Atonement when was it written

Aug 28, Bart rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Literary fiction aficionados. That I can remember, I've never before disliked the start of a book so thoroughly, and by the end, gone on to think so much of it as a complete work. As the title indicates Atonement is about a future artist's massive effort to redeem herself for ruining the character of a young man when she is a younger girl.

There are parts of this novel that are disjointed - or That I can remember, I've never before disliked the start of a book so thoroughly, and by the end, gone on to think so much of it as a complete work.

There are parts of this novel that are disjointed - or if they aren't they appear so because the opening act moves so slowly that one is barely conscious and later unable to recall that anything much happened at all. Halfway through this novel, when its greatness starts to happen, a reader almost laments his earlier opinions of it.

But whose fault is that? The beginning is such an act of endurance that the later parts make a reader wish that McEwan had moved things more quickly in the beginning - and used those words for more character development in the middle - so the reader could declare this novel, unequivocally, one of the five best novels he's ever read. McEwan is at the top of the art form throughout, though, whatever a reader opines of the product.

He knows what he's doing every step of the way, right down to an allusion to the disjointed narrative methods employed by Virginia Woolf. The ending is brilliant, unexpected and harsh. But unlike the case of the returning Baxter character in the third act of Saturday , this ending is consistent and at once surprising and inevitable.

After a person has read a few hundred novels, he grasps the art form well enough to know when an author is writing - usually it's when the author's employing some top-heavy descriptive technique that makes the water droplets gathered on a rose petal somehow more important than the protagonist's motives for anything she's done to that point - and it fairly well cries out, "Look at me, my creator is a writer! McEwan is fine enough at his craft that the ending is both unanticipated and perfectly consistent.

That alone makes this novel excellent. View all 40 comments. Oct 25, Will Byrnes rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction. Ian McEwan - image from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette - photo credit: Joost van den Broek I was bored with this until half way through, but then it got interesting.

It touches on imagination versus reality, fiction versus fact, in addition to the story content. A portrait of an upper middle class English family is interrupted by a supposed rape in which a young imaginative vengeful girl misidentifies the rapist. I found that it stayed with me and that I appreciated it more with time. The film, re Ian McEwan - image from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette - photo credit: Joost van den Broek I was bored with this until half way through, but then it got interesting.

The film, released in View all 18 comments. Atonement, Ian McEwan Atonement is a British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement. Set in three time periods, England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.

Abstract: On a summer day in , thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis Atonement, Ian McEwan Atonement is a British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement.

Abstract: On a summer day in , thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment's flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions "Atonement" follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

View 2 comments. Apr 15, Lizzy rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites-of-all-times , historical-fiction , read-years-ago , time-all-time , stars The subject matter of Atonement is literature itself, but it is much more. The characters are full of life and the language, even if elaborate and subtle, does not go around or makes inroads into itself.

The narrator and protagonist, Briony Tallis, emerges in the beginner as a pre-adolescent that dreams to arrange the world in her texts, as in the p The subject matter of Atonement is literature itself, but it is much more.

The narrator and protagonist, Briony Tallis, emerges in the beginner as a pre-adolescent that dreams to arrange the world in her texts, as in the play she is writing. Her love for order, for the careful design according to her spoiled desires, is translated into an impulse to write that hardly depend on the theme.

She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. On that day of , Briony sees Cecily and Robbie in a game that culminates in a fateful scene. Briony believes she sees something that profoundly perturbs her. Here we are, therefore, in the territory of Jane Austen, cited in the epigraph, or Henry James, George Eliot, and many other English authors: social tension versus sexual stress, pride and prejudice conflicts, mere misunderstandings that adopt dramatic dimensions.

