The difference in tone is that the writing seems in some almost impalpable way to have ‘settled down’. In particular, the queasy alternation between lyrically fine writing and plainer description that is characteristic of the first section has here disappeared. The first section, for example, flourished this rather uselessly lacy description of some roast potatoes: ‘The undersides held a stickier yellow glow, and here and there a gleaming edge was picked out in nacreous brown, and the occasional filigree lacework that blossomed around a ruptured skin.’ That reads like Nabokovian parody, and not much like the McEwan we know from his earlier work, who would run a mile from ‘nacreous’; the stylishness has a slightly revolting amorality: all this for some roast potatoes? There are patches like this throughout the first section, in which the writer seems to be trying out different levels of stylishness. But in the second and third sections, the same quality of attention, of visual noticing, is now disciplined, thinned of its excess luxury, and made morally strenuous by virtue of its suddenly serious subject. In the third section, Briony, now a nurse in London, is dressing a wound, and here is how McEwan describes it: ‘The wound was eighteen inches long, perhaps more, and curved behind his knee. The stitches were clumsy and irregular. Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.’ Ah – that sounds like McEwan. The same quality of noticing that was fussily lavished on the potatoes is strictly lavished on the wound, to tremendous effect: the style seems to be atoning for earlier luxuries.
In general, the prose in these latter sections is recognisably consistent with McEwan’s exactitude, especially his precise and systematic use of estrangement. In the second section, again and again the prose presents a kind of metaphorical mirage which, as Robbie dazedly refocuses, melts into horrid reality:
hanging there, a long way off, about thirty feet above the road, warped by the rising heat, was what looked like a plank of wood, suspended horizontally, with a bulge in its centre … A fighter was strafing the length of the column.
At first sight it seemed that an enormous horizontal door was flying up the road. It was a platoon of Welsh Guards in good order, rifles at the slopes, led by a second lieutenant.
A black furry shape that seemed, as he approached, to be moving or pulsing. Suddenly a swarm of bluebottles rose into the air with an angry whining buzz, revealing the rotting corpse beneath.
There were no boats by the jetty. He blinked and looked again. That jetty was made of men, a long file of them, six or eight deep, standing up to their knees.
If the first section was a display, a demonstration of the novelist’s consummate freedom to inhabit several characters and of his ability to stretch his prose style into different shapes, the second and third sections are passionately committed to a single point of view, and labour to make us inhabit that vision. Of course, in a novel so involved with fiction’s truthfulness, the amazing evocations of Dunkirk and wartime London cannot but fail to share some of the weird but successful doubleness of the novel’s first section. Stephen Crane’s writing about the Civil War was so vivid that one veteran swore he had fought alongside Crane (who was not alive then) at Antietam. By contrast, McEwan is not shy to credit, in his acknowledgments, the Imperial War Museum; so he is happy to let us have an image of the bespectacled contemporary author doing his research, poring over texts and photographs. We know, then, that the burden is on the author-researcher to put us there, to ‘do’ Dunkirk, to make us inhabit Robbie’s wet boots. McEwan succeeds, I think, and makes it seem less like fiction than like a memoir. This is what Aristotle meant when he said that a convincing impossibility is preferable, in poetry, to an unconvincing possibility. Yet this great freedom shows how dangerous fiction can be, and why its transit with ‘lies’ has historically been so subversive.
And again, steadily, stealthily, McEwan, amidst the proper raising of postmodern doubt and scepticism, is making his own case for fiction, is making his own defence of what he does as a novelist. The second section begins thus: ‘There were horrors enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterwards would not let him go.’ And a little later, Robbie thinks to himself: ‘No one would ever know what it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture.’ The ‘unexpected’ or telling detail is one of the elements of modern fiction’s power after Flaubert, and sure enough, these two sections are built, systematically, out of telling detail after detail. Briony, tending to a soldier who has lost half his face, ‘could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long.’ Hideously long is worthy of Conrad. McEwan surely wants us to reflect on this word ‘detail’ when, in the third section, he has Briony meet Cecilia and Robbie. In the course of their painful meeting, Briony reveals what the reader has suspected, that it was Paul Marshall who attacked Lola, and not, as Robbie and Cecilia had always imagined, Danny Hardman, the gardener. ‘During the silence that followed, Briony tried to imagine the adjustments that each would be making. Years of seeing it a certain way. And yet, however startling, it was only a detail. Nothing essential was changed by it. Nothing in her own role.’ As a legal assessment of her own role as false witness, this may be true, but in every other respect, of course, a ‘detail’, in this charged context, can never be ‘only’ a detail. It was a failure to read mere details, to take pains – in a literary sense – with detail that led Briony astray in the first place. McEwan, the novelist, would not have made Briony’s mistake, one feels.
