Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The "Complete" review ~ Atonement

The complete review's Review:

The first half of Atonement -- the long first part of the book -- is set in 1935, at the Tallis home in the English countryside. It begins with Briony Tallis, a bright but still very childish thirteen year-old, preparing a play, The Trials of Arabella. Briony seems a budding dramatist, enjoying this staging of events and putting words into people's mouths, but the events of just those days will change her from potential playwright to novelist, a very different kind of fabulist. A great deal goes on in the brief time covered in this first part of the book, but most of it is relatively mundane stuff. The highlight is meant to be the return of Briony's brother, Leon, from school; it is to impress him that Briony writes her play. McEwan slowly sets the stage and introduces the players -- also more dramatist than novelist at the beginning. The house is fairly full -- though, in the terrible heat, not exactly bustling with activity. There is another sibling: Briony's considerably older sister, Cecilia. The parents are weak presences: the mother, Emily, isn't a very strong woman and the father is almost entirely absent (away working in London). Other figures of note include Robbie Turner, the housekeeper's son who shows great promise and whose education has been paid for by the Tallises. He and Cecilia both attended Cambridge at the same time, and while they didn't associate much there they suddenly find themselves closer than expected back home. Then there are the cousins -- nine-year-old twin boys and the fifteen-year-old Lola. Their parents have split up and the children have just been sent here, where Briony immediately ropes them into participating in her play. Lola, adept at some manipulation, turns out to be a bit much for Briony to try to control -- but Briony seems to manage to twist most situations to her satisfaction. Then there's the wealthy industrialist, slick Paul Marshall, also staying over ..... McEwan takes his time, allowing the story to unfold. There are ominous signs and small warnings all along. There are accidents -- a child wetting the bed, a chipped vase -- and then things seen and overheard and possibly misinterpreted (and possibly missed). There are more dramatic slips -- Robbie pens two letters and has Briony deliver the wrong one. It becomes ever clearer: something bad is bound to happen, something terrible, even. Briony is at the centre of most of it. The novel wanders farther afield, focussing on others, too, but Briony is the key. She alone might have been able to change the course of events. McEwan makes it clear: there were opportunities:
She could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her and begun a résumé of the day. If she had she would not have committed her crime. So much would not have happened, nothing would have happened, and the smoothing hand of time would have made the eveing barely memorable But throughout there is also always a sense of inevitability to the story. Briony does do something very, very bad -- but the true crime (and there is one) is committed by another. It's one of the few weaknesses in the book (though in a book of such strength weakness too is relative, and it is not that much of a blemish): the evil-doer is too strongly depicted as such, the character's villainy too obvious, even the deed itself foreshadowed in almost every detail (there was no doubt what the crime would be, or who the victim). The suspense, however, is in Briony's crime -- to see what her betrayal will be, and how McEwan will manage it. It is a horrible betrayal, ruining two lives. It comes almost exactly halfway through the book -- a long buildup just for this, but at no point does McEwan disappoint along the way. The reader has been prepared for it, and it is still shocking and wrenching -- a neat, tragic climax smack in the centre of the novel. The first part of the novel ends with Briony's crime -- allowing for only a few bits of the consequences to unfold. What really happens in the hours and days and months and even years after isn't made immediately clear. The second part of the novel jumps ahead a few years, focussing on Robbie Turner, now soldiering in France -- in fact, fleeing from the oncoming Germans. It's a complete change of pace and scene -- and story. It might be a bit too much -- McEwan showing he can write war-scenes, while the reader constantly wants to know: but what of all the others. But McEwan sticks with Robbie, allowing only a few more details to come out that reveal what transpired in the intervening years, and ultimately that too works. The third part focusses on Briony, studying to become a nurse in wartime London -- the same job her estranged sister, Cecilia, has. Briony is also still writing, and at one point sends a manuscript to Cyril Connolly at Horizon -- receiving an encouraging rejection letter. McEwan presents the entire three-page letter, and from Connolly's comments it becomes clear that Briony submitted what amounts to a first draft of the first part of Atonement (reading slightly differently now in part because some of Connolly's suggestions have been incorporated into it) ...... It dawns on readers: Briony's atonement is not her forsaking Cambridge to become a nurse, or trying to be forgiven by those she wronged, but rather it is the writing of this novel. This is confirmed, soon enough. The book closes with a short last section set in the present, in London, 1999 -- a final summing up. There appear to have been readers who were disappointed by what has been perceived as an unfair final authorial twist here. Briony even anticipates them:
I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened ? "The answer is simple", McEwan has Briony write -- and it is. McEwan shows here, with a crystal clarity that few novelists have achieved in recent times: fiction triumphs. The author decides what "really happened". That's always the case. That is what fiction is. And here, for once, the author has presented his decision in a near-perfect manner -- in particular because he shows so well how this particular reality (or un-reality) came about (and leaves the inevitable lingering questions of what can be believed, of what is truth and what is wishful thinking and what pure invention). Questions remain -- but McEwan makes a convincing case for their needing to remain, and for readers needing to confront them. Trust us: neat endings, tied up with a bow, aren't nearly as satisfying as what McEwan has to offer. Fiction doesn't offer certainty, or absolute answers. It is nothing like factual, literal truth. But McEwan here shows why this fiction-truth is better, and what amazing power fiction has It hardly plays a major role until near the end, but Atonement is a convincing example of why authors write novels -- indeed, of how (and why) we all create our own realities (be they in book form, or merely mind-games that allow us to bear the enormity that is life itself). Both Briony-as-author and, much more significantly, McEwan-as-author make a very impressive case for the continued role and need for the novel. And Atonement is a also a very good novel even without these writerly concerns. The first part is exceptional, a large cast of characters and many events adeptly interwoven, all culminating in a terrible but understandable betrayal. The other parts, too, are very well done -- the horrors of war, the scenes of the wounded, and the lives of Briony, Cecilia, and Robbie. A marvelous read, highly recommended.
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Links: Atonement:
Random House publicity page
Profile in The Observer
Interview in the San Francisco Chronicle Reviews:
BBC
Blogcritics.org
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culturevulture.net
Entertainment Weekly
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London Review of Books
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My Favourite Book
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taz (German)
James Tata
3M's Reviews
titel (German)
The Washington Post
Women's Day
Steven Wu's Book Reviews
Yale Review of Books
Die Zeit (German) Atonement - the film:
Official site
IMDb page Ian McEwan:
The Official Website of Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan at Contemporary Writers
Ian McEwan at BooksUnlimited Other books by Ian McEwan under review:
Amsterdam
On Chesil Beach
Saturday Other books of interest under review:
See the index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review
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About the Author:
British author Ian McEwan is the author of many fine novels. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998.
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© 2002-2007 the complete review Main the New the Best the Rest Review Index Links

Here's a consensus of views on Atonement

Review Consensus: Only a few with a few reservations -- but most are very, very impressed.

