Ian McEwan

Here's a fantastic essay from James Wood writing in the London Review of Books on the work and methods of my favorite contemporary novelist, Ian McEwan: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n08/wood02_.html It's forcing me to re-evaluate my reaction to Atonement, a novel whose ending I, indeed, felt tricked by. My favorite bit (spoiler alert):

"On the last two pages of the novel, of course, McEwan lays bare his final secret: Robbie died at Dunkirk on 1 June 1940, and Cecilia was killed in the same year by a bomb in Balham. The lovers never united. Briony invented their happiness as an act of novelistic atonement for her earlier act of novelistic failure.

"Plenty of readers are irritated by this conjuring trick. But if Briony made it all up, so did we. If the desperation of both her guilt and her wish fulfilment stirs us, it is because, by way of McEwan’s delayed revelation, by way of his narrative secret, we have ourselves conspired in Briony’s wish fulfilment, not just content but eager to believe, until the very last moment, that Cecilia and Robbie did not actually die. We wanted them to be alive, and the knowledge that we too wanted a ‘happy ending’ brings on a kind of atonement for the banality of our own literary impulses. Which is why the ending provokes interestingly divergent responses: it alienates some conventional readers, who dislike what they feel to be a trick, but it alienates some sophisticated readers, who also dislike what they feel to be a trick; and I suspect that the estrangement of both camps has to do with their guilt at having been moved by the novel’s conventional romantic power. It shouldn’t be possible, but Atonement wants to have it both ways, and succeeds in having it both ways. It is Ian McEwan’s best book because it successfully prosecutes and defends – as inevitable – the very impulses that make McEwan such a compellingly manipulative novelist; and because it makes us willing, guilty, and finally self-conscious co-conspirators in that machinery of manipulation."

Enjoy,

CD