But then Briony, it seems, is not a very McEwanish kind of writer. The great revelation of the third section, and even more acutely of the fourth section, dated London, 1999, and which I have withheld for so long in an attempt to evoke the experience of reading the novel for the first time, is that Briony not only grew up to be a writer, but that she has written the text we have just read – all of it, because the third section ends: ‘BT London, 1999.’ In the third section, McEwan invents a letter from Cyril Connolly, in his capacity as editor of Horizon, the celebrated little magazine. Connolly has rejected Briony’s novel, Two Figures by a Fountain. Connolly’s letter suggests that Briony has written a rather dreamy, drifting kind of piece in the manner of a sub-Virginia Woolf, from three points of view – Briony’s, Cecilia’s, and Robbie’s – full of lyrical aimlessness (‘scores of pages [dedicated] to the quality of light and shade, and to random impressions,’ writes Connolly). He suggests that Briony try again, and insert a little more plot and human interest into the narrative. Suddenly the peculiarities of the first section, in particular the lyrical instability of the writing, make sense. (Connolly, the Proustian aesthete, picks out ‘the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer’ as especially fine.) It was not simply, then, ‘McEwan’ writing; it was McEwan writing as Briony. McEwan was impersonating a tyro Virginia Woolf.
In the short fourth section of the novel, set in 1999, Briony is an old and eminent writer, who has just been given a diagnosis of dementia. The novel ends with the lady at her writing desk, at five in the morning, reflecting on the piece of writing she first started in January 1940 (which must have been the piece Connolly saw), and to which she has returned ‘half a dozen different’ times between then and now. But although we comprehend that what we have just read – the text of the entire novel – was written by Briony, we have no great desire to comprehend that what we have just read was made up – i.e. invented – by Briony; McEwan cleverly plays on the complacency of our middlebrow readerly expectation, whereby, with the help of detailed verisimilitude, we always tend to turn fiction into a kind of fact. If we have just read, in section three, that Briony walked to Clapham and saw Robbie and Cecilia there, this must ‘really’ have happened, yes? – even if Briony admits that she, and not McEwan, wrote what we just read. Most of us have no great willingness to see fiction as invention, but McEwan wants us to turn fiction back into fiction
, as it were, and on the last two pages of his novel, he lays bare his final secret: Robbie died at Dunkirk on June 1, 1940, and Cecilia was killed in the same year by a bomb in Balham. The lovers never united. Briony invented their prosperity as an act of novelistic atonement for her earlier act of novelistic failure. She never ‘really’ saw them in Balham. That was invention, wish-fulfillment. As a girl, she ended their lives, by falsely testifying; as an adult and novelist, she has brought them back to life.
There is something moving about this guilty resurrection, especially in the context of the Second World War. The references to Woolf are not hubristic, for To the Lighthouse, that elegy for the dead of the First World War, circles around and around this idea of how to mourn both the private dead and the public dead. In the last section of Woolf’s novel, the painter, Lily Briscoe, effectively brings Mrs Ramsay back to life, by thinking about her and by painting a representation of her into her picture. The novel itself achieves a kind of revivifiying of Virginia Woolf’s mother, the model for Mrs Ramsay. Briony has done something similar in the second and third sections of Atonement, and the desperation of both her guilt and her wish-fulfillment stirs us in ways we cannot quite describe, not least because, by virtue of McEwan’s delayed revelation, we have ourselves been made part of Briony’s wish-fulfillment, we have become its willing victims, content to believe, until the very last moment, that Cecilia and Robbie did not actually die. We wanted them to be alive: we have been absolutely complicit with Briony’s yearning, and the realisation that we too wanted that ‘happy ending’ brings on a kind of guilt, a kind of atonement for the banality of our own literary impulses.
So McEwan’s book pampers our old-fashioned readerly expectations and then dashes them. It says, in effect: ‘You wanted a “good read”, didn’t you? Well, you’ve had your good read for three hundred or so pages. And now? It was all made up. It never happened.’ But Atonement, of course, is at the same time a very ‘good read’ in an old-fashioned sense, which is why the novel provokes divergent responses: it alienates some readers, who dislike the trick ending, and who perhaps dislike the revelation of their own complicity in having enjoyed, until that revelation, a good read; yet the novel has of course sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and has been enjoyed by the kind of book clubs that would be wary of, say, In Between The Sheets or The Cement Garden.
Is this, in fact, a ‘trick ending’? Or is it really the only ending such a book could have had? Certainly, if this is a trick ending, then this novel also has a trick beginning and a trick middle. For it never stops being about its own writing – the second and third sections may be less obviously fictive, less obviously artificial and self-reflexive than the first one, but they still raise questions, as we have seen, about the relation between authorial research and invention, between fiction and fact. And the final revelation, to be fair to McEwan, is not much like those moments at the end of certain kinds of postmodern stories when the author writes: ‘And then he woke up’ or ‘Then she put down her pen, and closed the book you have just been reading.’ We don’t suddenly exclaim, at the end of Atonement, ‘Oh, it was just a fiction.’ We exclaim: ‘So, what kind of fiction is this?’ Or perhaps, better: ‘So, what kind of truth is this?’ For the ironies can only pile higher and higher. If Briony invented sections two and three, it would seem that Briony’s nice fiction – Cecilia and Robbie reunited – is trying to atone for her nasty fiction (her false witness in section one), one untruth for an original untruth. But why should the ‘untruth’ of her second and third chapters be morally superior to the untruth she committed in part one? You could say that, in bringing Robbie and Cecilia back to life, she at least did no harm. But in strictly literary terms, just as she forced an ending onto the young lovers in part one by sending Robbie off to jail, so she has forced an ending onto the older lovers in parts two and three by shaping their destinies. A happy ending still represents the exercise of a God-like power on the part of the author. A story must be closed in order to be a story, and such closure can entail either death or longevity.
