ian mcewan | Freshlyworded

*My somewhat battered copy of Atonement*

What a delight it was re-reading Ian McEwan’s masterful wartime novel Atonement.

And how equally delightful to re-watch the movie adaptation which came out six years later in 2007.

I thought I would be somewhat disappointed in the film, but while it condenses the storyline and isn’t able to really get inside the characters’ heads as deeply as the novel, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton remain faithful to McEwan’s plot and story and know what to leave out and what must remain.

If I had to choose either the book or the movie, it would have to be the book though, simply because McEwan is a wonderful writer and storyteller and there is so much more to enjoy and ponder across its 371 pages than the 123 minutes of film time.

McEwan has that quite rare gift of being both a serious literary novelist (a Booker Prize winner no less, though not for Atonement, though it was shortlisted in 2021, losing to Peter Carey‘s The True History of the Kelly Gang). but also, being a popular and accessible writer who places the story at the centre of his efforts and who has achieved mainstream success.

In an interview in 2002, following publication of Atonement, McEwan spoke about his approach to writing and how he wants to welcome his reader in and make it impossible for them to not be able to turn back (no different, I suspect to the approach of Stephen King).

McEwan mentions a subplot within the novel, where the main character (Briony Tallis) submits a novella to a magazine and the editor replies that it is full of beautiful passages about how light reflects off stone and water, but you have to have “the backbone of a story”.

McEwan said in the same interview, that the idea behind Atonement was whether literary fiction could “do a love story” and the answer is, it most certainly can.

To summarise the plot briefly, Atonement begins in England in 1935, when thirteen-year-old aspiring writer Briony Tallis misinterprets a series of events between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s housekeeper, leading her to falsely accuse Robbie of a crime he didn’t commit.

Her false testimony sends Robbie to prison and then to fight in World War II, tearing him apart from Cecilia, who chooses to estrange herself from her family in solidarity with him.

As the years pass, through the war and beyond, Briony grapples with guilt over what she did as a child, eventually becoming a novelist herself and attempting, through her writing, to atone for the damage her lie caused to the two lovers’ lives.

The novel ends with surprising and devastating twist as the reader is confronted with brutal reality (within a fictional story), versus the happier ending Briony plays out in her mind and on the page.

To return to McEwan’s writing. It would not be unfair to call him one of the finest writers of his generation. An example of his precise, imaginative prose is on display when McEwan describes how Emily Tallis, the withdrawn mother of Briony and Cecilia, experiences the onset of a migraine.

We find Emily lying still and silent in her darkened room. McEwan writes of her migraine beginning to build as “illuminated points in her vision, little pinpricks, as though the worn fabric of her visible world was being held up against a far brighter light”.

Then McEwan describes the approaching migraine as heaviness in the right corner of Emily’s brain, “the inert body weight of some curled and sleeping animal” that she must not provoke lest “the knifing pains would obliterate all thought”.

McEwan carries on this metaphor of the migraine as some lurking animal, indifferent to Emily’s misery and that her only hope lies in keeping still in the darkness. It’s just one example of his brilliant, precise writing and how it can conjure up something intangible and convey the terror of an approaching period of pain.

This is just one example of how the book triumphs over the movie, which does not have the scope or length of time to take the viewer into that metaphor – indeed there is no reference to Emily’s malady in the film – and many others that McEwan effortlessly teases out in his marvellous prose.

The strength of the movie lies in its strong cast: Saoirse Ronan as the 13-year-old precocious Briony is exceptional, as are Keira Knightley as Cecilia, James McAvoy as Robbie and Benedict Cumberbatch as the sleazy chocolate tycoon Paul Marshall, to name just a few.

The script by the legendary screenwriter Christopher Hampton retains the most important elements of the book and dialogue, the locations and sets are immaculate (the hellish scenes on the beaches of Dunkirk before the 1944 evacuation are sensational) and the cinematography and directing keep the story moving forward, whilst providing the opportunity for character development.

It’s actually quite a challenging novel to turn into a movie, because there are these leaps of faith that the reader must make (McEwan has the time and skill to explain for instance how Briony misinterpreted the events leading up to Robbie’s arrest) but Hampton and Wright create a sense of believability via skillful writing and clever uses of light and shadow to create confusion.