McEwan considers the simple distortions that physical acts, such as vision, can suffer when clouded by moral bias. Briony is attracted to Robbie and envies in Cecily her independence and, and in her anxiety to wipe out her shortcomings recreates the world in her own way, succumbing to prejudice and threatening her already reduced capacity to accept reality. But, more than that, what McEwan shows is how a writer can worsen weaknesses such as vanity, cowardice and credulity, sentiments that derive from the solitary and fallible condition that is above all human.

Briony, with an absent father, a sick mother, a distant brother and an adult sister, fills her solitude with words that want to arrange everything, as she organizes her room. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing.

Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends.

Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. However, the novel goes beyond an intimate recounting. Among dead and wounded, he drifts with his head down and wrapped in his own sentiments to protect himself and to dream he will be exonerated for having survived in a battle where so many had died.

Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. He had put in time, now they must do the work.

His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame. The force of his narrative comes from its plot and its magnitude as well as from its richness and structure. McEwan does not need to resort to fragmentation and mysticism to deal with the battle between affection and speech, tolerance and freedom, a clash so in evidence nowadays. View all 39 comments. The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

In the heat of a s Summer, a family reunites at their country home for what may be the last time. Cousins have come to stay, a sister has returned from University and a brother is returning from America with a new friend in tow.

Briony, the only child left at home, is furiously writing a play to be performed, but what she witnesses-and is exposed to-will force her to make a decision that she will regret for the rest of her life. This book reminded me strongly of Evelyn Waugh, though I think that's purely based on the surroundings and era and mostly the house.

Whilst Evelyn had a whimsical style to his writing, Ian McEwan is positively overflowing with flowery prose that leads nowhere and brings up memories of terrible books they made me read for college. Atonement is a relatively easy read, if you can take so much description and little plot.

None of the characters are anything except a piece of personality and don't go beyond their one trait and I felt nothing for all of them. They all had their one job and, whilst they did this one job well, that was that and there seemed nothing beyond their doing their one job.

We begin in a wonderful countryside house, which is described to death and the plot simmers along nicely. There's a play being written, and the cousins coming down from the North are being forced to act it out. There is youthful petulance, coming-of-age rebellion and adults avoiding responsibility and, in truth, the scene is set nicely in the first few pages. But then this setting of the scene continues for around half the rest of the book and it soon becomes clear that the plot is far away and we're not entirely sure if it'll be seen at all.

Setting the book during the war seemed like a pointless endeavour, if only to include some kind of treacherous battle scenes to add to the overall lack of drama up to this point. I suppose the book needed to be set somewhere and some time, but the overall affect was unimpressive. I found the whole thing lacking, in truth.

The book, whilst it shifted to another city and even country, was just too small. Everything was cloying and felt like it was happening in one tiny bubble. I prefer big worlds and big plots, not just a single thread moving through a mire. The main thing that irritated me about this book, is that it was full of needless cliffhangers that were seemingly pointless to anything except to expunge the pathetic attempt at a plot beyond the story arc.

Nearly every chapter ended with something along the lines of "and oh my if this character hadn't done what he's about to do in the next chapter then his life would not have turned out the way it did", as if McEwan is unsure of his plot and needs to plead with us to keep reading.

I must must must read on if you say something interesting is coming along, because so far we haven't had much, have we, Sir? I feel, having read this book, that I could spot a book I dislike from the first few pages now, whereas before I'd probably have to get through it all just to know.

So, of course, I will now not be wasting more hours on books that seemingly go nowhere, even after the first half, than I need to. Blog Reviews Instagram Twitter View all 12 comments. Mar 17, Kevin Ansbro rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Fans of Brit-trad-lit, lovers of beautiful prose.

Shelves: family-dynamics , irrevocable-lust , human-emotions , coming-of-age , human-psyche , morality , quintessentially-english. A lesson to us all: never put anything in print that one day might come back to bite you in the ass. Pleasingly, McEwan writes with aplomb about the human psyche: of lust, loathing, immaturity and guilt; his prose is word perfect.