From the Reviews:

"The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't do. (…) We're each of us, McEwan suggests, composing our lives." - Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor

"A challenging and brilliant work, it rewards careful attention to the writer's art. (…) The careful structuring of the work calls attention to its artifice and reminds us of two alternate assertions about what art does: Keats's Romantic assurance that artistic beauty is truth and Auden's disclaimer that poetry makes nothing happen. This novel shows how such seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at once. Atonement is a most impressive book, one that may indeed be McEwan's finest achievement." - Edward T. Wheeler, Commonweal

"It is rare for a critic to feel justified in using the word "masterpiece", but Ian McEwan's new book really deserves to be called one. (…) Atonement (…) is a work of astonishing depth and humanity." - The Economist

"Refracting an upper-class nightmare through a war story, McEwan fulfills the conventions he's playing with, and that very play -- in contrast to so much fashionable pomo cleverness -- leads to genuine heartbreak." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly

"Avec des pages d'une subtilité époustouflante: spéléologue de nos abîmes intérieurs, McEwan nous offre une magistrale autopsie de la fragilité humaine, au fil d'un roman qui chatoie comme de la soie. Et qui brûle d'une lumière noire, lorsqu'il explore les inextricables ténèbres de l'âme." - André Clavel, L'Express

"In Abbitte widmet sich Ian McEwan seinen alten, den großen Themen -- Liebe und Trennung, Unschuld und Selbsterkenntnis, dem Verstreichen von Zeit --, und er tut dies souveräner, sprachmächtiger und fesselnder denn je." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"If Atonement tells an engrossing story, supremely well, it also meditates, from start to end, on story-telling and its pitfalls. (…) McEwan has never written into, and out of, literary history so brazenly before." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

"Suffice to say, any initial hesitancy about style -- any fear that, for once, McEwan may not be not in control of his material -- all play their part in his larger purpose. On the one hand, McEwan seems to be retrospectively inserting his name into the pantheon of British novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. But he is also, of course, doing more than this" - Geoff Dyer, The Guardian
"All this is at the same time an allegory of art and its moral contradictions. (…) (I)t is not hard to read this novel as McEwan's own atonement for a lucrative lifetime of magnificent professional lying. I haven't yet read Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang that beat this novel to the Booker Prize. But it must be stupendous." - Terry Eagleton, The Lancet

"Ian McEwan's new novel (…) strikes me as easily his finest (…..) McEwan's skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. (…) It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

"Il n'est pas sûr qu'Expiation soit, comme on l'a dit, le livre le plus abouti de Ian McEwan. Des longueurs (les scènes de guerre), l'artifice final (le roman dans le roman) peuvent justifier qu'on continue de lui préférer l'étonnant thriller psychologique qu'était Délire d'amour. Mais, pour la première fois, McEwan s'aventure sur les terrains intimes de la nostalgie, du souvenir, de l'extrême fragilité des liens entre les êtres." - Florence Noiville, Le Monde

"Abbitte gehört zu den seltenen Romanen, die so makellos komponiert sind, dass man sie kaum aus der Hand legt, bevor nicht die letzte Seite umgeblättert ist. Über weite Strecken ist er geradezu ein Roman comme il faut. (…) Daran wird auch wenig ändern, dass ihm -- typisch McEwan -- wieder einmal eine Kleinigkeit gründlich missraten ist. "London 1999", der knapp dreissigseitige Schlussteil, hat das Zeug, als einer der verunglücktesten Romanschlüsse in die englische Literaturhistorie einzugehen." - Uwe Pralle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"(C)ertainly his finest and most complex novel. (…) Atonement is both a criticism of fiction and a defense of fiction; a criticism of its shaping and exclusive torque, and a defense of its ideal democratic generosity to all. A criticism of fiction's misuse; and a defense of an ideal." - James Wood, The New Republic

"On one level, it is manifestly high-calibre stuff: cool, perceptive, serious and vibrant with surprises. (…) So it is probably silly to waste time pointing out that the most glaring aspects of the book are its weaknesses and omissions. As usual, McEwan has contrived a good story; but he seems weirdly reluctant to tell it." - Robert Winder, New Statesman

"(T)his book, McEwan's grandest and most ambitious yet, is much more than the story of a single act of atonement. (…) It isn't, in fact, until you get to the surprising coda of this ravishingly written book that you begin to see the beauty of McEwan's design -- and the meaning of his title. (…) (T)rust me, Atonement's postmodern surprise ending is the perfect close to a book that explores, with beauty and rigor, the power of art and the limits of forgiveness. Briony Tallis may need to atone, but Ian McEwan has nothing to apologize for." - Daniel Mendelsohn, New York.

"Atonement will make you happy in at least three ways: It offers a love story, a war story and a story about stories, and so hits the heart, the guts and the brain. It’s Ian McEwan’s best novel (…..) Atonement is the work of a novelist at peak power; we may hope for more to come." - Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"(I)f it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and Atonement your novel. It is his most complete and compassionate work to date." - Tom Shone, The New York Times Book Review

"The writing is conspicuously good (…) it works an authentic spell." - John Updike, The New Yorker

"(I)mpressive, engrossing, deep and surprising (…..) Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now." - Hermione Lee, The Observer
"Ian McEwan's latest novel is a dark, sleek trap of a book. (…) Lying is, after all, what Atonement is about as much as it is about guilt, penitence or, for that matter, art." - Laura Miller, Salon

"(F)lat-out brilliant (…..) McEwan's writing is lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense." - David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle

"Whether Briony’s conscience can ever be clear, and, more important, whether McEwan’s purpose can be adequately served by such a device, is open to question. That these are troubling matters is certainly well established. The ending, however, is too lenient. (…) Here his suave attempts to establish morbid feelings as inspiration for a life’s work -- and for that work to be crowned with success -- are unconvincing." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator

"It might almost be a novel by Elizabeth Bowen. (...) Both sections are immeasurably the most powerful that McEwan, already a master of narrative suspense and horror, has ever written. (...) Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book. Unshowy symmetries and patterns underlie its emotional force and psychological compulsion." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

"So much for the virtues of the imagination. But McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the damages of story-telling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page." - Richard Lacayo, Time

"Even by his exacting standards his latest novel is extraordinary. His trademark sentences of sustained eloquence and delicacy, which have sometimes over-rationalised the evocation of emotion, strike a deeper resonance in Atonement." - Russell Celyn Jones, The Times

"My only regret is that because he uses rapid editing and time shifts, too many of the dilemmas and tensions that are established in the first half of the book are left unresolved. (…) Still, the first part of the book is magically readable and never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart." - Jason Cowley, The Times

"McEwan continues to describe, with characteristic limpidity, the house and the dynamics of its inhabitants. His patience is doubly effective, for it generates not only an authentic environment in which the tragedy can eventually unfurl, but also an ever-burgeoning sense of menace. It would devastate the novel's effect to reveal what does in fact occur. (…) Probably the most impressive aspect to Atonement, however, is the precision with which it examines its own novelistic mechanisms." - Robert McFarland , Times Literary Supplement

"Whether it is indeed a masterpiece -- as upon first reading I am inclined to think it is -- can be determined only as time permits it to take its place in the vast body of English literature. Certainly it is the finest book yet by a writer of prodigious skills and, at this point in his career, equally prodigious accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"Ian McEwan hat einen Roman über die Literatur geschrieben, der gleichzeitig ein Roman über den Menschen ist. Gleichzeitig -- darin liegt die Kunst. Kein Buch, in dem neben diversen Figuren auch einige literaturtheoretische Überlegungen vorkommen, sondern ein Buch, das nach der Moral des Schreibens fragt und Schreiben, also Imaginieren, als besonders heikle Form sittlichen Handelns betrachtet." - Evelyn Finger, Die Zeit

