Ian McEwan’s semi-Austenesque novel, “Atonement.”

Ian McEwan, whose novels have tended to be short, smart, and saturnine, has produced a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama, “Atonement” (Doubleday; $26). The novel’s first half takes place over two summer days in 1935, on a Surrey estate occupied by the Tallis family: Jack, the head of the household, whose work for the Ministry of Defense keeps him night after night in London; Emily, his wife, who is prone to migraines and long spells of daydreaming in her bed; Leon, the eldest child and only son, twenty-five and working in London in a modest position at a bank, though he has a law degree; his sister Cecilia, younger by two years, fresh from her finals at Cambridge, bored and at loose ends; and our heroine, thirteen-year-old Briony, given to posing philosophical questions and perusing the thesaurus, and for the past two years an increasingly active writer. She has just composed a play, “The Trials of Arabella,” to be performed in honor of her brother’s homecoming. He is bringing a wealthy friend, Paul Marshall, and there are three cousins just arrived from the north, the Quinceys—Lola, fifteen, and nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot—who are to act in Briony’s play. The three are refugees from a broken household: Aunt Hermione, Emily Tallis’s younger sister, has run off to Paris with “a man who worked in the wireless.” To this cast of characters add some servants and the anomalous figure of Robbie Turner. Robbie is the son of the Tallises’ former gardener; when the boy’s father deserted him and his mother, they were charitably taken up by Jack Tallis, who gave Grace Turner the gardener’s bungalow and has paid for Robbie’s education, including three years at Cambridge. He has just passed his finals with a first in literature, while Cecilia earned only a third. Though at Cambridge simultaneously, they rarely met there, and are tense and awkward with each other this summer, in the domain where they grew up together. They, it is perhaps not too much to reveal, supply the novel’s love interest.
An illustrative sketch of Ian McEwan
In his fictional panorama “Atonement,” McEwan captures the tastes and sights of a past he did not witness as a child.Illustration by Eric Palma

McEwan’s epigraph is from Jane Austen, and promises a spacious family novel of humorous interplay, romantic intrigues, and near-tragic misunderstandings. The promise is to some extent kept; the homesick twins and the blossoming, manipulative Lola inject disturbance into the stagnant Tallis household. But in the warmth of these days, the year’s hottest, a Virginia Woolfian shimmer overlays the Austenish plot, which keeps threatening to dissolve. The play, for example, does not go on (until sixty-four years later). Jack Tallis, the powerful absentee Old Man, an offstage deus ex machina, never descends. Instead, amid many images of water and vegetation and architectural nicety, various viewpoints backtrack and overlap, and certain scenes are replayed from widely different perspectives. The writing is conspicuously good; and this goodness turns out to be, eventually, a subject of criticism—by Cyril Connolly, no less—in a droll show of artistic self-reference, although in the meantime it works an authentic spell. Picture after picture, in the haze of this midsummer, arises to challenge and flatter the reader’s capacity for visualization. At a key moment, a precious vase is tussled over, and a fragment breaks off and falls into a fountain:

With a sound like a dry twig snapping, a section of the lip of the vase came away in his hand, and split into two triangular pieces which dropped into the water and tumbled to the bottom in a synchronous, see-sawing motion, and lay there, several inches apart, writhing in the broken light.

That seesawing synchronicity, that writhing in the broken light show us more than we had expected to see. A seemingly half-baked comparison to savanna writhes on, renews itself, and ends with a smiling metaphoric flourish:

Then, nearer, the estate’s open parkland, which today had a dry and savage look, roasting like a savanna, where isolated trees threw harsh stumpy shadows and the long grass was already stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer.

The reader, seeing through Cecilia’s languid eyes, is brought up short by virtually abstract images:

She lolled against the warm stone, lazily finishing her cigarette and contemplating the scene before her—the foreshortened slab of chlorinated water, the black inner tube of a tractor tyre propped against a deck chair, the two men in cream linen suits of infinitesimally different hues, bluish-gray smoke rising against the bamboo green.

