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.
You can’t teach this at a creative writing program or summer camp for aspiring littérateurs. Certainly McEwan works diligently and has mastered his craft, but he also possesses an instinct for what works and what doesn’t. For example, much has been made of McEwan borrowing from Lucilla Andrews’s memoirs of her time as a nurse in a London hospital during World War II. The charges were overblown, and McEwan, for his part, had been open in citing this source for his book long before the press picked up on it. Yet the connection is all the more revealing of this novelist’s skill. He understood exactly which tiny details and descriptions from Andrews’ book could serve as building blocks for the high drama of Atonement. In his hands, a nurse’s day-to-day takes on a vivid intensity that almost matches the battlefield sequence at the center of his novel.
Ah, the battlefield section . . . But no, not really a battlefield description in any conventional sense of the term — since there is more field than battle here. In another daring move, McEwan leaves out almost all of the fighting from his World War II interlude, and instead focuses on the retreat and evacuation from Dunkirk. This was that tragic moment when "the whole root, the core, and brain of the British Army," as Winston Churchill described it, were left stranded and exposed on the coast while waiting for their rescue. Hundreds of thousands of men waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting. No, this is not your usual subject for a spirited war story. Yet McEwan takes this low point in the unfolding of World War II and builds it into one of the most remarkable pieces of historical fiction of recent memory.
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