Review of Atonement ~ Tom Shone

Ian McEwan's stony-titled new novel, ''Atonement,'' opens with a scene of pastoral bliss. It is 1935, an English summer is in full swing and parallelograms of morning light are making their way across the floor of the Tallis family's country house, where everyone is busy preparing for the return of Leon, the oldest son. This is exciting news for his younger sister, Briony, who is putting on a production of her new play. It's not such good news for her older sister, Cecilia, who will have to face her childhood friend, Robbie, whom she spent most of her time at Cambridge pointedly ignoring, and secretly falling in love with. So far, then, ''Atonement'' would seem to have very little to atone for, unless you were to count an above-average chance of being made into a Merchant-Ivory film.
This in itself should be enough to have hardened McEwan fans anxiously flicking back to check that it is indeed his name on the dust jacket. Just a few novels ago, McEwan was offering useful tips on how best to saw through a human thigh bone (remove the trousers first), and his last novel, ''Amsterdam,'' which won the 1998 Booker Prize, ended with a mutual euthanasia pact. Try getting that past Emma Thompson's agent. Yet here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel -- irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit -- that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago.
Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust. There's that date for a start, four years distant from the onset of the war, but still a little too close for comfort. Then there's the arrival of Leon's friend, Paul Marshall, a Quilty-like bore whose gaze lingers on the Tallis girls just that fraction of a second too long. Then there's the small matter of Briony. Or perhaps not so small; at 13, Briony stands on the threshold of adolescence, with all its itchy self-dramatizing instincts and glamorous mood swings. Contemplating the loss of a favorite dress, ''Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead.''
Such fantasies seem harmless enough, and another novelist might have mined them for their charm alone, but McEwan has always had an eye on the darker veins that course through children's imaginations. His recent book for children, ''The Daydreamer,'' had a nice Roald Dahl-like streak of malice to it, and his adult fiction has always heeded the close alliance between creative and destructive impulses. When Briony's plans for her play are derailed, her dramatic instincts look to feed elsewhere, and they find scandalized sustenance in glimpsed intimacies between Robbie and Cecilia. Before the night is out, a crime will be committed, a lie told and a little girl who thought herself the heroine of her own drama will find herself playing the villain in someone else's. So much for the soft bloom of innocence.
It would be shame to divulge exactly what happens on that night -- one of the great things about McEwan is how much faith he has in the urgings of plot. His books have a natural 45-degree tilt, leaning forward, through a fog of mounting unease, toward claret-dark revelation. Interestingly, what stays with you afterward is the unease, not the revelation. Rereading his novel ''Black Dogs'' recently, I remembered that the climax involved some dogs -- black ones, as I recall -- but couldn't remember what it was the mutts got up to. This is not an insult; on the contrary, McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma -- for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities.
The events of that night, for instance, account for only half the plot of ''Atonement'': the rest is reaction, ripple, repair. When the action reopens a few years later, Robbie is dodging German shells in France, Cecilia is praying for his safe return and Briony, now estranged from the both of them and working as a nurse, is busy piecing together soldiers in a London hospital: ''Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.''
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Tom Shone is a film critic for The Daily Telegraph of London.

Guardian Review.....Atonement.......

In his latest book Atonement Ian McEwan brings the British novel into the 21st century, says Geoff Dyer Saturday September 22, 2001The Guardian

Atonement Ian McEwanJonathan Cape£16.99

The twists and turns of Ian McEwan's fiction are built on a knack for sustained illusion. When he writes "a glass of beer" we do not just see it; we are willing to drink from it vicariously. The ballooning accident (imaginatively derived from footage of an actual incident) that opens Enduring Love is a spectacular example, but the ability to make the invented seem real animates every page of his work.







The novels' psychological acuity derives, always, from their fidelity to a precisely delineated reality. Needless to say, the more disturbing or skewed that reality (in the early stories and novels, most obviously), the more finely McEwan attunes his readers to it. Moral ambiguity and doubt are thereby enhanced - rather than resolved - by clarity of presentation. This is why the themes of the novels (with the exception of the enjoyably forgettable Amsterdam ) linger and resonate beyond the impeccable neatness of their arrangement. McEwan is, in other words, a thoroughly traditional original.

Atonement does not feel, at first, like a book by McEwan. The opening is almost perversely ungripping. Instead of the expected sharpness of focus, the first 70 or so pages are a lengthy summary of shifting impressions. One longs for a cinematic clarity and concentration of dialogue and action, but such interludes dissolve before our - and the participants' - eyes.
Unlike Martin Amis, say, or Salman Rushdie, McEwan is an invisible rather than a flamboyant stylist. Even so, the pallid qualifiers and disposable adverbs (a "gently rocking" sheet of water, the "coyly drooping" head of a nettle) come as a surprise. The language used to distil the scene - a gathering of the Tallis family at their country house on a sweltering day in 1935 - serves also as a wash that partially obscures it.

Various characters come and go but the novel, at this point, seems populated mainly by its literary influences. Chief among these is Virginia Woolf. The technique is not stream of consciousness so much as "a slow drift of association", "the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen". The book later contains a critique of its own early pages - or at least of the draft from which they derive - in the guise of a letter from Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon , who advises that "such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement". The requisite propulsion is provided by the unexpected intrusion, as it were, of two other novelists from the interwar years.

Cecilia, the eldest daughter of the family in whose house we are imaginatively lodged, was at Cambridge with Robbie, the son of the Tallises' cleaning lady, whose education was funded by Cecilia's father. They become aware, on this sultry day, of some kind of current - animosity? irreconcilable attraction? - passing between them. Robbie tries to articulate this in a letter, at the bottom of which he scribbles the naked truth: "In my dreams I kiss your cunt." He discards that draft and intends to send another, blander one but, in keeping with Freud's analysis of such slips, accidentally sends the shocking letter to Cecilia via her adolescent sister, Briony, who opens and reads it.

The consequences of the go-between blundering in like this are liberating and incriminating in unequal measure. What Lawrence called the "dirty little secret" of sex besmirches the Tallises' world, or - as Lawrence insisted - reveals how besmirched that world really is. It is as if Mellors from Lady Chatterley's Lover has gatecrashed the exquisitely rendered world of Mrs Dalloway . Or as if the contents of McEwan's stories had been explicitly daubed on the walls of Brideshead.
Another crisis soon follows, this one imported from EM Forster's India. Cecilia's young cousin, Lola, is sexually assaulted in the grounds of the house. Lola does not know by whom, but Briony - an aspiring writer - compounds her earlier transgression by convincing her and everyone else (except Cecilia) that Robbie is the culprit. Unlike the incident in the Marabar caves, this one does not end in a retraction and Robbie, the proletarian interloper, is convicted.


In the second section of the novel, the pastel haze of the first part gives way to an acrid, graphic account of Robbie's later experiences in the British rout at Dunkirk. McEwan is here playing more obviously to his strengths. The highly decorated novelist deploys his research in an effective if familiar pattern of narrative manoeuvres. Refracted through Robbie's exhausted, wounded view of history in the making, the retreat unfolds in a series of vividly realised details and encounters. In the atrocious context of battle, Briony's apparently motiveless crime is rendered almost insignificant. "But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was."

