Atonement

"Shortlist"

"I think a lot of writers can related to Briony Tallis, the main character, who is a young girl with an incredibly rich imagination. But hopefully not many of us have used our imaginations to provoke such a dreadful series of events as Briony does. She witnesses and, crucially, misunderstands, an interaction between her sister Celia and their gardener Robbie. She uses her imagination to fill in the blanks of this interaction, in which a flirtation becomes, in her head, a crime, with tragic consequences for everyone involved. It’s a book that doesn’t hold back on the carnage of war, though in a different way to Kate Atkinson’s. It has this laser focus on the evacuation from Dunkirk and the resulting casualties. The Dunkirk chapters are just extraordinary, and so grim. They really give us an insight into what it must have been like, not just for the men going through it, but the civilians who met the casualties when they returned to this country, the trauma of it all. In both of these first books, we get the sense of the clash between the orderliness of society pre-war, then the chaos of war itself. And they both have an interesting structure. Atonement is a novel within a novel: Briony is an inspiring writer who has submitted a novella to an editor and gets feedback that she has to ramp up the tension. i.e., to use literary devices to make it a more enticing story. McEwan is basically telling us that this is happening in the story we’re reading: it is a retelling of events from her childhood, but with her own imaginative contributions. History is a perception of the past, a constructed narrative. There is always something implicitly unreliable about this; even with recent history we are always getting things wrong, losing part of the truth of what actually happened. Some voices shout louder than others. What you can gain is a much more human take on it. You can step out of the facts and figures of history and put a voice to the experience. You don’t necessarily get that writing nonfiction. I don’t think that anyone should ever use fiction as an academic account of the past, but it can give you a way of stepping into the past, a way to explore the atmosphere of the time. These novels are obviously not history books . They are fiction, but they still give unique insight into the emotions people might have been feeling: they give voice to the terror of war."

"Atonement, by Ian McEwan, is one of my favorite contemporary novels."

"At the moment I put my latest, “Sweet Tooth,” just ahead of “Atonement.”"