Ian McEwan has come a long way since the days when his menacing, somewhat morbid tales of deviancy and dysfunctionality earned him the nickname ‘Ian MacAbre’. Today, ten novels and five film adaptations later, he is regarded by many literary critics as one of Britain’s finest living novelists. Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998 and his new novel, On Chesil Beach, is shortlisted for this year’s award.

Atonement (2001) is arguably his finest work and well deserves the accomplished and judicious film adaptation that opened last Friday, with the impressive Keira Knightley elegantly slipping from the shackles of her piratical past into the role of a 1930s upper-class graduate of moral spine and loyal heart.

Like Enduring Love and On Chesil Beach, Atonement is about the prolonged reverberations of a single event. McEwan explores many themes – social class, interpretation and misinterpretation, the role of the artist in presenting truth and offering hope, the nature of true love and its recognition, selfishness and self-protection – but his title identifies the book’s central concern.

What do you do when you have lied and your words have had terrible, irreversible consequences for people you love? How do you live? In clenched denial? In paralysing remorse? In optimistic pursuit of reconciliation? In determined campaigning for the promotion and acceptance of the truth?

What do any of us do with the chaos we cause? And what do we do when the death of people we have maligned or hurt blocks the road to reconciliation forever?

Of course, for the followers of the true Atoner, there is a path to forgiveness; but McEwan is an atheist and for Briony, the liar in his story, there is no God to limit the consequences of her sin, turn them to good or even break the corrosive power of the guilt that goads her. In the end, she forges some way forward, but is it any solace to her (or us)?

McEwan’s is a grim conclusion and certainly it takes courage to embrace such a bleak view of existence. But perhaps it also takes a certain wilful artistic stubbornness. After all, Briony lives in a Christian country through a century of bloodshed. Why does McEwan never allow her, in her desperation, even to explore the Christian atonement that so many of her compatriots found both real and potent?

Sometimes we put the blinkers on ourselves.

Mark Greene

additional resources

For a short but helpful overview of Ian McEwan’s work, read the ‘critical perspective’ in the British Council article on contemporarywriters.com.

Read an interview with McEwan about Atonement, conducted in 2002, on abc.net.au.

Read Peter Bradshaw’s discreet review of the film, ‘a clever, ambitious, compassionate picture … which aims at big ideas and … treats us like grownups’, on guardian.co.uk.