In similar fashion, the partial democratisation of Britain that results from the social upheaval of war is prefigured by Cecilia's turning her back on her family and allying herself with Robbie, the working-class graduate (whose smouldering sense of grievance and displacement would be vehemently embodied on the postwar stage by Jimmy Porter).

Part three shifts back to London, where Briony is training as a nurse, struggling to cope with the influx of casualties from Dunkirk. McEwan's command of visceral shock is here anchored in a historical setting thoroughly authenticated by his archival imagination. The elliptical style of the opening part has no place in these pages, as the graphic horrors of injury, mutilation and death pile up before Briony's eyes. She loosens the bandage around a patient's head and his brain threatens to slop out into her hands. Does this devotion to the victims of war wash her hands of her earlier guilt? Does her atonement depend on Robbie's survival? Or can it be achieved through the eventual realisation of her literary ambitions - through a novel such as the one we are reading? Who can grant atonement to the novelist, whose God-like capacity to create and rework the world means that there is no higher authority to whom appeal can be made?
It is a tribute to the scope, ambition and complexity of Atonement that it is difficult to give an adequate sense of what is going on in the novel without preempting - and thereby diminishing - the reader's experience of it. Suffice to say, any initial hesitancy about style - any fear that, for once, McEwan may not be not in control of his material -all play their part in his larger purpose.
On the one hand, McEwan seems to be retrospectively inserting his name into the pantheon of British novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. But he is also, of course, doing more than this, demonstrating and exploring what the mature Briony comes to see as a larger "transformation... being worked in human nature itself". The novels of Woolf and Lawrence did not just record this transformation; they were instrumental in bringing it about. McEwan uses his novel to show how this subjective or interior transformation can now be seen to have interacted with the larger march of 20th- century history.

While John Fowles was working on The French Lieutenant's Woman, he reminded himself that this was not a book that one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write but, perhaps, one that they had failed to write. A similar impulse underwrites Atonement. It is less about a novelist harking nostalgically back to the consoling uncertainties of the past than it is about creatively extending and hauling a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century.

Frank Kermode on Ian McEwan.....Atonement......

Point of View

Frank Kermode

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Minor resemblances between this novel by Ian McEwan and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew have already been noticed and are of some interest. James left a quite full record of the development of his story, which described modern divorce and adultery from the point of view of a young girl. It had its roots in Solomon’s offer to satisfy rival maternal claimants by cutting the disputed child in half, but it grew far more complicated in the years between the first notebook entry on this topic and the completion of the novel about ‘the partagé child’. First there was a plan for a 10,000-word story, which, in prospect, set delightful technical problems: about ‘the question of time’ – ‘the little secrets in regard to the expression of duration’ – and about the need to use the ‘scenic method’. In the notebooks James prays that he not be tempted to ‘slacken my deep observance of this strong and beneficent method – this intensely structural, intensely hinged and jointed preliminary frame’. Only when the frame was built was he ready to start what he called the ‘doing’.
Ian McEwan’s new novel, which strikes me as easily his finest, has a frame that is properly hinged and jointed and apt for the conduct of the ‘march of action’, which James described as ‘the only thing that really, for me at least, will produire L’OEUVRE’. Not quite how McEwan would put it, perhaps, but still the substance of his method, especially if one adds a keen technical interest in another Jamesian obsession, the point of view. His central character is a 13-year-old girl called Briony, already a maker of stories and plays, and so already a writer of fictions that have only their own kind of truth and are dependent on fantasies which readers are invited to share, with whatever measure of scepticism or credulity they can muster.
Briony is the daughter of an important civil servant who has a grand though ugly country house. The year is 1935 and, since a war is threatening, he has exhausting responsibilities in Whitehall. Along with other more genial preoccupations, his London duties keep him off the scene, even on the special occasion during which the story begins. On the hot summer’s day of this celebration, Briony, in one of those strange moments that chance or fate delivers into the hands of the novelist, or more specifically into Ian McEwan’s, happens to see her elder sister, Cecilia, just down from Girton, take off her outer clothes and jump into a fountain – this in the presence of Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s faithful cleaning lady, who has also been sent, at the expense of the girls’ father, to Cambridge. Robbie did well there, but has now decided to start again and qualify as a doctor – one who ‘would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable’: much as if he had decided to be a novelist. However, the monstrous patterns of fate begin to involve him now, at the fountain, before he can even start a medical career. The episode at the fountain changes his plan, as it changes everything.
McEwan’s readers will remember other random and decisive changes of this kind, violent or subtle interruptions of everyday time and behaviour, intrusions of dream-like horror, like the snatching of the three-year-old girl in The Child in Time or the rogue balloon in Enduring Love. The trick works less well, I think, in the more recent Amsterdam, with its slightly ostentatious symmetries, its carefully laid clues concerning euthanasia and crooked Dutch doctors – these give the book structure, but the ‘doing’ is less interesting. The failure of the composer’s final symphony, after we have heard so much about the process of composition, might uncharitably be seen as an allegory of the novel it occurs in. There is, however, a finely written scene in which the composer, hiking in the Lakes, declines to help a woman walker when she is violently assaulted; this nasty bit of reality is interfering with the musical thought he had come to work out, and he decides that the music comes first, as his story might to a novelist.
The fountain scene in this new book has as much force, and has also that touch of the grotesque which is one of this author’s special talents. Cecilia has been half-playfully disputing with Robbie the right to fill a valuable vase with water from the fountain. He wants to do it for her. Their little struggle proves more serious than it should have been; as they wrestle for the vase two triangular pieces break off its lip and fall into the fountain. (Triangles, by the way, form a minor leitmotif for readers to puzzle over.) Robbie prepares to plunge in and recover the pieces; but Cecilia gets her clothes off and plunges first. The wounded vase will later meet an even worse fate, and this premonitory damage echoes what happens to other fragile objects highly valued but easily ruined, such as Cecilia’s virginity, and indeed life itself.
A numerous company is preparing for dinner when Briony, happening to go into the library, finds Robbie and Cecilia violently engaged in the act of sex. Robbie had written Cecilia a harmless letter, but accidentally sent in its place a coarse little meditation on his lust for her, and specifically, the message insists, for her cunt. The letter had been delivered to Cecilia by the hand of Briony, who, being a writer, naturally had a look at it. It was this letter that turned Cecilia on and, when circulated, turned everybody else off.
Meanwhile some young cousins, derelict because of a divorce, were staying with the family, and at the awful dinner that evening the unhappy nine-year-old twin boy cousins, one with a triangular piece missing from his ear, ran away. During the search for them their sister, Lola, a bit older than Briony, is sexually assaulted, and despite the darkness Briony thinks she is able to identify the assailant as the lustful Robbie. Hence his imprisonment. He is released to the Army, and, in a deeply researched and imagined episode, takes part in the Dunkirk evacuation. A point of interest here is that Robbie and his associates, heading for the coast with a demoralised remnant of the BEF, are surprised to see brisk, disciplined Guards regiments going in the opposite direction, presumably to serve as a doomed rearguard. Here as elsewhere we are left to wonder who picked up this point and put it into the story. Did it, in fact, happen? Who will vouch for its truth? Has the author a patriotic weakness for the Guards? It’s a small point, but it raises the sort of question that comes up over and over again in this novel. By way of ambiguous answer the narrative, when it ends, is signed ‘B.T.’, Briony’s initials.
Briony’s play, The Trials of Arabella, written for the house party, but for various reasons not then performed, was the fantasy of a very young writer enchanted by the idea that she could in a few pages create a world complete with terrors and climaxes, and a necessary sort of knowingness. The entire novel is a grown-up version of this achievement, a conflict or coalescence of truth and fantasy, a novelist’s treatment of what is fantasised as fact. Briony is the novelist, living, as her mother is said to have perceived (or the author, or Briony, says she had perceived), in ‘an intact inner world of which the writing was no more than the visible surface’. We merely have to trust somebody to be telling something like the truth. In the scene where Robbie and Cecilia make love in a corner of the darkened library (a key scene, terribly difficult for anybody to write) Briony, entering, sees her sister’s ‘terrified eyes’ over Robbie’s shoulder. Who is saying she is terrified? Who is saying Cecilia ‘struggled free’ of her heavy partner? Surely she was carried away by lust and henceforth became Robbie’s devoted lover? We can only suppose that Briony, writing at the very end of the complex affair, is imagining what she would have made of the scene at 13. She must have read the scene wrongly, for we learn that the lovers were actually ‘in a state of tranquil joy’ as they ‘confronted the momentous change they had achieved’. At this moment Cecilia is overwhelmed by the beauty of a face she had taken for granted all her life. Can she also have had terrified eyes? Or could Briony have taken for terror an expression that meant something quite different?
For contrivances such as these the novelist could be forgiven a Jamesian note of self-congratulation and self-encouragement, usually, in the Master’s case, expressed in French: voyons, voyons, mon bon! Let us see what I, and later what they, can make of this treatment. When Briony comes to the rescue of her cousin Lola the explanation of what happened is not Lola’s but Briony’s: ‘It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.’ Her positive identification of the rapist is not explicitly endorsed by Lola; we are even allowed to suspect that this flirtatious child knew perfectly well the attacker wasn’t Robbie, that it was really a friend of Briony’s brother, down there only for a visit but destined to play a heavy part in the sequel. But the less willing Lola was to admit the truth the greater Briony’s confidence in her own story, whose impact on reality was so disastrous to Robbie. Her version of the truth was reinforced by that letter and the terrible word it contained. And the girl persisted in it beyond the point where her testimony could be revoked.
To write about the virtuosities of the later pages – what happens to Lola and her assailant, whether Cecilia and Robbie get together, what became of the grand ugly house – would be to deprive readers of satisfactions to which they are entitled; but it leaves the reviewer in a quandary. To discuss the ‘doing’ properly it would be essential to allude to the whole book. It might reasonably be revealed that both Cecilia and Briony, now estranged because of the success of the younger girl’s evidence against Robbie, serve in the war as nurses (again the enviable specificities, the sometimes apparently absurd hospital discipline, the drawing on reserves of endurance, the hideous and hopeless wounds).