That said, the novel suffers from its own ident A lesson to us all: never put anything in print that one day might come back to bite you in the ass. That said, the novel suffers from its own identity crisis, a mezze of Jane Austen, followed by a main course of Sebastian Faulks.

The author's genius, though, is in causing us to forget that his book was actually written in the modern day. Very clever! But when inscribed in ink, onto s vellum stationery, the "C" word is both shocking and ruinous. There is no doubt that McEwan is one of Britain's greatest literary gods, his beautiful prose had me purrrring with delight Ah, but here's the thing The story. Nnnng, grmmmphh! Oh, it just didn't keep me enthralled. There, I've said it!

In addition, I have my own crazy theory that Briony might just be the author's imagined avatar of his younger self. View all 47 comments. Dec 31, Terry rated it liked it. This is where a 2. I am extremely ambivalent about this novel--first the pluses: the writing is gorgeous; McEwan has some of the best prose out there.

Every line has meat to it, nothing is throwaway, and every visual is so vivid that the reader is transported to a specific time and place. Secondly, what everyone praises the novel for , the commentary McEwan is making about the novel itself--the fact that it is written, that characters and plots are manipulated by th This is where a 2.

Secondly, what everyone praises the novel for , the commentary McEwan is making about the novel itself--the fact that it is written, that characters and plots are manipulated by the author, and how a real character emerges eventually while at the same a written story exists too. This is very difficult to write about without revealing anything about the plot, but as one reads the novel, it becomes clear what McEwan is trying to do.

Finally, the references to other literature including some of the best novels--Clarissa, Lolita--and novelists--Elizabeth Bowen is directly mentioned, Henry Green and Virginia Woolf are obvious influences is fluid, never forced, and is done to showcase a love of literature. At the same time, there are downsides to McEwan's endeavor--how to write a novel that is commenting on its obvious falsity its construction as fiction , while at the same time trying to convey reality. This is perhaps an impossible task, and I'm left with the nagging feeling that the novel wants to have its cake and eat it too.

The characters and situations are so obviously phony that it becomes distracting in the first part of the story. I was drawn in by the fantastic writing, but then found myself wanting to hurl the novel across the room at some of the ridiculous choices by both the characters and the novelist. Namely: 1 The main plot twist makes little realistic sense. Absolutely zero would fly in a mystery novel let alone real life; 2 The characters in the first part are boring aristocrats who we don't care about check out a Henry Green novel; except in his novels, the reader continues to laugh at them, there is no attempt at emotional attachment ; 3 The 'mystery's' solution is obvious to the reader before the crime even happens; 4 Briony part 1 is an insufferable narrator as kid narrators, To Kill a Mockingbird excluded, so often are ; 5 The novelist's choice to name a sexually, precocious teenager 'Lola' too obvious a reference.

But these choices are meant to be ridiculous--reality is only supposed to set in in the epilogue. At the same time, I marveled at how real parts 2 Robbie at war and 3 Briony as a nurse--some of the hospital scenes are the best I've ever read seemed to be. Then the question became for me--if they seemed real because of the way the scenes were written the gore again in the hospital , but could not have been real because the characters and overall plot of the Tallis family are so fake, isn't that cheating?

I haven't reached a conclusion yet, but something is still bugging me about the conception of it. Ultimately I prefer novels that go the opposite route--Paul Auster's Oracle Night for example--that start out real and quickly become fake, or throw out the idea of a realistic, consistent plot entirely only in the conclusion does David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas come together , rather than the never-ending 'is it real? View all 8 comments.

Jan 05, Allison rated it it was ok Shelves: fiction. I feel that perhaps I have sabotaged this book somewhat as I read it directly after finishing Love In the Time of Cholera, and perhaps in retrospect should have read a poetry book or some non-fiction in between. Clearly anything I would have read after finishing a Masterpiece would pale in comparison but I decided that the critical raves this book had received and high praise from people around me should be enough to encourage me to see it through to the end.

