required reading

I read into the night last night, something I haven't allowed myself to do for a long while. I put my book down when I was just over halfway through, at midnight, but I couldn't leave it there and sleep, so I picked it up again and carried on reading by the low light of a bedside lamp until after 2am, when I reached the last page. For the next twenty minutes my head felt as if it were filled with static - the fizzy come-down from utter absorption in the book

The book was Ian McEwan's Atonement. This is the second time I've read it. An upcoming film adaptation and the fact that it was being sold with this beautiful cover and packaged together with Henry James' What Maisie Knew prompted me to pick it up again. I'm certainly not sorry that I did.

When I first read Atonement, newly released, I fell in love with it. I drank in the heady atmosphere of Part One of the novel, describing the preoccupations of thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis as she attempts to impose meaning on the actions of the adults around her: her sister Ceclia and family friend Robbie in particular. And I wasn't so grown up that I couldn't sympathise with Briony's adolescent crisis of ego, recognizing pathways of thought that I had followed before:

... did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it...? Did everybody, inlcuding her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance, and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique when no one was

I recall finding the dislocation between Parts One and Two rather jarring, adding to the impact of Robbie's trek to Dunkirk in 1940 (now I recognize more of McEwan's style in the later part of the novel than in the former, and this makes complete sense, of course).  I was hooked into the line, the progression of the story (CC would have been satisfied with the forward momentum!), and drank in all the twistings and turnings of the last part of the novel with eagerness. The end, the last few pages, felt like a smack on the face, and they did so again as I read last night, having forgotten how the novel concludes. Again I felt both betrayed by Briony and resigned with her.

Since I first read Atonement, I've read two more of McEwan's novels: Saturday, and On Chesil Beach. And so, yesterday, I read with an eye for one of McEwan's key themes - the way that a sequence of events can dance and pivot around a moment. Atonement's significant moments stand out as if they've been marked with highlighter: they are the ones that play in front of the reader doubly or triply, from the viewpoint of Briony, Robbie, Cecilia, Lola, Emily - each one striving for equal importance, each with a claim as intense as the others. (And yet, even here Ian McEwan is playing a magnificent trick on the reader, because of course the whole novel is Briony, and only Briony).

Briony's moment of betrayal, the pivot in Atonement, plays a little like the fall of Eve. Briony moves from prelapsarian blissful ignorance to and adult world of shame, deception, and sexuality. Just before the crisis point of the book, Briony stands outside the Tallis house, peering in through the window at her mother, resting on a chaise longue:

She could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her, and begun a resume of the day. If she had she would no have committed her crime.

But Briony is no longer the little girl to be mothered; she is being initiated into this adult world, with its myriad of voices and opinions and claims. Is Briony's lie an indirect response to the demands of two billion others, with their insistence on being the authors of their own stories, and the little gods of their own consciousness? Briony's lie, after all, is her first really good story, and her first success in adapting the world around her to fit her own words, something she continues until the end of her life.

There was plenty more that struck me as I read, though I didn't take the time to stop and look: the significance of triangles that someone pointed out as a recurring motif throughout the novel, the nature of guilt, how we attempt to absolve it, whether Briony succeeds in atoning for her crime, and the use of metafiction - plays and stories hidden inside the novel. At the end of a second reading I'm even more confused about where Brony's authorship ends, and where McEwan's begins. I'm certain that this won't be the last time I read Atonement.