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.

Guardian Review

Audrey Niffenegger throws you into a pretty perplexing scenario at the start of The Time Traveler's Wife. Here are a woman and a man meeting in a Chicago library, but while Clare clearly knows Henry and has done for ages, Henry doesn't have a clue who she is. This, we gradually understand, is because he has been travelling from his future to her past, and in that past they fell in love, so he hasn't yet met her in his own present. Somehow, that tangled mess of tenses sorts out on the page into a scene that is entirely comprehensible and rather charming.



Niffenegger goes on to exploit the possibilities of her fantasy scenario with immense skill: no wonder this first novel has spent weeks on the bestseller lists in the US. Her version of time travel lends itself to neat comedy - it is an uncontrollable condition, which means Henry can find himself sucked out of the present and thrown naked into another time and place at any moment.
For instance, when Clare and Henry finally get married, with all their family and friends in attendance, he is maddeningly whisked away just before the ceremony. But luckily, through one of the sweet coincidences that is a feature of Niffenegger's world, an older Henry falls through the years to take his place, and only the most observant of guests wonders about his suddenly grizzled appearance.

Even at such a carefully composed moment of comedy, Niffenegger keeps the pitch tuned not just to the mechanics of her magical world, but also to the emotions of the couple. This is what saves this novel from being just a childish joke: her ability to mesh the japes with a careful grounding in the dynamics of character and relationship. Take away the time travel, and you have a writer reminiscent of Anne Tyler and Carol Shields, who captures the rhythms of intimacy, who burrows into the particularities of family life. Because she builds this scaffolding of domesticity, what you remember is the realism as well as the fantasy, and through much of the book the time travel works to enhance the reality rather than take over from it.

When Clare first makes love with Henry she is 18, but he has travelled back in time, and in his present he is 41, has been married to her for years, and is finding their relationship going through a bad patch. After they make love, he is pulled back into his present with the thirtysomething Clare, who is waiting for him crossly: "Henry's been gone for almost 24 hours now, and as usual I'm torn between thinking obsessively about when and where he might be and being pissed at him for not being here... I hear Henry whistling as he comes up the path through the garden, into the studio. He stomps the snow off his boots and shrugs off his coat. He's looking marvellous, really happy. My heart is racing and I take a wild guess: 'May 24, 1989?' 'Yes, oh yes,' Henry scoops me up, and swings me around. Now I'm laughing; we're both laughing."


This scene epitomises the best thing about this book, which is the way Niffenegger uses time travel as a way of expressing the sense of slippage that you get in any relationship - that you could be living through a slightly different love story from the one your partner is experiencing.

And she certainly weaves her plot well. This is one of those books that makes you want to eat it up from start to finish, eager to see how the twisted curves of time will be straightened out. But despite the way that I felt sucked through the novel, the book's limitations eventually begin to grate.

Although at first you might think Niffenegger wanted to disturb the quiet tone of American domestic life with her madcap scenarios, gradually you realise this is a wholly reassuring narrative.
Henry may sometimes find himself at war with the laws of space and time, but at heart he has a "fanatical dedication to living like a normal person". The triumph of the book is the triumph of normality, of setting up a decent family life even if you are constantly dissappearing from it, of being loyal to somebody with what Niffenegger finally explains as a genetic dysfunction - chrono-displacement, as she calls it.

Rather like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, in which a girl looks down from heaven after her death and even manages to intervene in the lives of those left behind, The Time Traveler's Wife sets up a very benign kind of magic.

Although his time travelling often exposes Henry to danger and embarrassment, it also serves to smooth out the rawness of lived experience. Because Henry can visit the future, he can not only buy a winning lottery ticket if necessary, he can also see the house he and Clare will live in, and even be sure they will be married and have a child.

That certainty about the future gives both of them a quasi-religious sense that their lives are already mapped out, and the time of their deaths already written. In a couple of particularly sentimental scenes, Henry manages to visit Clare and his daughter after his own death, and in those moments there is the evanescent comfort of a vague spirituality. By the time Niffenegger begins to tune up the violins for the swoony sweet ending you knew was on the cards, the magic has taken over from the realism, to the cost of the book's potential impact.

· Natasha Walter's The New Feminism is published by Virago14.12.2003: Interview: Audrey Niffenegger