The title of the book seems to suggest that Briony will do something by way of atonement, but nothing quite fitting that description seems to occur. The problem, we finally learn, and as might have been expected, was this: ‘how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. No atonement for God, or novelists . . .’


These words occur in the epilogue, as I call it, a final chapter dated ‘London, 1999’. Briony now, as again one might have expected, has behind her a successful career as a novelist. At 77 she is suffering from a succession of tiny strokes, and her memory, she is told, is likely to fail progressively. Like Ian McEwan, she has recently been working in the library of the Imperial War Museum. Her book is finished, like Ian McEwan’s, and it has apparently exactly the same story. There follow reports of a series of quite implausible encounters. ‘If I really cared so much about facts,’ she writes, ‘I should have written a different kind of book.’ And she wishes she could write a happy conclusion, all well and lovers alive and reunited – ‘it’s not impossible.’ In fact she has already written it and we have already read it and probably believed it.
McEwan’s skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. Perhaps to be disquieting has always been his ambition; the first stories were in various ways startling. By now he is such a virtuoso that one is tempted to imagine that the best readers of this book might be Henry James and Ford Madox Ford. It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief.
For example, we are told that Briony, while still a wartime nurse, sent a novella called Two Figures by a Fountain to Horizon. It was not accepted, but the editor, Cyril Connolly (or anyway someone who signs himself simply as ‘C.C.’), wrote her a letter running to over a thousand words, with favourable comment on sentences we have already admired. The implication is that the present novel is an expansion of that early work. We can even spot changes from novella to novel (for example, Cecilia goes ‘fully dressed’ into the fountain) and might attribute the improvements to C.C.’s kindly advice. He wonders if the young author ‘doesn’t owe a little too much to the techniques of Mrs Woolf’. The novella, he claims, lacks the interest of forward movement, ‘an underlying pull of simple narrative’. He thinks the vase should not have been Ming (too expensive to take out of doors; perhaps Sèvres or Nymphenburg?) The Bernini fountain she mentions is not in the Piazza Navona but in the Piazza Barberini (the error is corrected in the novel). He complains that Briony’s story ends with the damp patch left beside the fountain when Robbie and Cecilia have gone. (It is still there in the longer version but it is there only a beginning.) Elizabeth Bowen, it seems, read the novella with interest, but thought it cloying, except when it echoed Dusty Answer. The author is invited to drop by at the office for a glass of wine whenever she has the time. Had she, by the way, a sister at Girton six or seven years ago? Given her hospital address, is she a doctor or an invalid?


In the first place parody, this brilliant invention does quite a lot of what James called structural work. It is funny because although it sounds rather like him, Connolly would never have written such a letter; it lives, like the book as a whole, on that borderline between fantasy and fact that is indeed the territory of fiction. McEwan has examined this territory with intelligent and creative attention, and it could probably be said that no contemporary of his has shown such passionate dedication to the art of the novel.


Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Here she is · Zadie Smith
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice

Atonement......Next Book club choice......

Our next discussion is on the book "Atonement"....................by Ian McEwan.

I'm not a real fan of this guy.....found "Saturday" a turn-off!! But I'm willing to give it a try. I suppose the film was OK.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Shriver thinks.........

How harshly do the sins of the son reflect upon the mother?

That’s the contentious question posed by Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin,’ which takes the form of narrator Eva Khatchadourian’s letters to her ex-husband Franklin following a Columbine-style high school massacre perpetrated by their son.

The book has caused quite a stir stateside by dint of it’s undermining of conventional parental stereotypes – Eva is an ambitious and rigorously analytical character who decides to have a child largely out of restlessness rather than any great biological imperative. To her horror – and the reader’s – she finds herself not only failing to form a bond with Kevin, but growing to outright dislike the kid, a problem that only escalates as he gets older.

The novel’s premise is a potent one because it dares to breach a subject that is borderline taboo in societies where children are indulged rather than reared. It’s not that Eva is a bad mother per se, in fact she’s dutiful to the point of pathology, but she just doesn’t enjoy being around her son.

Clearly the author, whose sartorial sense and manner of speech are as precisely observed as her prose, has hit a nerve.

“Despite the fact that it hasn’t been very heavily promoted, the degree that it succeeded has been all word of mouth stuff,” she acknowledges. “There’s clearly some kind of a hunger out there.”

Does she get people thanking her for –

“Being more honest about motherhood? Yeah. Very grateful that somebody has tried to get across what it’s like to raise a child.”

Shriver herself decided at the age of eight that parenting wasn’t for her. Yet her insights into the minutiae of motherhood are pretty impressive.

