The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at Atonement by Ian McEwan.
There were so many ways Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement might have gone wrong. If critics were like Olympic diving judges and factored in “degree of difficulty,” they would treat McEwan’s story line as if it were a back-flying two-and-a-half somersault. If this were NASCAR, fans would be waiting for the first big crash.
How do you get all this stuff to cohere in a single volume? After all, here is a book that leaves the starting-gate as a Jane Austen country manor romance and crosses the finish line as a post-modern meta-fiction. Along the way, we get a World War II historical piece and a hyper-realistic account of a nurse’s life — both of which could stand alone as novellas — and don’t forget the “wronged man” crime mystery, or the steamy scene in the library that would leave them blushing and breathless at The Jane Austen Society.
Yes, this book might have collapsed under its own weight and the dizzying range of effects that McEwan attempts to incorporate in its pages. But it doesn’t fail, it succeeds stunningly, despite the spins and back-flips. The author is in total control—as, indeed, he needs to be to pull off his plan. This book starts out solidly, and just gets better and better. At every twist and turn in the plot (and, heaven knows, there are plenty of them), McEwan delivers the goods. Yet he also manages to hold the biggest surprise in his back pocket for the very end of the novel.
McEwan has demonstrated in other settings his preference for clever and convoluted plots. Just check out the double zinger at the end of Amsterdam or the turnabout at the conclusion of Saturday. Not many serious authors these days will dare build these Dickensian structures. We all know about British understatement, but even the Yanks are quite comfortable with plots that never resolve, with books that end with a ugly phlatttt!!! — leaving the reader wondering whether the remaining chapters got left out by mistake. Not with Ian McEwan. He believes that a story, like a game of chess, should move from opening to mid-game to end-game to a clear and satisfying resolution. And nowhere is this demonstrated with more virtuosity than in Atonement
But the real draw to this book is not the complex story line, but rather McEwan’s sheer mastery of the narrative. At every phase of Atonement, McEwan tests his powers and demonstrates his unflagging skill at setting a scene, drawing it out with the right degree of description and detail, highlighting the telling incident within the incident, setting the balance between the physical and psychological aspects at hand . . . in short, getting everything just right.
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