The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  It would be fair to say that until the publication of Atonement in 2001, Ian McEwan’s fictions had been prodigies: they did everything but move us. McEwan had made himself a master of narrative stealth, of the undetonated bomb and the slow-acting detail: the fizzing fact that steadily dissolves throughout a novel and perturbs everything around it. His fictive worlds had always been highly managed climates, with not much room for gratuity, abundance, spaciousness. His books, like detective stories, were always moving forwards. They seemed to shed their sentences rather than to accumulate them. Tidiness, finish, polish, craftsmanship, formal intelligence – these were the words that seemed best to describe his work.

  Atonement represents a break with this pattern. McEwan carefully loosens the golden ropes that have sometimes made his fiction feel so craftily imprisoned. This novel has a new spaciousness and amplitude, moving, in its first section, from England in 1935 to, in its second, a remarkable account of the British army’s retreat at Dunkirk, and thence to a third chapter set in wartime London. More importantly, McEwan employs this large novel to comment on the type of fiction that he has tended to produce in the past – the sort of controlled and controlling storytelling that insists on artfully tidying up its clean narrative lines and themes, the sort of fiction that always seems to know better than the characters themselves what they are thinking, what they are going to do next. It is perhaps a stretch to claim that Atonement is an atonement for fiction’s manipulative untruths, not least because finally it seems to be a defense of those untruths. But it is surely a novel explicitly concerned with fiction’s fictionality, and keen to examine the question of the novel’s responsibility to truth.

  These rather abstract anxieties are wonderfully made flesh in the novel’s thirteen-year-old heroine, Briony Tallis, who is an ambitious budding writer. The novel opens, amusingly, with her attempt to write a play, The Trials of Arabella, and to cast in it her cousins, Pierrot, Jackson, and Lola. McEwan shows a great deal of tact in the patient way he follows the daydreams and furies of this bright little girl. The aimless solipsism of childhood is marvellously caught, as Briony sits and plays with her hands:

  She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instance before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it?

  Briony’s elder sister, Cecilia, has just come down from Cambridge, which she attended with a young man called Robbie Turner. Robbie’s status is awkward: the son of the Tallis’s cleaning lady, he has been essentially adopted by the wealthier family, who paid for his education. And Cecilia is complicatedly in love with him.

  A house party is in the offing: Briony’s elder brother Leon and his friend Paul Marshall have arrived from London. But there is a way in which none of these people quite exist for Briony, are indeed just Pierrots for her inner circus: ‘was everyone else really as alive as she was?’ she muses. ‘For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face?’

  Briony is going to learn that indeed her sister does feel as ‘valuable to herself’ as Briony does. Or rather, she is going to ignore this sympathetic imaginative truth, in a moment for which the rest of her life will be an atonement. From her window, she sees an event which she can barely comprehend. Cecilia and Robbie are standing next to the fountain. Suddenly, Cecilia strips off her clothes and jumps in to retrieve something, while Robbie watches her. Then she puts her clothes back on, and returns to the house. Robbie also leaves the scene. Briony is oddly stirred by her witnessing, convinced she has seen some kind of mysterious erotic domination played out. At first, she holds herself to properly rational standards. She knows she must not judge. She decides to abandon melodrama, with its easy judgments, and start the task of writing truthfully and impartially. She can write the scene from three different perspectives, she realises with excitement – hers, Cecilia’s, and Robbie’s:

  from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. 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 … And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value.

  Sixty years later, McEwan tells us, when Briony is a famous novelist, her work known for its ‘amorality’, she will remember this year as a turning point in her literary development.

  But of course Briony ignores her own wise perspectivism. A series of events combine to convince her that Robbie is a sexual menace, an outsider, a predator who must be stopped. She reads an erotic note that Robbie writes to Cecilia but mistakenly hands her; and she interrupts Robbie and Cecilia having hurried sex in the library, inferring from their position that Robbie is forcing Cecilia. So when the fifteen-year-old Lola is molested in the house’s darkened garden, Briony assumes that the shape she saw was Robbie’s, and she testifies against him to the police. Robbie is duly arrested.

  Briony’s impulse to judge, to close the case, is inextricable from her literary impulse, which is to fashion a closed story. Stories, she has already reflected earlier in the book, are only stories when they have endings: ‘Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.’ There has to be a ‘story’ about Robbie, she thinks:

  and this was the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But wasn’t she – that was, Briony the writer – supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery tale ideas as good and evil? There must be some lofty, god-like place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other … If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.

