And take the reasonable view and begin to assign the blame? No one would ever know what it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture.’

Of course, ironically, at sixty (now seventy) years’ remove, the Second World War is for most of us reduced precisely to names and dates, to some version of ‘the reasonable view’. It falls to the novelist to bring it fully back to life, to restore, for his readers, the fleeting moment of hope when the soldiers reached the beach, each at the end of his own long and terrifying flight from the battlefield – the soundlessness of the sand, the salt smell of the air, ‘The taste of holidays’ – only to find (as it first appeared) that there was no hope there.


****


Complicatedly, this novel is both itself, and a novel about itself. Like a snake eating its tail, the narrative proves a moebius strip from which there’s no clear escape. We’re reading the lush and glorious prose of Ian McEwan, of course; but we’re also reading the prose of one of his protagonists, Briony Tallis, the young aspiring writer in 1935 who, by the novel’s conclusion in 1999, is revealed to be not only an accomplished novelist now grown old, but more specifically the writer of this book. Her reasons for the writing are intricate and painful, and should be left to the reader to discover. But the revelation of her authorship will prompt many to return to the novel’s opening, to question the seemingly insouciant lyricism of its most richly evocative passages, and to analyse McEwan’s, and Briony Tallis’s, choices at every turn.

For, as Briony Tallis acknowledges, there is grave responsibility in reconstructing a version of what was. The novel she is writing, the novel in our hands, has required meticulous research – including correspondence with soldiers who were at the scene (‘ ‘‘You have your RAF chappie wearing a beret. I really don’t think so. Outside the Tank Corps, even the army didn’t have them in 1940. I think you’d better give the man a forage cap.’’ ’) – and the melding and reconfiguring of actual events (‘I worked in three hospitals in the duration ... and I merged them in my description to concentrate all my experiences in one place’). This is precisely an example of a writer’s falsification in the service of truth. But perhaps, Briony Tallis would contend, perhaps sometimes, the novel can serve another, still greater kind of truth, a type of justice. Perhaps – and there is surely inherent blasphemy in the very suggestion – a novel can provide some form of redemption.


****


Atonement is divided into four sections, beginning in 1935 and ending in 1999. The opening section, by far the novel’s longest, is set in a country house in the south of England, at a time when the prospect of war is bruited but still seems a faint and dreamlike possibility. In these chapters, in which we are granted access not merely to the thoughts but also to the fantasies of the future of many of the central characters, McEwan’s dance between the real and the imaginary is particularly lively.

The story at hand is that of an ultimately disastrous house party in the summer of 1935. The hosts are the Tallis family: Leon, the eldest, home from London; Cecilia, a recent Cambridge graduate; and young Briony, all in the company of their mother, Emily, a largely absent but fond matriarch who is prone to migraines. They are entertaining their cousins – fifteen-year-old Lola, and nine-year-old twins Pierrot and Jackson Quincey – whose parents are in the process of divorcing; along with a friend of Leon’s, Paul Marshall, heir to a vast fortune in the confectionary business. Also present, and centrally important, is Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallises’ cleaning lady, a brilliant young man also recently down from Cambridge who, thanks to the largesse of Jack Tallis, Emily’s husband, is contemplating medical school.

There is much literary nuance in the assembling of this company: the time-honored structure of the country-house gathering affords, like a stage-play, rich possibilities for misapprehension and deceit. Different configurations of characters – diverse in age and social class, as well as temperament – will gather and disperse in various rooms or locales around the property; scenes are witnessed, conversations partially overheard, and significant notes exchanged. Upon occasion, plays are performed – although in this case, Briony’s play is halfheartedly rehearsed, then abandoned. These are deliciously familiar tropes. Think of the oeuvre of Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey provides Atonement’s epigraph; or of Brideshead Revisited, and of the novels of Anthony Powell; and again of Jean Renoir’s film The Rules of the Game. Or more recently, of Edward St. Aubyn’s quintet of Patrick Melrose novels, in which house-parties of various kinds underpin much of the social interaction. The signifiers are familiar; but their significance is not fixed.

