Smash hit

The importance of turning points has been discussed by McEwan before. In Black Dogs (1992), the narrator, Jeremy, reflects that they "are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by, a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character's growth". This is Atonement in microcosm.

Briony - a "story-teller" and a "dramatist" - decides that she must have an "unforgettable" peripateia. She wrongly distils a morality from a sequence of actions, and makes a mistake for which she spends the rest of her life atoning.

McEwan uses the second and third sections of the novel to examine the long term effects of "Briony's crime" both on her and her victims.

The themes of Atonement - time and loss, connection and separation, innocence and experience - will be familiar to McEwan's readers, and so too will some of the book's effects. In particular the patient description of the country house and its garden is a reminder of McEwan's brilliance at evoking architectural and domestic space. The clean lines of Atonement's plot - the striking central event, with its radiating consequences - are also characteristic of his fiction: one thinks of the ballooning disaster which begins Enduring Love (1997).

Of love, war and guilt

Atonement, the big-screen version of Ian McEwan’s wartime epic, is being hailed as the best British film for years

BACKGROUND

• Where truth and fiction meet

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• The TLS on Atonement

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• Ken Russell on the adaptation trap

Related Internet Links

• Read more out about the film Atonement

• Discover the book behind the must-see film

Stylistically, too, Atonement is unmistakable McEwan. It is written in his typical sentences: short and unshowy, but supple, demonstrating what might at first appear an affection for cliche, but is in fact a willingness to let ordinary language do the talking. Here is an exemplary passage describing a fountain in the garden, a half-size reproduction of Bernini's Triton fountain in Rome:

The muscular figure, squatting so comfortably on his shell, could blow through his conch a jet only two inches high, the pressure was so feeble, and water fell back over his head, down his stone locks, and along the groove of his powerful spine, leaving a glistening dark green stain. In an alien northern climate he was a long way from home, but he was beautiful in morning sunlight, and so were the four dolphins that supported the wavy-edged shell on which he sat.

As well as being a superb writer of place, McEwan is also among the finest practitioners of the free indirect style in English, and each phrase in Atonement vibrates with the voice of the character it is so discreetly ventriloquizing. While a nurse in wartime Britain, but still trying to become a writer, Briony reflects that "to enter a mind, and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design - this would be an artistic triumph". Not uncoincidentally, her formulation neatly paraphrases McEwan's own achievement.

Probably the most impressive aspect to Atonement, however, is the precision with which it examines its own novelistic mechanisms. The question of how the past is represented in language has become the central obsession of British fiction over the past three decades. At its ubiquitous worst, this has resulted in a vague but self-conscious authorial gesturing towards the difficulties of representation, rather than any perceptive engagement with them. In Atonement, however, McEwan focuses on the way in which we create the future by making it fit templates of the past; how the forms into which the imagination is shaped by fiction are applied to life. It is in this way, he suggests,

that literature can make things happen, and not always for the good. Briony is McEwan's test-case for this enormously serious theme, a theme which he pulls brilliantly into focus with the revelations of the final pages. The dust jacket proclaims Atonement his "finest achievement", and although publishers are prone to this Whiggishly perfectible view of their authors' talents, in this case they are triumphantly right.

Atonement by Ian McEwan £16.99 372pp. Cape

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