Atonement, Ian McEwan

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Triton Fountain

(January 15) Really, really liked this.

The irresistible part is the relationship between Cecilia and Robbie -- have lovers ever been more tragic and star-crossed than this? But everything about this novel is great. The bare bones of the plot are fascinating in themselves, and then McEwan does interesting things with them. There is some Virginia Woolf, some metafiction, some stream of consciousness, some gritty realism -- all of it used perfectly to tell its part of the story.

Then there is the whole sub-theme of the growth of a writer, which I found very compelling because it was easy to identify with Briony. I, too, wrote plays when I was 10 or 11, and cast my sister, brother and next-door neighbour in all the parts. Briony’s childhood play, The Trials of Arabella, is a miniature Punch-and-Judy version of the main story of Atonement and it cleverly begins and ends the book.

On top of this there are some intriguing symbols and images worked into fabric of it all, such as vases with flowers; water in all its forms; disembodied limbs, which crop up in a variety of cunning ways, without being either intrusive or instructive; references to works of art, such as Clarissa (a romanticized rape), Hamlet (the hero’s awkward choices are not unlike Briony’s), and (a copy of) Bernini’s Triton Fountain. The water imagery, which flows (lol) through the whole book, is thoroughly instructive (in contrast to the limbs) and is very well done.

And then, for me, there’s a bittersweet aspect to Briony that is haunting. Though it’s easy to identify with her at first, as time goes on it’s hard to like her, both for what she does to Cecilia and Robbie and for the way she allows herself off the hook for it. Do writers tend to be like that?