For anyone wanting to revisit this story, I recommend reading McEwan’s wonderful novel first and then kicking back with a bowl of popcorn and enjoying the excellent, but limited movie adaptation.

Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel “The Child in Time” has as its central theme, the abduction of a three-year old child in broad daylight in a supermarket in suburban London in the 1980s.

Having a small child of my own, I picked up the book, read the back cover, and bought it, intrigued.

I think the premise in my mind was similar to what makes people slow down past traffic accidents – a glimpse of something horrifying and the reassurance that, it’s OK, it’s not happening to me. It’s why sadistic horror movies like Saw and Wolf Creek are so successful.

Quickly on in McEwan’s novel, we meet the central character, Steven Lewis, a successful children’s novelist living in a flat with his wife Julie, and their daughter Kate. One morning Steven lets Julie sleep in, while he and Kate dress warmly and walk to the supermarket to pick up groceries.

At the checkout, there is this ominous forbearer of disaster:

Stephen lifted the first items onto the belt. When he straightened he might have been conscious of a figure in a dark coat behind Kate.

And then, a little later:

The man with the dogfood was leaving. The checkout girl was already at work, the fingers of one hand flickering over the keypad while the other drew Stephen’s items towards her. As he took the salmon from his cart he looked down and winked at Kate. She copied him, but clumsily, wrinkling her nose and closing both eyes. He set the fish down and asked the girl for a shopping bag. She reached under a shelf and pulled one out. He took it and turned. Kate was gone.

Then follows the frantic searching down aisles. Calling out his daughter’s name. The police arrive. Stephen returns to his flat, alone, without his daughter, to tell his wife the terrible news.

At first it seemed a little far-fetched

Was is possible for a child to be abducted in such a manner, so swiftly, in a busy supermarket?

I had plans to write to Ian McEwan (or his publisher at least) to ask if this aspect of the novel was based in any way on real events.

But then, serendipitously, I came across a story about an experiment in London, where, under controlled circumstances, parents turn their attention away from their children in park for a just a few seconds, only for them to fall prey to a would-be paedophile.

There were nine children aged between five and 11 who were approached by a “stranger” who asked them to help him find his dog.

Seven, without hesitation and despite being warned about strangers, agreed to go with him, disappearing while their mothers’ attention was diverted by a telephone call.

Certainly the everyday, banal menace created in those supermarket scenes by McEwan – something he does so brilliantly – sends a cold shiver down your spine.

I expected the rest of the novel to be about a father trying to come to terms with the loss of his daughter and subsequent breakdown of his marriage. This is part of it, but McEwan turns the novel into a meditation on the idea of childhood, memory and parenthood.

Steven Lewis spends his days in stifling government-sponsored committees who are tasked with compiling a report on childcare and child-rearing. In the evenings, he sits alone in his flat drinking Scotch, thinking about Kate or his estranged wife, now living alone somewhere in the countryside.

There are strange dream-like sequences in a country pub, where he becomes the lost child looking in on his parents, many years in the past, as they come to terms with his own unplanned for conception.

His friend, Charles Darke, a junior minister in Thatcher’s government and the man who made him into a successful children’s author, gives up his plush home in London, the minor celebrity of political life and moves with his wife Thelma to a country estate, where he retreats into a child-like state, building a tree-house and making the woods his home.

There are the elements you expect in such a novel, such as Stephen going to a toy shop to buy a birthday present for his daughter, while he tries to convince himself that this is a healthy act. There is his constant fear of being away from his flat should Kate return and a disturbing episode where he decides that a child he sees in a school playground is his daughter, now much older.

Overall, I found it a strange, disjointed, stumbling and yet also bewitching novel, delving in and out of other people’s lives before returning to the story of Stephen Lewis and his quest to rejoin the world of the consciously living.

Christopher Hitchens, a close friend of Ian McEwan, called this book his “masterpiece”. I am not sure I agree.

I found I plodded along at times, not quite sure of the direction and the need for some of the diversions. But reflecting back, perhaps it deserves a second reading.

As with all McEwan’s books there are little gems here and there that touch on universal truths:

These lines struck me particularly poignantly. They are the thoughts of Stephen when visits his own parents and realises he only knows “outlines and details from stories” about their lives, but “nothing of how his parents met or what attracted them”:

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full an intricate existence before you were born.