“Infinitesimally different hues” is the mode, as skyscapes, physiognomies, gestures ("She turned aside and made a steeple of her hands to enclose her nose and mouth and pressed her fingers into the corners of her eyes"), and scents ("the grasses giving off their sweet cattle smell, the hard-fired earth which still held the embers of the day’s heat and exhaled the mineral odor of clay, and the faint breeze carrying from the lake a flavor of green and silver") are evoked with a delicious care and verbal cunning. This is written, each page subliminally announces, and that undercurrent prepares the reader for the atonement of the title: Briony, the writer and the character becoming one, atones for a childish blunder with a mature woman’s fiat of creation. Even at the age of thirteen she exults to herself, “There was nothing she could not describe.”

The novel’s second section transports us to another prose climate, as the terrors and confusions of the British retreat to Dunkirk in 1940 are harrowingly detailed. Some of the details are surprising and piquant—a caged parrot caught up in the chaotic scramble, a peasant with his collie plowing a field in intervals between bombing and strafing attacks, soldiers shooting their horses in the head and their motorized vehicles in the radiator. In the desperately crowded and underprovisioned conditions around Dunkirk, British soldiers threaten and assault one another while the enemy swoops overhead and the R.A.F. and the Royal Navy fail to materialize. As a whole, the section is gripping, but it is not extraordinary, quite, like the novel’s first half. The element of the marvellous—the latently menacing seethe of the everyday—has been replaced by the more vulgar excitement of overt peril. If we marvel, it is at the ability of contemporary English writers (McEwan was born in 1948) to capture the tastes and sights of a past they did not witness even as children. It is as if the earlier generation of writers—Waugh, Greene, Green, Golding, Powell, Orwell, Bowen, Spark, and dozens of lessers—had laid down, on this dense island soil, an accessible past, while Americans must reinvent their more scattered country from scratch. The imaginary writer of “Atonement” in her last pages expresses her debt to the research facilities at the Imperial War Museum, in Lambeth, and to an “old colonel” who has testily corrected her terminology and fine points. Her sixty pages of war’s turmoil are followed by sixty of war’s bitter fruits, in the form of the atrocious casualties that Briony, who has signed up as a probationer nurse, witnesses and learns to minister to. She extracts shrapnel, talks French to a young man who dies in her arms, removes the bandages from a blasted face:

Using a pair of surgical tongs, she began carefully pulling away the sodden, congealed lengths of ribbon gauze from the cavity in the side of his face. When the last was out, the resemblance to the cutaway model they used in anatomy classes was only faint. This was all ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long.

The reader will possibly recall how the novel’s lovers, in their moment of mutual possession, find their way to unself-conscious passion through “the contact of tongues, alive and slippery muscle, moist flesh on flesh.” Lust and disgust keep close company; in McEwan’s hypnotic first novel, “The Cement Garden” (1978), another set of children left to their own devices, in another summer of unusual heat, experience the debility and putrescence of the body as well as its tabooed allure. “Atonement” concerns, among other historical phenomena, puritanism in 1935, when an impulsive four-letter word in a man’s love letter could draw the attention of the authorities. The frail, moist flesh, mutilated in war, corseted and shamed in peacetime, and subject, in the long view, to swift decay, gives this intricately composed narrative its mournful, surging life. The poems of Auden and Housman are talismanic volumes within its furniture, and “Clarissa” with its scribbling heroine, but equally prominent is Gray’s “Anatomy.”

The novel’s bloody illustrations of the horrors of war compel assent and pity, and yet, such is the novel reader’s romantic nature, it is the lovers that keep us turning the page; theirs is the consummation we devoutly wish. Our wish is granted, but with a duplicitous art. “Atonement,” in its tenderness and doubleness and final effect of height, in its postmodern concern with its own writing, and in its central topic of two upper-class sisters in the period between the world wars, has a striking happenstance resemblance to Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin.” Both revert, from the perspective of an old woman facing death near the bloated end of the twentieth century, to an era when a certain grandeur could attach to human decisions, made as they were under the shadow of global war and in living memory of the faded virtues—loyalty and honesty and valor—that sought to soften what McEwan calls the “iron principle of self-love.” People could still dedicate a life, gamble it on one throw. Compared with today’s easy knowingness and self-protective irony, feelings then had a hearty naïveté, a force developed amid repression and scarcity and linked to a sense of transcendent adventure; novels need this force, and must find it where they can, if only in the annals of the past. ♦