“Well, I do have an imagination,” she says. “Or rather, I have vivid fears. Ultimately I was still trying to examine my own fears of a potential coldness in me, a selfishness that would exclude extending myself to particular children, because I think children are particular. As a child, I felt like a person with volition rather than a being that was being acted upon from without, and therefore my parents had to contend with me as a real person whom they have not always liked. In writing the book I started getting more sympathetic, less condemnatory, stopped looking at it from a child’s perspective. What I was afraid of for myself, if I were to become a mother, was just… having someone around the house I didn’t want there. A kid is a stranger in the house. You have to get to know him.”

Which may seem obvious, but it’s quite the wake-up call for those who assume having children will solve their own existential crises, or save their marriage.

“They don’t understand that it’s going to try the marriage,” Shriver observes. “I think people bring a completely different expectation to parenthood now. It’s not about your kid going to till your fields, it’s about them giving you a new sense of meaning, that they are going to fill out your life emotionally and reward you with their love, and your life is going to be richer, fuller and more exciting in those senses. And that’s actually expecting a fuck of a lot. And it doesn’t always come across.”

In Kevin’s case, that shock is compounded by his obnoxious nature.

“We’ve all been in the restaurant with this nyah-nyah kid, and you want to kill him,” Shriver says. “And his parents don’t do anything. And that’s where Eva and Franklin divide, because Franklin is completely indulgent and Eva is much more an old style disciplinarian.”

But more than that, as he grows older, Kevin becomes more sullen, disconnected, lacking in empathy and disdainful of humanity in general.

Was his psychological profile assembled from case studies of high school killers?

“Not really. That was just stuff I made up. As a construct, I liked it. And the whole concept of Kevin was really of someone who wasn’t, as you say, seething with fury, but who was just… bored. Bored to the point of disgust with everything. Essentially not interested in being here, and a little resentful of the fact that he was, because nothing about being alive interested him.”

Which is a hallmark of most male adolescents – at least until they become interested in sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.

“You see it all the time, that feigned boredom, I’ve-seen-it-all-before, nothing impresses me, the physical lassitude, clothing dripping off them. What made it an interesting character to write is that it’s usually a phase that kids go through and come out the other side of, but I imparted it all the way back to infancy.”

It’s a chilling notion that, beyond all the sociological and nurture-versus-nature factors, there can be such a thing as a bona fide bad seed, irredeemable from birth.

“I read an interesting article in the New York Times about psychologists who worked with and have written about mass murderers,” Shriver says, “and there’s this movement arguing that we need to bring in ‘evil’ as a clinical diagnosis, that there are single cases they have contended with that so boggle the mind there’s no other word that will do. I’m of two minds about that impulse, but clearly there is this sub-category that they’ve been exposed to that is constantly upsetting them and they need a label for it in order to accommodate it, and probably in order to quarantine those experiences they’ve had from the rest of life because they’re so upsetting. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case in this book, but I guess ultimately I do believe that some people are born irredeemable.”




© Peter Murphy
Reproduced with permission




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One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.


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© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.
Monday, October 03, 2005
We Need to Talk about Kevin

Have put up a post on The Middle Stage about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's a book I can’t recommend strongly enough.

Update: have cross-posted the full review. Here it is:

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a long, long time (and when you’re reading books and writing about them for a living, you learn to be chary about sweeping statements like that one; the reviewer’s jargon is already full of stock phrases. But then cliché is sometimes the only recourse). This is a story told in the form of long confessional letters written by a woman, Eva Khatchadourian, to her (presumably estranged) husband Franklin, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over the course of her letters Eva looks back at her peculiar, strained relationship with her son; but she begins her story with the time when she and Franklin, both in their late 30s, decided to have a child.

In a perfect world, the most important reason – perhaps the only reason - for a couple deciding to have children would be: both of them badly want to, and feel they are ready for it. In the real world, far too often too many other factors play the decisive role. This is especially true in more conservative societies where pressure from family elders is a continuous, intrusive presence – but it holds good everywhere. The reasons can be many. Perpetuating the species – or, less nobly, having children as a means of ensuring immortality for oneself. The knowledge that they’ll talk about us when we’ve passed on (whether they say good or bad things is another matter), the same way we talk about our parents. Simple curiosity about what it might be like to hear someone calling “Momm-MEEE?” from around the corner. The dark thought that if something were to happen to your partner, you’d at least have a tangible memento. Eva’s decision ultimately rests on a combination of these.

The first 60-70 pages give us some of the starkest, most daring writing on the nature of our closest relationships, the ones we take for granted. In her letters, Eva painstakingly dissects her feelings about parenthood. She wasn’t ready, she repeatedly claims:

“At last I should come clean. It is not true that I was ‘ambivalent’ about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.”
Her descriptions of pregnancy, of the child-bearing and delivering processes, are shockingly subversive, and shockingly honest.

“Crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression ‘you’re eating for two now, dear’ is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair…”
And later, comparing pregnancy to infestation, to “colonisation by stealth”, as depicted in horror films like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby:

“…the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell…any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader.”
If the gestation period was a nightmare, the actual labour is worse. Finally, however, Kevin deigns to come into the world, and Eva, having heard gush-stories from friends about how parents fall instantly, irrevocably, in love with their newborns, discovers that she feels nothing for him.

“I felt…absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion…but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.”
Here, Shriver’s book takes an interesting right turn. Kevin (at least in the account of him presented us by Eva) turns out to be the kind of child who would have both Damian (the kid in The Omen) and baby Hannibal Lecter bawling for their security blankets. Importantly, this is how he is right from the outset (which means it isn’t the result of his mother’s attitude towards him). He’s positively demoniac – frighteningly precocious and aware, yet uninterested in everything; completely bereft of attachments, yet with a fearsome propensity for malice. No babysitter can handle him for any length of time. Classmates and even teachers are frightened of him for reasons that can never be properly explained. He has the power of influencing people to do things that are bad for them. Eva can see this side of him; Franklin, who truly IS in love with his child, can not.

As the years pass, Eva repeatedly questions whether she’s been a good mother but wonders if she even had an option, given her son’s nature: “After having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”

In a desperate attempt to “understand something about my soul”, Eva has another child, against Franklin’s wishes, and this one turns out to be an angelic girl who does indeed stir the mother inside her. Her soul is safe for the time being. But now Kevin has a potential victim right under his nose.

Here, portions of the book start to read like the scripts of those horror movies about malevolent children (albeit much better written). And yet, throughout the reading process, we must be aware that we can’t blindly trust Eva’s narrative. Though there’s nothing equivocal about Kevin’s final act of destruction, there is room for ambiguities in the details that accumulate over the years. Another option presents itself: could it be that Kevin, though undoubtedly a strange, emotionless child, was never as malicious in the early stages as his mother makes him out to be? Could the real evil have resulted from his upbringing, and is this what Eva is trying to conceal (even as she repeatedly apologises for the things she does feel responsible for)?

And by the time we reach the book’s end, there’s yet another option: could Kevin have become what he is because he carries his mother’s genes? Throughout the story we’ve been presented the picture of Kevin as his father’s son, while Eva clings to her darling daughter (when Franklin and Eva decide to separate, they joke darkly about there at least being no argument over custody). But is there a bond between Eva and her son that transcends these surface appearances? The final, chilling paragraphs certainly seem to suggest so.