Here is why I found this book lacking I feel that perhaps I have sabotaged this book somewhat as I read it directly after finishing Love In the Time of Cholera, and perhaps in retrospect should have read a poetry book or some non-fiction in between. Here is why I found this book lacking without giving too much actual plot away to those who would want to read it themselves. I found all of the characters completely devoid of any true personality or any reason I should care or feel connected to them.

The details described in the book do a lot for physical surroundings but we know nothing of Cecila except she went to college and chain smokes, so I don't particularly care about anything that happens to her, besides the fact that much of her life is lived outside what information the book provides.

Briony is a terrible child, a narcissistic teenager, and and at last a harmless grandmother who I don't especially care about at any of these three points in her life. The only character with the least bit of humanity seems to be Robbie who is still somewhat confined to his role as the "victim".

All the lovely descriptions of ponds and hospital wards and French war-torn villages could not make up for the fact that none of these characters were the slightest bit interesting to me or seemed to connect to anything. They simply floated through long locational descriptions being powerless to the world around them and unfortunately for me I didn't need pages to get that point.

It could have easily been accomplished as a short story or novella. I just kept feeling that the book had all this great detail but didn't focus it on anything that it shoud have. I know this may sound exceedingly harsh and once again I do chalk some of this up to reading Atonement directly after a much better novel it had no hope in eclipsing or even paralleling in its structure but I also know how quickly and easily I fall in love with characters.

How quickly I can get pulled into a good story and I sincerely feel that although I wouldn't call this book a complete waste, that my time would have been much better spent elsewhere. View all 5 comments. Jan 02, Diane rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , gorgeous-prose , british-charm , audiobooks , movie-adaptation. What a lovely reread this was!

I first read this novel almost a decade ago, and the story has stayed with me. The prose is gorgeous, and again I was completely absorbed in this novel. My favorite character is Briony, the young writer seeking atonement for a mistake she made as a child. And my heart aches for her sister, Cecilia, and her wronged lover, Robbie. I've only read a few of McEwan's books, but I like his writing style so much I want to read more.

Highly recommended. Favorite Quotes "Was e What a lovely reread this was! Favorite Quotes "Was everyone else really as alive as she was? One could drown in irrelevance. View all 9 comments. Feb 16, Martine rated it it was amazing Shelves: film , modern-fiction , british , family-drama , historical-fiction , favourites.

Having recently seen and loved the magnificent film adaptation, I decided to reread Atonement , which quite impressed me when it was first published. And guess what? It was an even more rewarding experience the second time around. Knowing what was coming -- knowing the plot twist at the end -- helped me focus on the quality of the writing rather than on the development of the story, and as always, McEwan's prose completely sucked me in.

He is, quite simply, one of the most talented authors alive, Having recently seen and loved the magnificent film adaptation, I decided to reread Atonement , which quite impressed me when it was first published. He is, quite simply, one of the most talented authors alive, and he uses his gift to great effect here.

I'm not really going to go into the plot here, because the less the first-time reader knows about the book, the better. Suffice it to say that it is about an imaginative thirteen-year-old who witnesses a few things she doesn't understand, draws the wrong conclusions and ends up ruining the lives of two people near and dear to her. The first half of the book deals with the event itself and the hours leading up to it; the second half deals with her attempts to, well, deal with it -- atone for it, so to speak.

As always, McEwan excels at setting the scene. His description of a hot summer afternoon in a English country house is lush and sumptuous, his evocation of a young soldier's struggle to reach home after the disastrous battle of Dunkirk is haunting, and his look into the horrors of a war-time London hospital is gruesome in all its detail.

Amazingly, McEwan manages to find beauty even in the most horrific scenes, which is one of the things which set him apart as a writer. As usual, though, it's the psychological stuff that is really outstanding. McEwan has a knack for taking his readers deep into his characters' minds, letting them share their most intimate, most uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. Sometimes these thoughts are a little disturbing those of you who have read his earlier works will know what I mean , but usually they have the effect of completely drawing the reader into the story.