  What Briony has seen is plotless, because she can make no hermeneutic sense of it. But she imposes a plot anyway: she makes it mean. In addition to explicit ruminations like these on storytelling and fiction, Atonement’s first section is carefully mined with signifiers of fictionality. There is, first of all, as already mentioned, the nagging artificiality of the entire section, along with the heaped literary allusions, to Austen, Fielding, Richardson, T. S. Eliot, and so on: McEwan superbly pulls off that very hardest of tasks, the simultaneous creation of a reality that satisfies as a reality while signaling that it is itself a fiction. Note, too, that one of the reasons that the writing here feels so calmly antique, so ‘old-fashioned’, is that McEwan systematically avails himself of precisely the ‘lofty, god-like place from which all people could be judged alike’ so characteristic of ninete
enth-century (especially Tolstoyan) fiction. After all, McEwan reserves the god-like right to enter, variously, the minds of Briony, Cecilia, their mother Emily Tallis, and Robbie Turner. He uses a confident, generalising authorial voice (‘in any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful’); or an all-knowing ‘flash-forward,’ which signals his own control of events (‘Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project’s highest point of fulfillment’); and he fills the section with intimations of foreclosure and clairvoyance: Lola, Jackson and Pierrot are the children of divorce, ‘a mundane unravelling that could not be reversed’; Robbie’s mother actually works as a part-time clairvoyant, dishing out predictions to the villagers for money; and the Tallis paterfamilias is a London civil servant who has been working in – what else? – something called ‘Eventuality Planning’. Indeed, isn’t the generally absent Tallis father a kind of omniscient narrator whose calming presence, in an ideal world, might have averted all these nasty unplanned eventualities? ‘When her father was home,’ Cecilia thinks to herself, ‘the household settled around a fixed point … he mostly sat in the library. But his presence imposed order and allowed freedom.’ Cecilia prefers Fielding to Richardson, she tells Robbie; clearly she needs the forceful, paternal intervention of a Fielding-like narrator: naughty Richardsonian seduction-missives are just what set this mess ticking.

  But such a narrator, who at once ‘imposed order and allowed freedom’, only exists ideally: that is why he is absent. In practice, McEwan seems to be saying, the storyteller can grant his invented people a good deal less freedom than he likes to congratulate himself on. The lofty, god-like perspective is an ideal, and hard to attain in reality. The storyteller will be at worst a Briony – an arch-controller and distorter – or at best a McEwan, more patiently shaping his characters’ destinies. We can tell that Briony is applying too much torque to her story, and is thus a ‘bad’ novelist; but what about McEwan, the ‘good’ novelist? Perhaps he is just a more efficient version of Briony – one who, like all great storytellers, smothers his obvious manipulation in the subtlest sleight-of-hand?

  All this is raised by the first section of Atonement, before any of the revelations of part three, which force us to modify our entire sense of the story. So in this paradox-thick novel, one of the nicest paradoxes is that it is only through fiction itself – McEwan’s own narration – that we can see how potentially untruthful and distorting fiction can be (Briony’s fictive distortions). Yet, in a further twist, if all fiction is a species of distortion – Briony’s and McEwan’s – why should we believe that fiction can disinterestedly comment on its own distortions? Fiction can’t be its own ombudsman, it seems; postmodern self-reference of the kind that Atonement attempts will always have the feel of a sick man analysing his former health. McEwan, I think, sees all this, and wants to get beyond the gesture of certain kinds of self-referential novels, which seem to assume that merely by flagging their own fictionality – simply by interrupting their own artifice – they have broken the spell of fictionality. This is why his novel, for all its late-twentieth-century tricks, refers to Austen, Fielding and Richardson – to a tradition, early in the novel’s history and before the great developments of realism, that had no illusions about illusion, that was able robustly to keep in its head the apparent incompatibilities that fiction is both about the world and makes the world, and that empiricism and idealism can work together.

  Atonement, then, is both a postmodern novel and an old-fashioned one, and it wants to have things both ways. It offers a critique of the dangers of fiction-making, much as Pnin or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie do; but, also like those novels, it bursts out of the implied melancholy of this self-laceration by the sheer force of its world-making reality, by the power of its capacity to make palpable, to make real, a fictional world, to satisfy its ordinarily hungry readers.

