Phew…Good job I don’t suffer from high blood presssure as the novel is winding me up SO MUCH! Coitus interruptus stylistically and thematically. Everywhere I look what do I see but Ian McEwan. His hand, articulate, heavy, masculine and sure imposes its magnificent vocabulary EVERYWHERE so that not a single character seems to have the slightest independence or automony. They know only what Ian and lovely Briony allow them to know…what a relief for us all! John Fowles resurgam! The dangers of being a writer afterall! and what is the word ‘membrane’ doing thrown into an ostensibly ‘hot’ scene’ …clinical Ian/ Briony ….but then of course we are meant to say ‘that is the point’… Atonement can take many forms indeed!
This novel resurrects the male authority of the 19thC AUTHOR and mixes it up with some ever so clever ‘postmodern’ awareness of the ‘writer as parasite’ and throws in some ‘serious’ morality questions for light relief. McEwan even strays into Pat Barker territory. He tried to make the novel meaningful through the detailed description of the First World war. Only of course this is really Briony’s story and attempt at Atonement so we can’t blame him if it seems too much a device?
Of course the novel is trying to question can we heal ourselves and others through reediting the past? Are stories and anecdotes, a primary rather than secondary way of living our lives? Or is damage irrevocably done? Only wish silly Briony had been sent to a finishing school accompanied by her dull play and legion of plastic animals.