Ian McEwan's Atonement - the bittersweet consolation of solipsism

It was perhaps a mistake to read Atonement after seeing the film. It was perhaps also a mistake (although more McEwan needs to be read to be sure of this) to have read it after McEwan's earlier book, Enduring Love, as they share several similarities. This is still to say that Atonement is a wonderful read.

The edition that I have is Vintage’s 21^st Brithday Rainbow collection, of which Atonement is a lovely shade of Shamrock green. The quoin of the book (if that’s the right term) is also green. I wonder how that was done. A simple idea but the effect is very pleasing.

McEwan’s prose gives a visceral pleasure. Whilst reading the book I have this impression as if reading it in a sepia, crepuscular light. He is perhaps the best writer at capturing emotion. Especially the transmutations and permutations of sentiment and passion. That flighty thing which shimmers and quivers and mutates and evolves; often-times seemingly without reason or rationale. He is able to grasp the delicate nuances of thoughts and the fact that it is something often devoid of and divorced from nobility, logic, reason and affability yet still retains for the reader an element of empathy. The personal, the inner, the intimate and enclosed privacy of one’s most private thoughts and instincts, which cannot be communicated or explained but yet fuels, indeed drives one’s actions, both imperative and exigent. At the same time, this force, in part the id, the primal, the Dionysiac, rendered palatable to oneself by often skewed, self-serving reasoning, is really what is at the core of one’s personality. This analysis, or rather, vignette of Briony, the narrator of the tale, made the first part of the book a pleasure to read indeed.

The bourgeoning of a young personality blessed and encumbered at the same time with an artistic personality, exquisite sensitivity, vivid imagination and a sense of self-imbued importance and responsibility. All what are normally considered wonderful qualities clashes with situations that leads to what amounts to a Euripidean tragedy: that of greatness let down by a simple flaw. In this case, the tremulous first steps of budding love with its characteristic hesitation, misunderstanding and ultimate anagnorisis between Cecilia and Robbie, juxtaposed in the worst possible way with circumstances and Briony’s personality, thus composed, as the ultimate catalyst of grave misunderstanding and almost immediate peripeteia.

One feels that this section must also be semi-autobiographical; the thoughts of a young budding writer awakening from the woollen bubble of childhood, of happy endings, proprieties, sweet solipsism of indulging in one’s imagination. That’s something I certainly can relate to. She awakens to the power of words from that one word ‘cunt’. The amazing power of words, especially the incendiary punch of obscene or rude words that evokes immediately an emotional response. A theory (Steven Pinker?) goes that for humans it is an evolutionary advantage to move from physical display of antagonism to use verbal substitutes. Across cultures, similar categories of words are insulting; those to do with faeces, private parts, sex, one’s mothers and ancestors etc. It also seems to be linked with the primal parts of our brain like the basal ganglia. Fascinatingly, in many people who have suffered stroke and subsequent brain damage which renders them aphasic, first to recover is often their swear words. They sometimes then have an inability to control their verbal tirade. It just goes to show that the power of certain words, especially at the pre-world war II era, accidentally unleashed onto a girl especially sensitive to their qualities, on the verge of adulthood understandings, can trigger such an antagonistic feeling towards their author.

The shock to her system begins an evolution from a child to a woman, from a write who writes perfect little self-contained stories with happy endings to one that is awakened to the powerful tug of emotions. Lost with the realisation that she needs to write not to describe but to emote; to simulate or capture and transmit the powerful emotions that were triggered in her by the word.

The way McEwan wrote about the relationship between Robbie and Cecilia highlights the nature of love. The power of unfurled love, the anxiety, opacity and frustration in the moment of uncertainty; even the resentment that arises as an explanation for the uncontrollable surges of pure emotion. It reminds me of the third quatrain of Blake’s poem:

Love seeketh only itself to please,
To bind another to its delight.
Joy in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.