In this case, McEwan both satisfies our expectations – here, for example, is the grand manor in its cultivated yet rustic setting, surrounded by parkland, follies and fountains and ha-has, bounded by woods – and simultaneously undermines them: the house itself is a fake latecomer, a Victorian horror, a ‘bright orange brick, squat, lead-paned baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted chances, and by a younger writer of the modern school as ‘‘charmless to a fault’’ ’, erected on the site of an ‘Adam-style house . . . destroyed by fire in the late 1880s’.

Like their house, the Tallises, in spite of their apparent grandeur, are false, a mere generation removed from humble origins: ‘Cecilia’s grandfather . . . grew up over an ironmonger’s shop and made the family fortune with a series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps.’ The family isn’t so far, it transpires, from their father’s protégé, the aspirant, industrious and brainy Robbie Turner, who, in this particular moment of possibility, is caught halfway in his move up the social ranks: his mother polishes the silver at the big house, it’s true; but he will attend the dinner party as a guest. There is something narratively perfect – almost purely novelistic – about Robbie: his are the perfect characteristics for a novel’s hero.

Then, too, there are the Quincey cousins: although they, like the Tallises, are blessed with an august and profoundly English-sounding surname – the one evoking the great essayist; the other the still greater composer – the children have been given theatrical, almost (and in one case, actually) clownish first names – Lola, Pierrot, and Jackson – as if, one might say, they were fictional characters. Their names call us, as readers, to interpretation – which is, of course, what fictional characters do.

If the slightly heightened contrasts of the Tallis household do not alert us to the complexities of their story-ness, young Briony’s ruminations will: McEwan captures brilliantly the combination of earnestness, grandiosity and fecklessness of a half-formed mind in pursuit of its artistic greatness. The novel’s first section tells of the crisis that will shape the Tallis family henceforth; but it also tells of the crisis of literary faith that will turn Briony into a novelist. Abandoning childish topics – ‘for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses’ – Briony comes to see her literary task as almost God-like:


She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view . . . None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. 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. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.



From this, we might infer that McEwan’s aim is simply to replicate Briony’s mission, to make us equally aware of the workings of various characters in the Tallis family circle. And indeed, this mission – Chekhovian, in its essence: it was Chekhov who famously wrote, of horse thieves, ‘Let the jury judge them; it’s my job simply to show what sort of people they are’ – would be largely sufficient for a work of art. But through the careful structuring of the remainder of the novel, we come to realize that McEwan has more at stake.


****

The second and third sections of the novel take place in the summer of 1940. These sections, like the novel’s first, are written in a close third person, enabling us to slip seamlessly from external observation to internal monologue and back again. In the first instance, we accompany Robbie Turner, now a private in the army, on his retreat through northern France to the beach at Dunkirk, where the British troops have massed in the hopes of a rescue by sea. These are a brutal, intensely vivid, eighty pages, in which we are spared nothing of the surreal sights and horrors of war, nor its black comedy. At one point, Robbie tries to save a woman and her child, only to see the spot where they were standing vaporized, and a smoking crater in their stead. At another, Robbie and his mate Nettle are forced to chase a wayward sow through the streets of a town for an old woman, in return for which they receive some food. How could these events be part of the same story? The implausible disjunctions aren’t lost on Robbie:


Periodically, something slipped. Some everyday principle of continuity, the humdrum element that told him where he was in his own story, faded from his use, abandoning him to a waking dream in which there were thoughts, but no sense of who was having them.


This section, like the first, has its antecedents. While it echoes a very different genre – the war narrative is a far cry from the house-party romp – Robbie’s account is similarly engaged both with an actual (potential) reality and with a body of fiction. The difference is, of course, that most war narratives – from Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried – are written by writers who have witnessed war as soldiers. Neither Ian McEwan nor Briony Tallis falls into this category of writer: there is something bold, brazenly theatrical, even challenging, about writing a character’s experience that includes the thought, ‘No one would ever know what it was like to be here’ – conceived, elaborated, and written by a writer (either fictional or actual) who was not himself or herself actually there.

