Atonement

Ian McEwan’s Atonement, published in 2001 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is his most ambitious and most fully realized novel-a work about the relationship between storytelling and moral responsibility that is itself, at every point, aware of its own moral stakes. It is a novel about a lie and what it costs, but it is equally a novel about fiction and what it can and cannot redeem.

The book begins in 1935 at an English country house, where thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis-intelligent, imaginative, not yet equipped with the moral understanding her intelligence requires-makes an accusation against Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, that destroys his life and her sister Cecilia’s with it. The novel’s first section, dense with period detail and inner life, establishes what Briony saw and misunderstood with a formal precision that implicates the reader: we too, briefly, see the scene through her eyes.

The second section follows Robbie through Dunkirk, and McEwan’s rendering of the British retreat-chaotic, bloody, absurd-is among the finest war writing in contemporary fiction. The third traces Cecilia and Briony through the war years. The fourth, which McEwan delays until the final pages, is the twist around which the entire novel pivots and which forces the reader to reread everything that came before.

McEwan’s achievement is to make the formal self-consciousness-the novel’s awareness of itself as a constructed thing-inseparable from its emotional power rather than at odds with it. The question of what Briony’s late-life novel can do for the people she wronged is also the question of what this novel can do for its reader. The answer is unsatisfying and honest and, finally, devastating.