Thursday, March 15, 2007

Atonement, authorial and otherwise

Early yesterday I read a line on page 5 of a 350-page book, and by midnight I had finished the book. Here is the line that caught my attention: "Whereas her big sister's room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony's was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way--toward their owner--as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled."

That little girl's carefully maintained shrine to herself soon comes crumbling down in exquisite slow motion stretching over the first third of the book. The book is Atonement by Ian McEwen, published in 2001, which makes me wonder how I've missed out on McEwen's work for so long. I have lots of friends whose opinions I respect, but not one of them ever grasped me by the lapel while insistently whispering McEwen's name in my ear or, better yet, sent me a McEwen novel for Christmas. Where are my friends when I need them? Someone must pay for those six lost years! Someone must provide atonement!

That someone will not be the author of the book within the book, who, late in life, attempts to assess her authorial responsibility: "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagation she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists."

Earlier, the same character agonized over a rejection letter that painfully opened her eyes to the chief fault in her writing: "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? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it."

This passage perfectly describes a less satisfying reading experience I had recently--in fact, two of them! But that rant will have to wait for another day. For now, I'm atoning for my past neglect by finding some more books by Ian McEwen.

1 comment:

Alistair Brown said...

Glad that you've encountered the pleasures of Ian McEwan (not McEwen ;-). Over here in the UK he's probably our most respected novelist at the present moment, as well as being a fine commentator on social and cultural issues (his essays on September 11th were about the most sensible and sensitive things published in the press at the time).

It's ironic, though, that he doesn't seem to have the same status across in America. He was the first truly successful product of our new courses in Creative Writing (at the University in East Anglia), modelled on those established so successfully in American universities for quite a while now.