The case for the power of fiction – the frank countering of Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – is made in these second and third sections of the novel. In the third, we accompany Briony, now eighteen, in her nurse’s training, as we have accompanied Robbie in his long march. Here again, we are overwhelmed with agonizing detail – ‘Everywhere, a soup of smells – the sticky sour odour of fresh blood, and also filthy clothes, sweat, oil, disinfectant, medical alcohol, and drifting above it all, the stink of gangrene’ – and with a nurse’s intimacies with the injured and dying. McEwan’s extraordinary linguistic facility is, in these sections, turned not to beautiful sunsets or fine meals, but to the mash and mire of ruined bodies and minds, struggling for survival. These, too, are familiars, far less enchanting than those with which the novel opens; and juxtaposed, as they are, with what has come before, or with Briony’s walk in the sunlit park on her day off, they are jarringly unfamiliar, too.

In the third section, moreover, McEwan resumes the interweaving of the Tallis family’s story – Robbie and Cecilia’s story, if you prefer – with Briony’s literary trajectory. Even as she trains to become a nurse, Briony is pursuing her career as a novelist. She receives a letter from Cyril Connolly, editor of the magazine Horizon, responding to her submission – of an early draft of this very fiction. She reflects on the nature of the contemporary novel: ‘A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time . . .’

Of course, McEwan’s novel – or Briony’s – is comprised in no small part of the movement of its characters’ thoughts. But there is a commentary upon Briony’s literary vision in the form of Atonement itself: McEwan’s character embraces modernism, intellectually, while McEwan comments upon that embrace in the shape and nature of his novel. Atonement is a novel fundamentally ordered by character and by plot, formally disrupted by modernism but discernibly linked to the fully indulged artifice of nineteenth-century realist fiction. Just as McEwan’s pastiche of war narrative provides both a re-enactment and a re-evaluation of such narratives, so too he is both dancing with his literary forebears and dancing around them at the same time. What is at stake, ultimately, is not simply the convincing ‘reality’ of his characters, but the ethical and aesthetic complications of the literary enterprise itself.

None of this would matter, of course, if Atonement were a dry, didactic or unrealized work. But McEwan’s magical conjuring powers are strong enough, by a long chalk, to free him to make ironic comment upon the artifice of such conjuring powers without fear of failing. We may be winking about the con, but we do so even as we’re eagerly and willingly being conned.

That the elaborate, consuming and self-knowing trickery that is a novel, that is this novel, might be a potentially moral or even redemptive act – for the reader as much as for the writer – is a profound question indeed. Briony, who has staked her life on the idea of fiction-as-redemption, fiction-as-atonement, certainly seems to know the answer to that question. Wily to the end, Ian McEwan, the book’s true author, who is crucially different from Briony, does not quite reveal his answer to her anguished question: God-like, all-knowing, he keeps it hidden.

—Claire Messud

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"McEwan's Atonement…truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past…. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel…. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes — the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression — into his narrative, and in a magical love scene."
—Brian Bethune, Maclean’s

"…Atonement is a deliriously great read, but more than that it is a great book.… There are characters you follow with breathless anxiety; a plot worthy of a top-drawer suspense novelist, complete with jolting reversals; language that unspools seemingly effortlessly, yet leaves a minefield of still-to-be-detonated nouns and verbs…. rife with…unforgettable tableaux…."
The Globe and Mail

"What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.… a tour de force by one of England's best novelists…. Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel — and more satisfying…— than anything McEwan has written….sublimely written narrative…. The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.… "
—Noah Richler, National Post

"I can’t imagine many readers who won’t find it compelling from beginning to end…. McEwan has dealt with major themes before in his novels, but never at this length and with this narrative richness. With Atonement he has staked a convincing claim to be the finest of all that brilliantly talented crew of British novelists, including Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis and Graham Swift, who rose to prominence in the 1980s."
—Phillip Marchand, The Toronto Star