We Need to Talk about Kevin raises so many issues – about the nature-nurture debate, about family units made up of very different individuals who have to find a way to coexist, about upper-class hypocrisies - that it’s impossible to mention all of them here. Ultimately I have to turn to another cliché, this time from the blurb-writer’s pantheon: consider yourselves grabbed by the shoulders and told “Read this!”

Marion Arnott ~ Review of "Kevin etc"

This is an uncomfortable book in many ways, exposing as it does, mercilessly and incisively, myths of family life, motherhood, childhood, social stereotypes, and murder, unthinkable, vile murder.


Eva Khatchadourian is Kevin’s mother and Franklin’s wife. Aged 16, Kevin slaughters nine people in the gym at his high school. Also his father and sister. Eva is left behind to face the law suit, the police, the battery of psychiatrists and child experts and media pundits, who all seem intent on finding out what she did wrong as blame is essential: ‘Blame confers an awesome power, and it’s simplifying…to culprits most of all.’


She writes a series of letters to her dead husband, reviewing her own mothering (scrupulously honestly and with a bitter wit that is both shocking and true), and the growing up of Kevin. With excruciating clarity, she describes her own ambivalence to Kevin before he was even born. She falls into motherhood for want of something better to do in her late thirties for want of something better to do after she notices that when she and her childless friends get together, their family conversations all revolve round elderly parents rather than an up and coming generation. Plus Franklin is keen to have children.

Of the night when Kevin was conceived, she remarks: ‘we might as well have left the door unlocked.’


A stranger has been invited in and there is no way of knowing what he/she will be like or what damage may be done.

Many aspects of the book will be familiar to mothers, harsh judgement and expectation being but two of them. Pregnant, Eva is public property, subjected to the scrutiny and criticism of others. America is ‘composed of’200 million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five food groups.’


Franklin is particularly painful to live with at this time: he has expectations of what she should
be like as a mother and sulks and disapproves when she fails him. She discovers very quickly the lie that ‘we are pregnant’ is – she’s pregnant, and the changes which follow will be to her life, not her husband’s. His disapproval continues and grows stronger after Kevin is born and begins to grow up. He is set on living the American Dream and no problems with his son will stop him. He refuses utterly to concede that there is anything wrong and suggests that Eva is the one who needs help. But his attitudes are mirrored by society.


In court, her mothering is under close examination and it is soon clear that she is in a no win situation: going off to work (which she did for a short time) was a failure in parenting which might have damaged her son; staying at home (as she does later) to look after him, proves that the responsibility for the way he turns out is hers and hers alone.

A little self-indulgent Eva might be, a little resentful, but there is nothing in her attitudes that cannot be found in millions of women whose children do not turn out to be spree killers. And of course if Eva had been granted any of the pleasures of motherhood, her normal ambivalences about being Mum might well have disappeared. But she gets nothing form Kevin. From the beginning, he is a difficult baby – won’t feed, won’t sleep, is unresponsive to her.

His war with his mother (for war it is) involves playing Mum and Dad off one another – Franklin ALWAYS sides with Kevin against Eva, in spite of mounting evidence that something is far wrong: they cannot keep a nanny or a babysitter; he is still wearing nappies at six (until Eva snaps and commits her one identifiable sin against the child); there are incidents of cruelty at nursery school, more serious ones at primary school, worst of all at High school – Kevin’s maturing only means more sophisticated malice towards anyone who crosses his path. He has a particular dislike of youngsters who are committed, ambitious, likeable, who enjoy life, an attitude which he disdains entirely. Kevin enjoys nothing, has no interests, has no aims and objectives, is chronically bored. The only thing which pleases him is getting away with things.
Eva, in her letters, makes a study of all the teen spree killers who make the headlines. Nothing about their lives seems to warrant their actions and she comes to see that attention and being special is what matters to them. In a culture ‘which does not discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as more achievable’ .

And these children like to be notorious.

Shriver makes a subtle and convincing case for the idea that some kids are ’just mean’. Interspersed with the story of Kevin is the story of other families, none of which meet the romantic American ideal of family life. Eva’s own mother is agoraphobic, traumatised by the massacres which took place in her native land. Franklin’s parents are gadget obsessed and completely ignorant of emotional issues. Her friends have oddities in their home lives too – but not one produces a flat-eyed psychopath like Kevin whose teen years are a catalogue of horrors which include the blinding of his little sister and the tormenting of other kids and even teachers. But his actions are always covert and hard to prove although Eva’s insight into him is proof enough for her. Kevin actually relishes her knowledge of him.


The pleasures of this book are many: the prose is crisp and fluent, Eva’s dialogues with Kevin on her prison visits are electric, her insights on society and its unreasonable judgements of mothers, and its insistence on scapegoating, thought provoking. It is perhaps a stretch of credulity that when Kevin blinds his sister that Eva does not ensure her daughter’s safety in the future, but perhaps this is necessary to the plot if Eva is to see the tragedy through to the end.

All in all, it is not hard to see why ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ won the Orange Prize.


© Marion Arnott Reproduced with permission

Kids Eh ~ Who'd have them?

The school shootings that ran rampant through the 1990s had everyone shocked and in fear of sending their kids to school. Throughout the shootings, culminating in Columbine, one thing probably went through everyone’s minds: What were these kids’ parents like? It’s human nature to assume that children who go bad are helped along by cruel or indifferent parents. Why do we think this? Because if we let our minds consider the alternative, that some kids are just born bad, then we must be aware of the frightening fact that it could happen to us.


We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver explores this very idea through a source closer to the subject than any other—the mother of a boy who shot seven of his classmates during a rampage in the school gym.

Although the book is fictional, the subject matter is all too real, and this makes it an exceptionally chilling read.

Eva Khatchadourian explores her feeling about her son Kevin’s actions through a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. Although this might seem like a limiting way to go about a book of this scope, it actually works quite well. Through Eva’s eyes, we watch the excruciating formative years of an evil child who convinces his gullible father that he’s a sweet boy, but whose mother knows better. Eva’s dislike of her cold little boy just fuels his cruel streak, slowly escalating his violent nature as he grows older.


The heartbreaking part of the novel comes when Eva and Franklin have a second child, the incredibly naïve and trusting Celia, who thinks her brother is the greatest person on earth. The foreshadowing of what happens to Celia, and to the entire family, is almost unbearable to read because Shriver does such an excellent job of painting a picture of a family whose members are far from perfect but who certainly don’t deserve what will happen to them. An air of bleak despair settles over the entire novel, reflecting Eva’s mood as she writes to her beloved Franklin.


If you plan to pick up this novel, be forewarned: it is not light, it will not give you faith in humanity and it will probably scare you more than any horror novel you’ve ever read. Why? Because what happened to Eva’s family could easily happen to any family in America. With her eye for detail and talent for creating a chilling, desperate atmosphere, Lionel Shriver has penned a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last chapter.

We need to discuss........!!!!!!!