It seems to echo an idea of mine, that love and hate are not only not opposites, but are in fact the same thing. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. The opposite of hate is also indifference. To hate requires love. The deeper the love, the more exigent the hatred. Love curdles, as someone rather eloquently, if somewhat harshly, put it. Othello is a study in the curdling of love by jealousy. There seems to be an abnormal, silly reverence of love, elevating it to something that it isn’t and can’t be. Idealising love and thus taking away all its complexities and what some might call plebeian nuances. The alienation by reticence to communicate, the trepidation between closeness and antipathy, is captured wonderfully. That the grave injustice done to Robbie occurred at the apex of their passions makes it believable that Cecilia breaks her ties with her family.

Part two of the book moves from the environs of a large estate to that of France at perhaps the pit of her history - when she is about to succumb to Nazi dominion. The British troops, Robbie included, are on the run, or what was euphemistically termed ‘strategically withdrawing’ to Dunkirk. The sheer disarray of their retreat and the sickening, depressing sights they see on their way paints a sombre picture of the war on the small scale, something that is often forgot. I’m still trudging through Klemperer’s ‘I Shall Bear Witness’, a valuable book superior to Anne Frank’s Diary, but sadly and infinitely less well known. The simple camaraderie with the French peasantry is touching. The shame of the British retreat, the empty hopefulness and false optimism is heart breaking. The rancorous and drunken disorder at the beaches, the almost utter loss of discipline and even solidarity hits a true cord. After weeks of fighting, facing deaths, the shame of defeat, trapped on a beach with the Panzers edging closer, with air-raids a daily occurrence; it is enough to shatter the most stout of minds. The fact that they have nothing to do on top of it all keeps men on edge. Under these circumstances, the slightest thing brings out their acrimonious worst. The single thing driving the fevered, slightly delusional Robbie onwards is the promise of Cecilia’s love. It is understandable that at the line between life and death, notions like loyalty, nationalism, patriotism flies out the proverbial window. Each clings to something personal and precious to get them through each day. War, other than being a horrible thing, also brings out the most basic of human, collective and nationalistic instincts and teaches us so much, through rivers of blood.

If you can hear, with every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs,Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you will not say, to children ardent for some desperate glory,That old lie: dolce et decorum est pro patria mori.

The next part, with grown-up Briony as a nurse, is splendidly written. Much literary effort is expended on the frontlines and justly so, but the stories behind the scenes, of women working in factories and farms, the seed of renewed feminism and the Suffragette movement, have not received their just place in literature. The realism of this section is well rendered; the surrender of privacy, the loss of identity, the submission to routine and order all reflect from another angle the harshness of the war. It also helps in some way to keep Briony’s mind off the inevitable truth; that of her lie which ruined the lives of her sister and Robbie. The brutality and cruelty of reality is in itself a form of punishment; self-chastisement for her crime, the deliberate denial of Oxford and the submission of herself to vicariously redeem some self-respect. By this, however, writing attained an even greater value to her. It’s a precious enjoyment snatched out of the day; her real raison d’etre, hidden from everyone. The feeling that she is more than cleaning bed pans and scrubbing floors, that her real worth is simply hidden by choice - a deliberate self abnegation. The letter from Horizon, the magazine to which she sent her manuscript, seemed to have sprung her from her emotional and indeed, literary stupor. The obvious lack of story reflected to herself the inability to face up to the reality of her actions years ago. To make amends, she battled with herself to raise objection at Lola and Marshall’s wedding. Unable to do so and ashamed, she went to search out Cecelia and Robbie. The uncomfortable and claustrophobic scene was painful to read. Robbie and Cecelia’s unforgiving coldness and Briony’s terse, strained but ultimately liberating confession was well seasoned by the obvious deep understanding between Cecilia and Robbie, further isolating Briony and deepening her sense of shame.