  The best example of McEwan’s desire to want it both ways, to be both skeptical and affirming, is the way he casts doubt on the possibility of imaginative sympathy and yet honours it as a novelistic ideal. It may be an impossible ideal, McEwan seems to say, but the novelist must continue to strive for it. Certainly, Atonement has to be seen as a book about the dangers of failing to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, that crucial transference of sympathy that Adam Smith wrote about long ago in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: ‘the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of the other … is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels.’ This is what Briony signally fails to do in the novel’s first section, but it is what McEwan is signally trying to do in this same section, carefully inhabiting one point-of-view after another. Emily Tallis, stricken with a migraine, lies in bed and thinks anxiously about her children – a kind of Mrs Ramsay moment, you might say – yet the reader cannot but notice that she is in fact a very bad imaginative sympathiser, because her anxiety and anger get in the way of her sympathy. Reflecting on Cecilia’s time at Cambridge, she thinks about her own comparative lack of education, and then quickly, but unwittingly, gets resentful:

  When Cecilia came home in July with her finals’ result – the nerve of the girl to be disappointed with it! – she had no job or skill and still had a husband to find and motherhood to confront, and what would her bluestocking teachers – the ones with silly nicknames and ‘fearsome reputations’ – have to tell her about that? Those self-important women gained local immortality for the blandest, the most timid of eccentricities – walking a cat on a dog’s lead, riding about on a man’s bike, being seen with a sandwich in the street. A generation later these silly, ignorant ladies would be long dead and still revered at High Table and spoken of in lowered voices.

  In Adam Smith’s terms, Emily is quite unable to ‘change places’ with her daughter; in a novelist’s or actor’s language, she is no good at ‘being’ Cecilia. But of course McEwan is himself wonderfully good here at ‘being’ Emily Tallis, using free indirect style with perfect poise to inhabit her complicated envy.

  Later in the section, as Emily sits by the light, she sees moths drawn to it, and recalls being told by ‘a professor of some science or another’ that ‘it was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest place, on the far side of the light – and in this case it was an illusion. It sounded to her like sophistry, or an explanation for its own sake. How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect?’ Emily, of course, would think this, proving herself very much the mother of impetuous Briony, who, precisely, did not take enough care to see reality from Robbie’s or Cecilia’s eyes. McEwan knowingly alludes here to a celebrated dilemma in the philosophy of consciousness, most famously raised by Thomas Nagel in 1974 in his essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Nagel concludes that a human cannot change places with a bat, that imaginative transfer on the part of a human is impossible: ‘Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.’ Standing up for novelists, as it were, J. M. Coetzee has his novelist-heroine, Elizabeth Costello, explicitly reply to Nagel in his eponymous novel. Costello says that imagining what it is like to be a bat would simply be the definition of a good novelist. I can imagine being a corpse, says Costello, why can I not then imagine being a bat? (Tolstoy, in an electrifying moment at the end of his novella Hadji Murad, imagines what it might be like to have one’s head cut off, and for consciousness to persist for a second or two in the brain even as the head has left the body. His imaginative insight foreshadows modern neuroscience, which does indeed suggest that consciousness can continue for a minute or two in a severed head.)

  McEwan himself discussed these matters shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. In an impassioned
piece in the Guardian, entitled ‘Only Love and Then Oblivion’, he argued that ‘If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality … Among their [the terrorists’] crimes was a failure of the imagination.’ Sounding very like Adam Smith, McEwan didn’t need to say, because it was so deeply implied, that this sympathy is one of the novelist’s great, ideal faculties. One might disagree with his certainty – after all, what if Mohammed Atta did indeed, and with great relish, imagine being his own victims? – and still be moved by the novelist’s great faith in the powers of the imagination.

  *

  The second and third sections of Atonement have a very different tone from their predecessor. In Part Two, we have moved ahead five years, as the narrative follows Robbie Turner retreating, along with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force, through northern France to Dunkirk. We learn that he has been in prison, that he and Cecilia are ardently corresponding, and that a remorseful Briony, now eighteen, wants to make amends by retracting her statement to the police. In the second section, however, this information is in some way incidental to the extraordinary evocation of the hideous banalities of warfare. In the third section, we follow Briony as she struggles with her job as a trainee nurse at a large London hospital during the war. In a gesture of atonement, she has forsworn Cambridge, and dedicated herself to nursing. Towards the end of this section, she visits her estranged sister in Balham, and discovers that she is living with Robbie, who has briefly returned from army service. There is an awkward, icy encounter between accuser and accused.