We need to talk about Kevin
Reviewer Cameron WoodheadMay 14, 2005


We need to talk about Kevin,By Lionel Shriver,Serpent's Tail, $22.95


Well before the post-September 11 security crackdown, there were metal-detectors in American schools. We have become inured, by sheer repetition, to the grisly aftermath of the US high-school massacre. Just as these tragedies continue to occur, they continue to torment the literary imagination.
Most prominent in fiction to draw on these sad episodes in contemporary history is D. B. C. Pierre's Booker prize-winning Vernon God Little. In it, a small Texan community - horrified by the mass murder of their youth by a disturbed native American boy who subsequently commits suicide - is in search of someone to blame. The mob alights on the killer's best friend, Vernon, whose unflinchingly satirical view of a town gone mad takes on messianic overtones as his inevitable martyrdom approaches.

But if Vernon God Little is a remarkable achievement, it pales in comparison with Lionel Shriver's controversial bestseller, We Need To Talk About Kevin - by far the best novel I've read in years.


We Need To Talk About Kevin takes the form of exquisitely crafted letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her former husband, Franklin, who leaves her just before her worst nightmare comes to life. Three days short of his 16th birthday, Eva's son, Kevin, shoots seven of his fellow students in the school gym and watches with grim satisfaction as they bleed to death.
In her letters, Eva attempts to discover why Kevin became a killer by examining her domestic life.

Before Kevin came along, Eva and Franklin were happy for a while. Franklin was a location scout for TV ads who could find a slice of Paris in Pennsylvania: an unabashed patriot, a staunch Republican, a believer in the American dream. Eva was a lifelong Democrat who loathed America, the parochialism of its people and the arrogance of its foreign policy. A successful businesswoman, she made her fortune publishing budget-travel guides, after much compulsive globetrotting in her 20s.

In many respects they were chalk and cheese, but very much in love. Still, the decision to have children did not come naturally, at least not to Eva. Franklin saw children as the answer to "the big question" (a question he spent much of his own life avoiding). Eva acquiesced out of vanity: she wanted to prove that she could be a good mother. She was destined to fail spectacularly.
Eva became despondent, a feeling exacerbated when Franklin orchestrated a move from their Tribeca apartment to a house in the 'burbs.

Eva interprets Kevin's misdemeanours as early signs of psychological abnormality. She believes that he deliberately refused to stop wearing nappies. She is convinced that he incited his kindergarten friends to anti-social behaviour. Later, she is appalled by his cruelty to an unfortunate-looking girl at a primary school dance.

But if Eva was always suspicious of the kind of person Kevin was growing up to be, in Franklin's eyes he could do no wrong. As Kevin develops into a sullen, manipulative teenager, his parents' difference of opinion became more pronounced. Eva starts to actively dislike Kevin. And his behaviour deteriorates in response: he masturbates in front of her, throws bricks at cars, and is the prime suspect in his little sister's mutilation.

Whether Kevin was born bad, or was failed by his parents, is a question that Eva cannot ultimately resolve. All she can do is narrate what happened, and continue to visit her son in prison. Indeed, these prison visits are among the most sublime and heart-rending passages in the book.

Of all contemporary American novelists, the one Lionel Shriver most resembles is Jeffrey Eugenides. Like Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, Shriver's novel is assembled over the broken bodies of children, but it is less interested in the cause of tragedy than the architecture of it, less concerned with why catastrophe strikes than in describing its contours.
What really matters is that Shriver has produced - through the voice of a fearsomely intelligent, self-absorbed, and utterly bereft mother - a breathtaking work of art.

Review of this month .........

We Need To Talk About Kevin

It came as a surprise to some when Lionel Shriver picked up the Orange Prize for We Need To Talk About Kevin. The literary merit of the novel had, after all, been somewhat overshadowed in the press coverage by all the talk of her breaking down taboos in her bitter, loveless depiction of motherhood. The quality of the actual writing got somewhat lost in the media hum.

To be fair the manner in which the novel was marketed actively courted such a response; inside the back cover there are even a series of questions specifically targeted at reading groups. It's an idea I don't think I've ever seen before, and one that will probably strike a lot of people as rather heavy-handed and, well, rather American.

But Shriver's book, more than most contemporary novels, seems to have been written to spark arguments, to create the kind of debate that reading groups thrive on, so perhaps it is appropriate.

We Need To Talk... describes the life of a boy who grows up to murder a number of his High School classmates in a premeditated massacre. His story is told in a series of letters written, after the event, by his mother Eva to his absent father Franklin. In these letters Eva describes her life before the birth of her son. The CEO of a successful travel guidebook company, she is an educated woman who is accustomed to her independence; when she eventually comes around to the idea of having a child, she views it as one more journey to be embarked upon, uncharted territory, something of an adventure. Eva is not a maternal type: she intellectualises everything, including her expectations of motherhood, and her feelings of disappointment and resentment following her son's birth come as little surprise.

Eva paints Franklin as her parental opposite. He throws himself into fatherhood with energy and utter devotion, doing all the things a good American dad is expected to do. But, almost from the moment of his birth Eva perceives that there is something wrong with Kevin, an absence of emotion, a lack of empathy.

In her eye's he is a malignant creature, always quietly plotting; and their relationship is one of constant conflict. As Kevin grows up things do not improve, he destroys things that are precious to her and develops some rather anti-social habits. And yet Franklin is always there to rationalise and defend his son's behaviour.

Where Shriver's novel succeeds, is in making you question exactly how revisionist Eva is being in her recollections. Kevin has committed unspeakable crimes, and though Eva is happy to confess to being a bad mother, she seems eager to establish that the trigger for Kevin's appalling actions lay within him from the start, like a bomb waiting to detonate.

On one level, many of the issues Shriver raises regarding motherhood are universal: she writes bitingly about the expectations of women who have children and the expectations that society places on these women. Some of Eva's worries will be familiar; she does not experience an immediate intense maternal bond and feels like a failure; and she feels intellectually stifled by life at home with young child. And Franklin too, who was more than happy to marry a cultured, passionate and sometimes volatile woman, seems to want her to morph into the perfect American Mommy the minute the child is born. But alongside Eva's justified anger and bafflement at her shift in status after she becomes a mother, there is also the sense that she too may be in some way emotionally lacking. Because, after all, this is not just a book about the paradoxes of modern motherhood, but also a narrative about that depressingly common American social phenomenon of the High School killing spree.

While Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! depicted a Columbine-inspired event from the inside, via the voice of Cheryl Amway, the teen victim of a cafeteria shooting, speaking from some point after her death, Shriver recalls the incident from Eva's more distanced perspective. Kevin did not just randomly gun down his schoolmates but purposefully picked them off with a cross bow – a deeply chilling, and disturbing scene – though an intentional dissimilarity from real life incidents takes an edge of its emotive impact.

In fact, Kevin's crime, when it is finally revealed in detail, bears as strong a resemblance to the finale of Steven King's Carrie as it does to anything in the headlines. Another critical divergence from genuine High School killings is the fact that Kevin did not end his life after he executed his classmates, and Eva is now able to pay regular visits to him in his upstate prison. There is much to engage with in Shriver's novel; it's very well written, her style accomplished and compelling – even if there is a whiff of Oprah's Book Club to her overall tone. For all Shriver's skill it's a difficult novel to like: her perceptive, sometimes even refreshing, examination of motherhood is completely undermined by Kevin's final crimes. It would have been a braver, more interesting, if thematically entirely different, novel had Shriver had steered clear of the headline-orientated denouement altogether. We Need To Talk About Kevin never attempts to provide easy answers to the many questions it raises, but it remains a persuasive, intriguing read, as equally repellent as it is enthralling.