Stranger still, if Briony wrote all three parts, how do we know she is atoning for anything? Connolly asked for more plot; and she provided it. In our minds, the events of part one have become ‘real’ while the events, or some of them, of parts two and three have now become ‘unreal’. But what if Briony made everything up, from the encounter at the fountain to the encounter in Balham? What if it is all fiction? And of course, it is all fiction, for what does it even mean to be talking in this babyish way about Briony’s fiction when it was not Briony but someone called Ian McEwan who made all this up anyway?
One final trick, a subtle one, remains. Briony does not exactly say that Robbie and Cecilia died. She says this:
But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister.
Surely it must amuse McEwan that thousands, probably millions of readers have chosen to read the passage above as a simple declaration that the lovers died and that Briony fictively prolonged their lives. But what Briony in fact does is float a hypothesis: she says, in effect, what if I tried to convince you that these people died? Would you still believe me? This sounds less like a statement than another potential fiction, as if-Briony is saying: ‘You must believe whatever you want to believe. I could take you either way.’ Thus for a second time in this book, the revelation of fictionality seduces the reader into separating fact from fiction. In the first example, the revelation that Briony wrote section three (the ‘BT 1999’ that appears at the end of section three) encourages the reader to think of what he has read as a fiction but a ‘real’ fiction: Briony may have written what we have just read, but she did really meet the lovers in Balham, we say to ourselves. In the second instance, the revelation that the lovers died in 1940 seduces us once again into turning fiction into fact: ah, we say to ourselves, Briony was lying about the lovers having survived the war; after all, they actually, really – ‘actually’, ‘really’ – died. She made it up. (All novels that introduce second and third layers of false fictionality work in this way, it seems, to establish fake distinctions between truth and reality: the second part of Don Quixote, for example, forces us to choose between a false Quixote and a ‘real’ one.)
But Briony merely says, what if they died? The same reader who had happily followed Briony’s fiction in the second and third sections, who had happily acceded to the happy ending of the good read, now accedes again to Briony’s final manipulations – this same reader now longs to make of this revelation yet another kind of easy fact: oh, they actually died. But McEwan chooses his words carefully, here – note that little interpolation, ‘say’ – because he wants this to sound like another possibility, another fiction. None of us, it seems, is really bold enough to confront the fictionality of fiction – we are all middlebrows now. And so is McEwan, whose novel is both manipulative and ample, at once calculating and keen to escape the charge of calculation by accusing itself of the sin before the reader can. Atonement prosecutes and defends fiction-making at the same time, and whether readers think this doubleness a blatant contradiction or a necessary paradox will determine their assessment of the novel. The hostile reader may argue that Atonement is just a typically manipulative Ian McEwan novel, one in a series of similarly sensational productions, but one that differs from its predecessors in being anxious about its own manipulations, and which thus incoherently arraigns Briony for the very faults it too commits. (There is that McEwanish need to tidy up all loose ends, for instance, to explain to the reader, at the end, how to read the novel properly – just as Briony loves, as a child, the ex
perience of neatly binding her notebooks and closing off her fictions.) The more sympathetic reader may concede the justice of this complaint, yet also feel that Atonement has a brilliance and suppleness that do indeed set it apart from his other work; and this reader may reflect that, anyway, all the writer can ever do, whether pre-modernist, modernist or post-modernist, is simultaneously enact and atone for the manipulations of fiction-making, in an eternally dialectical contradiction.
2 Don DeLillo, Underworld and Falling Man
ANDREW O’HAGAN
A Tale of Two Novels
For those who read novels, admiration is very often a wild-eyed precursor to ingratitude. We love our favourite novelists up to the point where the play of their talents overreaches our faith in them, and on that day we feel free to consider the new work an act of betrayal. There is nothing new in this and the process is important in the art of novel-loving. The good novelist will take it on the chin and serve his periods like Picasso. Yet in the nicest circumstances the motions of a novelist to honour and develop their material and their style is the stuff of complicated pleasure. We should avoid missing it if we can and I offer here an instance in Don DeLillo. The fact that DeLillo should risk both our love and our disappointment is a credit to his mother and his old school. It is also a guarantee, I think, of his essential seriousness: he is a senior craftsman, and we go about reading each of his novels in the manner of people with a lot to lose.
The Good of the Novel Page 3