The latter is definitely the case in Atonement. By presenting the story from different perspectives and vantage points, McEwan provides the reader with a complete and engrossing view of a life-changing event and its aftermath.

All the different perspectives ring true, and together they tell a marvellous tale of perception, loyalty, anger, secrets, lost love, shame, guilt, obsession with the past and -- yes -- atonement.

And about writing, for more than anything else, Atonement is about the difference between fiction and reality, the power of the imagination and the human urge to write and rewrite history -- to write destiny and play God.

I've heard quite a few people say that they found the first half of the novel too slow and ponderous, wondering why McEwan felt the need to devote nearly two hundred pages to the events of a single day.

Personally, I found that part of the book to be utterly brilliant in its rich, Woolf-like glory. As far as I'm concerned, the atmosphere of the first half is superbly drawn, with each character down to the most minor one being well realised and the tensions and suspense at work almost being made tangible.

For me, it is the second half of the book which has problems albeit minor ones , in that I found the jumps in time and perspective jarring and the otherwise fascinating chapter about Robbie's adventures in France somewhat unreal. Of course, there are good reasons for the slightly unreal quality of the Dunkirk chapter which the film captured just brilliantly , but still, it didn't quite work for me; it felt a bit out of place.

Thankfully, though, the rest of the book worked just wonderfully for me. Like other McEwan books, it left me with a haunting question -- 'What if? She is hardly your average thirteen-year-old I think even McEwan would have a hard time coming up with one of those!

As a fellow writer, I greatly enjoyed seeing the world through Briony's eyes, and hope her author will live to her old age and write as many good books as he has her doing. View all 11 comments. Jan 03, Nilufer Ozmekik rated it it was amazing. I will embarrassedly share a personal secret.

I am a big fan of charming Scottish Mr. After years I kept booing her at the theaters as soon as her frozen blue eyes appeared on the screen and I got kicked out from theaters! Good things about this predicament: Even she was 13, Saoirse freaking Ronan was brilliant actress and the story of the book is heart wrenching, extra powerful and remarkable! It is suggested that Robbie Turner may have died ofsepticaemia - caused by his injury - on the beaches of Dunkirk, and Cecilia may have been killed by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham Underground station.

Cecilia and Robbie may have never seen each other again. Although the detail concerning Lola's marriage to Paul Marshall is true, Briony never visited Cecilia to make amends. Briony explains why she decided to change real events and unite Cecilia and Robbie in her novel, although it was not her intention in her many previous drafts.

She did not see what purpose it would serve if she gave the readers a pitiless ending. She reasons that they could not draw any sense of hope or satisfaction from it. But above all, she wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia their happiness by being together. Since they could not have the time together they so much longed for in reality, Briony wanted to give it to them at least in her novel. McEwan has also said that he was directly influenced by L.

Hartley's The Go-Between. Atonement also contains a fictional letter addressed to Briony by the literary critic and editor Cyril Connolly. Atonement was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction. In late , it was reported that romance and historical author Lucilla Andrews felt that McEwan had failed to give her sufficient credit for material on wartime nursing in London sourced from her autobiography No Time for Romance. An opera is to be written based on the novel, with music by Michael Berkeley and libretto by Craig Raine.

Pop Culture Wiki Explore. Wiki Content. Recent blog posts Forum. Lulled by the long Part One which occupies half the book into the security associated with the classic realist novel, this minority of reviewers dismisses the final coda as an instance of postmodern gimmickry. In other words, all these reviewers read Part One as a strictly realist narration and fault McEwan for failing to live up to the realist expectations that he has aroused during the first half of the book.

It is my contention that this entails a radical misreading of the novel. The novel's epigraph, a quotation from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey , serves as both a warning and a guide to how the reader should view this narrative. McEwan ironically has the Tallis country house renamed Tilney's Hotel as a sly tribute to this fictional precedent. McEwan sees Northanger Abbey as a novel about "about someone's wild imagination causing havoc to people around them" Ali Tilney's remarks to Catherine "what ideas have you been admitting?