"Atonement has power and stature and is compulsively readable."
The Gazette (Montreal)

"It is difficult to imagine how the book might be bettered. Bold in its intentions and flawlessly executed, Atonement is one of the rare novels to strike a balance between 'old-fashioned' storytelling and a postmodern exploration of the process of literary creation. Atonement is a tremendous achievement, a rich demonstration of McEwan’s gifts as a storyteller."
The Vancouver Sun

"Ian McEwan’s writing is so vivid it can make your eyes ache. But you can’t look less closely or put the book down. Such is McEwan’s growing strength. Atonement is exacting and poetic in detail as well as generous with wry, often heart-rending insight. Each character is richly portrayed and fully realized, from their subtlest thoughts and motivations to their period dress and surroundings. Atonement sustains, rewards and surprises right up to its final page."
Victoria Times-Colonist

"With a clear prose style and a humming sense of tension throughout, Atonement is both illuminating and entertaining. McEwan believes in love and goodness, but he is far more interested in good’s contrary, whether it is evil or mere psychological weakness. There may be atonement for the past, but there is never redemption."
The Edmonton Journal

"Class conflict, war and the responsibilities of the artist are among the themes of Atonement, but it is Ian McEwan’s writing that makes this novel one of his best: lush and langorous in the long first section, understated and precise in the latter two."
The Ottawa Citizen

"…a classic McEwan performance, combining an intense forward narrative thrust with the sharpness of observation and description that has made him this country’s unrivalled literary giant."
The Independent (U.K.)

"Atonement [is] McEwan's best novel, so far, his masterpiece…. Atonement is...a meditation on the impulse of storytelling itself, on the wish to give shape to experience which deceives no less than it illuminates."
Evening Standard (U.K.)

"The close-up verdict will be simple enough: Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence; as searching an account of error, shame and reparation as any in modern fiction…. The bigger picture would have to set it within the long sweep of a literary canon. With a lordly self-consciousness, McEwan here blends his own climate into the weather-pattern of classic English fiction. Atonement is not a modest work; but then (to distort Churchill on Attlee), it has an awful lot to be immodest about."
The Independent (U.K.)

Reading Group Guide

1. What sort of social and cultural setting does the Tallis house create for the novel? What is the mood of the house, as described in chapter 12? What emotions and impulses are being acted upon or repressed by its inhabitants? How does the careful attention to detail affect the pace of Part One, and what is the effect of the acceleration of plot events as it nears its end?

2. A passion for order, a lively imagination, and a desire for attention seem to be Briony’s strongest traits. In what ways is she still a child? Is her narcissism -- her inability to see things from any point of view but her own -- unusual in a thirteen-year-old? Why does the scene she witnesses at the fountain change her whole perspective on writing? What is the significance of the passage in which she realizes she needs to work from the idea that -- other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value? Do her actions bear this out?

3. What kind of a person is Emily Tallis? Why does McEwan decide not to have Jack Tallis make an appearance in the story? Who, if anyone, is the moral authority in this family? What is the parents’ relationship to Robbie Turner, and why does Emily pursue his conviction with such single-mindedness?

4. What happens between Robbie and Cecilia at the fountain? What symbolic role does Uncle Clem’s precious vase play in the novel? Is it significant that the vase is glued together by Cecilia, and broken finally during the war by Betty as she readies the house to accept evacuees?

5. Having read Robbie’s note to Cecilia, Briony thinks about its implications for her new idea of herself as a writer: No more princesses! . . . With the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help. Why is Robbie’s uncensored letter so offensive within the social context in which it is read? Why is Cecilia not offended by it?

6. The scene in the library is one of the most provocative and moving descriptions of sex in recent fiction. How does the fact that it is narrated from Robbie’s point of view affect how the reader feels about what happens to him shortly afterwards? Is it understandable that Briony, looking on, perceives this act of love as an act of violence?

7. Why does Briony stick to her story with such unwavering commitment? Does she act entirely in error in a situation she is not old enough to understand, or does she act, in part, on an impulse of malice, revenge, or self-importance? At what point does she develop the empathy to realize what she has done to Cecilia and Robbie?

