Atonement

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.