The difference is that Briony who, we are told at the end of section 3 of Part One will become a successful novelist over the next fifty years sets out to use fiction to attempt to make amends for the damage fiction has induced her to cause in the first place. Fiction-making originates and does not just conclude this particular work of fiction.

The book proper opens with an ironic description, not of Briony, but of the play she has written at the age of thirteen. It is a crude melodrama with which Briony quickly becomes disenchanted. The point is that we meet an instance of Briony's literary imagination before we get to know her as a personality. She is an author first, and a girl on the verge of entering adolescence secondly. The literary self consciousness about which these British reviewers complain is present from the opening page of the novel and serves throughout the book to undermine the classic realist mode of narration.

McEwan has said, "I sometimes feel that every sentence contains a ghostly commentary on its own processes. In this respect McEwan shows himself to be a writer of his time, one whose fictions necessarily leave a trace of their own production. Catherine Belsey refers to Emile Benveniste's distinction between "discourse" and "histoire" in Problems in General Linguistics to illustrate how in classic realist fiction "the events seem to narrate themselves" Benveniste , whereas discourse assumes a speaker and a hearer.

Accordingly the "authority of [the classic realist novel's] impersonal narration springs from its effacement of its own status as discourse" Belsey From his earliest collections of short stories Ian McEwan has consistently drawn attention to the status of his fiction as discourse by alluding to or parodying traditional literary genres, thereby forcing the reader to take note of the presence of a self conscious narrator.

He has described each of his early stories as "a kind of pastiche of a certain style [. At least one reviewer has seen a parallel between Atonement and Bowen's The Last September "with its restive teenage girl in the big house" Lee Elizabeth Bowen also directly influences the form the final novel takes. After reading Briony's first neo-modernist attempt to give fictional shape to the events of submitted to Cyril Connolly at Horizon , Bowen reacts by first thinking the prose "'too full, too cloying,'" but with "'redeeming shades of Dusty Answer '" Rosamund Lehmann's first novel of about a young girl's growing up.

Cyril Connolly voices Bowen's final criticism of the modernist obsession with consciousness at the expense of plot by reminding Briony that even her most sophisticated readers "retain a childlike desire to be told a story" Briony's rewritten Part One owes its mounting tension to Bowen's criticism passed on to Cyril Connolly and the example offered by Bowen's earlier novel. Virginia Woolf acts both as a positive and negative influence on this novel. Talking about Atonement McEwan states that he "was wanting to enter into a conversation with modernism and its dereliction of duty in relation to what I have Cyril Connolly call the backbone of the plot" McEwan, Silverblatt.

Comparisons have been made between this book and Woolf's Between the Acts "in which a group of well-bred characters gathers for a family pageant against the backdrop of impending war" Cowley Features , and Woolf's To the Lighthouse the dinner scene of which is parodied by "the disastrous roast meat dinner fed to sweltering guests" in Part One Kemp Features.

As was the case with his use of Bowen, McEwan offers his reader internal evidence of Woolf's influence this time deleterious on the young Briony's narrative style when she is pictured reading Woolf's The Waves between nursing shifts. Under Woolf's modernist spell, Briony decides that characters "were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century" and that plots "too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn" McEwan has said that in Briony's first piece of fiction that reflects this modernist bias, "Two Figures by a Fountain," "she is burying her conscience beneath her stream of consciousness" McEwan, Silverblatt , indicating how for him the ideology of modernism especially its prioritization of stylistic innovation has hidden moral consequences.

Compare Briony's critique of her early draft of the novel: "Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream-three streams-of consciousness? Style, she discovers, really does have ethical implications. In interviews McEwan has cited at least two other literary connections. Talking of his schooldays, he recalled "reading [L. Hartley's] The Go-Between and being very struck by that novel of a child moving between the two lovers carrying notes back and forth.