8. How does Leon, with his life of agreeable nullity, compare with Robbie in terms of honor, intelligence, and ambition? What are the qualities that make Robbie such an effective romantic hero? What are the ironies inherent in the comparative situations of the three young men present Leon, Paul Marshall, and Robbie?

9. Lola has a critical role in the story’s plot. What are her motivations? Why does she tell Briony that her brothers caused the marks on her wrists and arms? Why does she allow Briony to take over her story when she is attacked later in the evening? Why does Briony decide not to confront Lola and Paul Marshall at their wedding five years later?

10. The novel’s epigraph is taken from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, in which a naïve young woman, caught up in fantasies from the Gothic fiction she loves to read, imagines that her host in an English country house is a villain. In Austen’s novel Catherine Norland’s mistakes are comical and have no serious outcome, while in Atonement, Briony’s fantasies have tragic effects upon those around her. What is McEwan implying about the power of the imagination, and its potential for harm when unleashed into the social world? Is he suggesting, by extension, that Hitler’s pathological imagination was a driving force behind World War II?

11. In McEwan’s earlier novel Black Dogs, one of the main characters comes to a realization about World War II. He thinks about the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend. Does McEwan intend his readers to experience the war similarly in Atonement? What aspects of Atonement make it so powerful as a war novel? What details heighten the emotional impact in the scenes of the Dunkirk retreat and Briony’s experience at the military hospital?

12. When Robbie, Mace, and Nettle reach the beach at Dunkirk, they intervene in an attack on an RAF man who has become a scapegoat for the soldiers’ sense of betrayal and rage. As in many of his previous novels, McEwan is interested in aggressive human impulses that spin out of control. How does this act of group violence relate to the moral problems that war creates for soldiers, and the events Robbie feels guilty about as he falls asleep at Bray Dunes?

13. About changing the fates of Robbie and Cecilia in her final version of the book, Briony says, "Who would want to believe that the young lovers never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism?" McEwan’s Atonement has two endings -- one in which the fantasy of love is fulfilled, and one in which that fantasy is stripped away. What is the emotional effect of this double ending? Is Briony right in thinking that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end?

14. Why does McEwan return to the novel’s opening with the long-delayed performance of The Trials of Arabella, Briony’s youthful contribution to the optimistic genre of Shakespearean comedy? What sort of closure is this in the context of Briony’s career? What is the significance of the fact that Briony is suffering from vascular dementia, which will result in the loss of her memory, and the loss of her identity?

15. In her letters to Robbie, Cecilia quotes from W. H. Auden’s 1939 poem, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which includes the line, "Poetry makes nothing happen." In part, the novel explores the question of whether the writing of fiction is not much more than the construction of elaborate entertainments -- an indulgence in imaginative play -- or whether fiction can bear witness to life and to history, telling its own serious truths. Is Briony’s novel effective, in her own conscience, as an act of atonement? Does the completed novel compel the reader to forgive her?

Interviews

An Interview with Ian McEwan

Barnes & Noble.com: Have you noticed a large difference between British and American audiences in the reception of your books?

Ian McEwan: Not really. I mean, I suppose I'm far better known here [in England] than in the States, and [my books are] studied at school here, and have been for many years. Kids doing their high school reading exams often end up writing about The Child in Time and, more recently, Enduring Love, and I think, apparently, Atonement is going to be absorbed into the school curriculum as well. [In England], I meet people who had to read me at school 12 years ago and have then remained faithful ever since. But my readership in the States, as I experience it through giving readings in bookshops -- it always surprises me that the people I'm reading to have been reading me for so long. But not because they were made to at school. And they actually know my stuff in ways that I find incredibly flattering. But it's not a mass audience. It's a sort of educated, book-loving...bookstore-haunting kind of readership.

BN.com: Your last book was Amsterdam, and that was very different in style. Could you compare the experiences of writing these books?