Then the final scene, the twist, the peripeteia. This is where I regret watching the film first. Because the impact of the wonderfully constructed and poignant realisation is lost although the novel ended very differently from the movie (in which it was an interview of Briony, now a famous author, about her last novel). In a way, the book’s ending is superior even if the movie’s ending was more terse and palpable. The fact that Briony’s memory is going, that very thing which holds the one event that had shaped and coloured her life, makes her nervous. It makes it an imperative that she should write the story down. But curiously, she is once more struck by the power of words, her power as an author. That the story starts and ends with her; when she, Lola and Marshall are dead, what is real will be dictated by what she writes. In an act of despondent and futile attempt at atonement, she let’s Cecilia and Robbie reunite after the war, but she was not conceited or self-serving, or rather, I think, free of guilt, to let them forgive her even in her own narrative. It seems to me that this amendment of reality in fiction is a brittle form of self deception. There is a distinct ring of desperation and perhaps self-delusory quality about this gesture. She says it’s not weakness or evasion but an act of kindness. But, for a person who ravels so much in imagination, it is arguably more a salve where at least in her mind and in her book, she can escape to a reality where they lived and continue to love each other.  

Contrasting with Briony, it is interesting to see how the other peripheral characters have moved on. Brinoy gives the impression that though half a century has passed, her life is still in many ways anchored to that day in summer. Her guilt, their deaths, leads her to atone in the only way she can, to give them happiness in fiction. This is her prerogative and her natural instinct. But, as a device in a novel, it works fantastically. The realisation that McEwan gives us reiterates the importance of characters, the relentlessness and cruelty of one’s actions and the ineffable despair of regret and remorse. What is also played on in the novel is the importance and difference between fiction and truth. Who was it that said, to tell a truth, an author will turn to fiction? Truth is more than facts, and sometimes facts get in the way of truth. To Briony, what is most salient is hope and joy after so much suffering and regret. McEwan however uses this to hide or perhaps highlight his message that fiction is more than telling the story, it is a responsibility to imbue the readers with a sense of poignancy. By revealing that Cecelia and Robbie are in fact dead and that half of part 3 is entirely fictional, he underlined the contrast between the harshness of real life and the world of stories, where things can be tinkered with to suit one’s wishes. Life is not like that. Its consequences are brutal. As Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain said ‘the world owes you nothing, it was here first.’ In a way it reverts back to Briony’s play, the trials of Arabella, where her desired outcome is to use it to enlighten her brother to find a suitable wife. Her wants are still the same more than half a century later; to use fiction to make the world just so. Even if real life changes are beyond her, she can at least salvage it in fiction.

McEwan destroys even the morsel of comfort the readers derive and the quantum of consolation Briony desperately yearns by breaking the illusion of her fictitious ending. I think he wanted to do three things: one is to underline the fragility, the pain and the desperate salvaging by Briony. The note of hopelessness and acceptance is truly sad and touching. Second is a warning to the responsibility carried by our decisions as well as the fact that sometimes we are resigned to our fate. Like the butterfly effect, one sometimes cannot but succumb to the whimsical nature of chaos. This is when people talk about fate and stars aligning, the seemingly inevitability and yet painfully unnecessary series of chance events, clash of characters and cruel twists chance. Lastly, it seems to me that McEwan deliberately breaks what Briony stated, that her duty as an author and as a kindness to herself, Cecilia and Robbie as well as to her readers, is to give them hope and consolation. In fact, by revealing the illusion, McEwan is saying that that is not what literature is for. It is about truth, and truth if often harsh. Tragedy strikes us more than happy stories. We should grow out of our need for happy endings sooner or later. The most famous, touching and ‘true’ stories are almost all tragedies. The tragic has a power to move and strike us in a way that happy endings lack. According to Nietzsche, the power of tragedy comes from the clash between the Apolline and Dionysiac; the animal and reason parts of our nature, a struggle that we face daily and therefore very pertinent. Stoicism in facing life and its caprice, courage in the light of defeat, requires first the abandonment of self-delusion.  

Finally, it strikes me that Atonement is a story about growing up and facing up to the real world. That happy endings do not always occur and regret and remorse are terrible things but will transpire. How we face such challenges and rebel against life is what we all should ruminate. Personally, I agree with the essence of Camus: he posed, in The Myth of Sisyphus, the king punished for his arrogance by cursed to forever push a large boulder up a hill, only to fail each time as he near the peak, that the ultimate philosophical question is whether or not to kill oneself - but concluded that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.  C’est la vie.