This novel [ Atonement ] owes something to that" Ali Other similarities between the two books include the hot summer setting, the dividing issue of class and the confusion of a child confronted with adult sexuality. In another interview McEwan talked about his use of an adult narrative voice in Atonement : "I didn't want to write about a child's mind with the limitations of a child's vocabulary or a child's point of view. In other words McEwan wanted to give as much prominence to the discourse as to the histoire or story.

Like Leo in The Go-Between and Maisie in What Maisie Knew , Briony is a child who becomes involved in an adult sexual relationship that she is ill equipped to understand. The narrator, however, has all the experience and understanding of a lifetime. By invoking within the text to an earlier literary genre or movement, McEwan draws attention to a continuous tension between the narrative and its narration. MvEwan's enduring concern with the act of narration in Atonement surfaces equally in his frequent use of intertextuality.

The quotation acts in an anticipatory fashion, warning the reader that Robbie is likely to prove similarly deluded. In this instance intertextuality is employed to establish a connection between the microcosm of the lives that Briony has disrupted and the macrocosm of a world at war.

In fact Atonement is replete with numerous allusions to other writers and books. For instance Robbie's collection of literary works is listed in some detail, ironically reflecting the ideology of F R Leavis that he had absorbed in Cambridge at first hand. He reflects smugly in a highly stylized passage: "he would be a better doctor for having read literature. What deep readings his modified sensibility might make of human suffering [. Ironically the reader is simultaneously being alerted to what that mode omits in this instance - the reality of sudden death and haphazard suffering that Robbie encounters in the retreat to Dunkirk.

That irony, like the irony present in the references to Malvolio and Auden, is one feature that distinguishes McEwan's citations as intertexts as opposed to sources.

The numerous allusions to other texts warn the reader not to treat Atonement as a classic realist text. Both Kristeva and Jacques Derrida argue that any text seen as intertext entails productivity. What they mean by that is that once a text establishes its interdependence on other texts its signification proliferates, Atonement offers particularly clear instances of what Kristeva claims are some of the different ways in which a text, in relating to other texts, becomes productive of further meanings, ways such as rereading and displacement.

McEwan's novel is most obviously a rereading of the classic realist novel of the nineteenth century, just as it is a displacement of the modernist novel, particularly as instanced in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and D. It is no coincidence that Robbie, seeking to excuse his sexually explicit note sent by mistake to Cecilia, thinks of appealing to "a passing impatience with convention" that he associates with "a memory of reading the Orioli edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover " which had been banned in England in Like Mellors, Robbie comes from a lower class than Cecilia cf.

Lady Chatterley. In fact this Freudian slip of Robbie's is indebted to another book as well. Because he had left the innocent version of his note to Cecilia on an illustration of the vagina in Gray's Anatomy , he had associated the handwritten polite note with the "bold spread and rakish crown of pubic hair" in the book, while his obscene typewritten draft lay clear of any intertextual contamination on his table Atonement makes another ironic literary allusion to an even earlier English novel, Richardson's Clarissa.

Arabella, the melodramatic heroine of the thirteen-year-old Briony's playlet, shares Clarissa's sister's name and thereby places "The Trials of Arabella" within a literary tradition of sentimentality and sensationalism, while inevitably lacking the psychological complexity of the original. Cecilia is spending the vacation after graduating at Cambridge by reading Clarissa , which Robbie considers psychologically subtle and she boring.

Their disagreement over this text helps determine the reader's response to the rape which takes place later the same day and which is sprung on the reader with none of the lengthy preparation that Richardson provides. Seen in the perspective of the novel as a whole, Lola's rape, unlike that of Clarissa, which leads to her death and Lovelace's damnation, is the prelude to a long and socially successful marriage cemented by Lola's and Marshall's determination to keep the identity of the rapist a secret while either of them is alive.