IM: I was a little cautious after Amsterdam because I had read in so many places that anyone who wins the Booker Prize never goes on to write a decent novel. So, there was a bit of "Watch me, you bastards..." about this. I was very careful. Amsterdam itself was much more like a holiday written straight after the intensity of finishing Enduring Love, and it was really kind of a jeu d'esprit. It was a novel that I sketched out on the back of an envelope around about the time I was halfway through Enduring Love, and it's the only time I've only started a novel with one just finished behind me. Usually I have to let some life go by, I have to live through my own changes, become slightly a different person.

This was very much the case with finishing Amsterdam and starting Atonement. I spent a year just writing little sketches, going for long walks, sitting with my feet up on the radiator staring out the window, writing random pretend-openings of books I knew I'd never continue. Turning down loads of writing commissions, and yet actually not producing anything, and feeling vaguely guilty for it -- just waiting. After about 15 months, I found I'd written a couple of paragraphs which I knew had taken me into the novel I was going to write. And it was just this girl stepping into the room with a bunch of wildflowers. The room has a certain kind of elegance, there's a young man outside she wants to see -- but doesn't want to see -- and there is a vase that she is looking for on a low table by a french window. And I don't know why, really, and I certainly didn't know why at the time, but I thought, This is a toehold for me. This is the beginning of whatever it is I'm going to write.

BN.com: From this first idea, how did Atonement evolve?

IM: Well, I'd had a number of separate ambitions and thoughts about possible novels. Graham Greene has a rather good phrase for things that you carry around in your mind. He used to call them "pools" -- like a swimming pool, or like a spring. And the work of starting or even continuing a novel was like digging trenches between these pools. The pools were, in his terms, sort of the inspired scenes. Well, I'm not sure that I'd call mine so much as "inspired"; they were just sort of vague ambitions. One of them was to write a love story. I had this thought as to whether it was possible, at the end of the 20th century, for the literary novel to explore the subject of love in quite the way it was automatically a subject in the 19th century. I mean, have we wrapped ourselves in so much irony and self-reference that we can no longer simply tell a love story?

I'd also, for many years, been very drawn to the underlying idea of Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey in which a young woman's reading of gothic novels causes her to misunderstand everything around her. And I've often thought that I would rather like someone with imagination to cause some sort of havoc.

I suppose, too -- people often say to me, well, you've written about children so much in your fiction. And I would say, have I really? There's a disappeared child in A Child in Time, and there are some grotesques in my short stories, and The Cement Garden is many, many years ago. I thought I'd never really seriously immersed myself properly in trying to make a fully rounded character out of a child, allowing myself all the resources of a complex adult vocabulary to describe a child's feelings. Which is what James does in What Maisie Knew. But having all those sort of vague ambitions -- I didn't even know that those various thoughts belonged in the same novel. I mean, I didn't know it until I finished, really.

BN.com: What are you reading now?

IM: Well, I read Embers, that Hungarian novel, by Marai, which I really loved. I'm rereading, because my son is doing it for his exams, The Lord of the Flies. I'm reading a book about scientific equations, which makes a case that their power is in their beauty, not only in their predictive qualities. It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science. I'm reading some poetry, I'm about to reread Henry IV, Part One again, just to be able to engage my son, who is a somewhat reluctant reader and has got to do some exams on these subjects.

BN.com: You said you usually take some time to become a slightly different person between novels. Looking through your earlier books, this personal evolution is evident -- you're definitely not an author who repeats himself. Where do you find yourself now?

IM: Well, I mean, I'm back in that stage, now. I'm not writing. I've written a couple of lectures, one on Edmund Wilson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You sort of have to pretend each novel is your first. And there is always an element of rebirth about it. You can't go back, you can't do the same thing again. It often takes a while -- and I know many novelists say this -- for the echoes to die away of the thing you started. Often you find in the early months other ideas come, and you realize they're just other unwritten chapters to the book you've just finished, really.

Introduction

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Booker Prize Finalist

The New York Times Book Review EDITORS’ CHOICE
and a Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Ian McEwan’s international bestseller Atonement.
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