Three nightmares dominate 'Atonement'.
The first, set in a country house during the oppressively hot summer of 1935, is the build up to the commission of a terrible crime. The offence is the false accusation made by one of the three main characters, Briony, against another. She knows the accusation is at best doubtful, and probably false, but she persists in it, even under oath, to the point of wrecking the life chances of a man who isn’t just innocent but also did her nothing but good.
This is the crime for which atonement must be made.
Five years later, we find ourselves plunged, again in sweltering heat, into the middle of the British Army’s catastrophic retreat in front of German armoured troops through Northern France to Dunkirk. This is the most powerful account I have read of the torment felt by individual men, especially a wounded man, struggling to keep up with what was practically a rout – undisciplined, chaotic and painful. It’s a tribute to the research McEwan carried out at the Imperial War Museum in London that he was able to capture the atmosphere of that harrowing time, and further proof of his outstanding qualities as a writer that he could convey them so vividly.
And the third nightmare is the one experienced again by Briony, in a first step towards atonement, as she trains to be a nurse at a hospital recognisable as St Thomas’s in London. That culminates in an extraordinary day of frightening and intense work, as she nurses wounded men from the Dunkirk evacuation. McEwan gives us a detailed account of the many hours she works, with men lightly injured, with men suffering terrible but treatable wounds, with men who cannot be saved.
Finally, there is a kind of coda in which McEwan deepens the dreamlike feeling of the novel still further. Because he leaves us wondering whether what he has given us is a novel of his own creation, or one written by Briony herself, a character he created. We see her going from a first attempt at writing the story, rejected by a publisher who nonetheless gives her excellent advice on how to improve it, to the final work, the one we’ve just read. And she asks us whether she hasn’t told the story as it deserves to be told. She tells us that she could have changed its details is significant ways but chose not to, and calls on us, the readers, to agree that she was right.
This reader is sure she is. My view is that Briony turned an indifferent first draft into an excellent novel. And Ian McEwan did well to make her work, and his own, available to us.
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