Lola's worldly manipulation of the advantage the rape has given her over her rapist acts as a form of social intertextuality, anticipating the laxer sexual morality of the later twentieth century.

An additional effect that such ironic references to other literary texts have in McEwan's novel is to act as a continuous reminder that the entire book is the final literary artifact of Briony, a professional author. In the case of the novel intertextuality relates an individual work to others that constitute the genre of fiction and that have contributed to the conventions that produce meaning in fictional narrative.

It is significant just how many other works of literature Atonement has suggested to its numerous reviewers. The rape reminds one reviewer of the incident in the Marabar caves in E. Forster's A Passage to India , but without the retraction Dyer 8.

Yet another reviewer discerns McEwan making a nod to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited Caldwell E3 , and a fellow reviewer describes McEwan's mixture of allusions to the genteel country house pastoral and the brutalities of sex and war by suggesting, "It is as if [. The novel has also been compared to an Agatha Christie country house thriller Adair 10 , Nabokov's Lolita with its sly allusion using Lola as the name of the raped nymphet Baker 5 , and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin that used a similar metanarrative device of an elderly female narrator revealed as such near the end Updike In addition to intertextuality McEwan makes use of other narrative devices to alert his reader to the status of his text as a literary artifact.

For instance there is his modulation of prose styles. In the long Part One McEwan chose to write in "a slightly mannered prose, slightly held in, a little formal, a tiny bit archaic" with which he "could evoke the period best" McEwan, Silverblatt. In Part Two, writing about Dunkirk, he chose "to write in a choppier prose with shorter, simpler sentences" Ali 59 , a style that is reminiscent of Hemingway. As he explained, "on the battlefield the subordinate clause has no place" McEwan, Silverblatt.

In the final coda he employs a contemporary voice, one that is acutely self-conscious and aware of its own act of narration. For instance: "I've always liked to make a tidy finish," says the elderly Briony, simultaneously referring to her life and her life's work In the case of Atonement , it is first Briony, then Cecilia, then Robbie, and so on. McEwan employs this particular "modal determination" Genette partly to distinguish his narrative from the classic realist novel's association with an omniscient narrator Briony's lie came from positioning herself as such a narrator in her fictionalized scenario of events , partly to demonstrate Briony's, the adult narrator's, attempt to project herself into the thoughts and feelings of her characters, an act which we will see is crucial to her search for forgiveness.

McEwan also draws attention to the constructed nature of the narrative by employing parallel or symmetrical motifs. Marshall's rape of Lola takes place by the eighteenth century, crumbling, stuccoed Greek temple in the Tallis grounds with its "row of pillars and the pediment above them" The wedding of Marshall and Lola turns out to be at a London church that looks "like a Greek temple," especially its "low portico with white columns beneath a clock tower of harmonious proportions" Separated by five years, the rape and marriage are brought into shocking juxtaposition by purely narrative means.

The last occasion on which Briony encounters the Marshalls at the end of the book takes place outside the Imperial War Museum which echoes the other two buildings in being based on Greek temple design and featuring columns and a portico. Behind the neo-classical facades that come to represent the "mausoleum of their marriage" lurk respectively ruin, a joint lie, and the destructive memories of a war from which Marshall made his fortune.

Part One is also characterized by frequent use of narrative anticipation, or what Genette calls temporal prolepsis. Genette claims that Western narrative tradition tends to use this device sparingly because the "concern with narrative suspense that is characteristic of the 'classical' conception of the novel [.

Positioning itself as partly opposed to Western narrative tradition, Atonement makes frequent use of anticipation in Part One. Perhaps overconfident, or more indebted to postmodernism herself than she lets on Briony repeatedly drops hints that she was even manufacturing this story as a child, and that it is shifting and changing even as she writes it from the perch of old age. In the third section, as an year-old writer, Briony receives a helpful rejection letter from real-life as in, actually real-life magazine editor Cyril Connolly.

She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite pen. I asked McEwan if some bit of Briony is triumphant.

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