Continuing series of book reviews for Writers.
As I read Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ I realized why I initially disliked it.
In previous book reviews for writers, I wrote of how am developing a theory of the novel and what makes a great novel. A brilliant novel is like a three-legged stool, and great novels get all three right and in balance.
We read to experience. Not to watch, that is what movies and TV are for. Paintings, sculptures, ballet and plays too. Not to hear. That is what wonderful music does. Not to feel as an embrace or roller coaster feels. But to actually experience. To immerse into the world of a novel is to experience the fictional world of the novel with the characters of the novel. We come to inhabit the characters, their thoughts, feelings, sensations, hopes, and dreams.
So a novelist must find the right balance of head, heart and body. Intellect, emotion and physicality.
In a great novel, the reader experiences life with the characters.
Their thoughts, whether soaring or mundane. Emma Bovary is a simple woman who thinks only of herself. But she lacks any feeling for her husband or any sort of moral rudder. Charlotte O’Hara is similarly amoral. And I might say Rebecca Sharpe, but Becky has an intellect and self awareness that lifts her into greatness.
Their feelings. Not to be confused with emotions. Their sensation of being in the world. The hot day. The touch of leather, the smell of roses, the sound of a clock ticking. The chill of fear, the tightness of worry. The body rush of physical and sexual excitement. The taste of red wine or Italian food. The sights and sounds of the world around them.
Their emotions. Their gut. Whether love or revulsion, fear or ecstasy, hope and dreams. And in their emotions, their heart.
We don’t want to watch someone fall in love. We want to fall in love with the character. We don’t want to be told a story of adventure, we want to experience the adventure. We don’t want to hear of a mental exercise of knowledge or growth, we want to share that development and growth. In our heads, in our hearts, and in our guts.
A Trinity. Heart, Head and Body. Emotion, Intellect and Passion. Love, Scholarship, and Groin.
Reading ‘Atonement’, I felt the scenery was overstated. There was too much description of place and history. The heat of the day. The story is slow to start. We are almost halfway through the book before the inciting event happens. I wondered why. I skipped sections of the internal thoughts of the characters, especially Briony. And in that skipping I saw the flaw. Of the three legs in the stool, this book is all intellect. It is a story inside the heads of the main characters. We know almost too much of what they are thinking. And the extended scene setting becomes a compensation for the body and physicality that is missing. A good attempt. But there is no heart.
At its root, this is a story of a heartless amoral girl and the damage such a sociopath can do. She thinks she is a writer, but the first requirement of a writer is to have empathy for her readers and the world around them. This broke my suspension of disbelief.
But we are left to watch the damage, rather than feel what is inflicted on the characters Robbie, Cecelia and Mrs. Turner. We might imagine the horror, but that is not what a great novel should do.
Good advice to a novelist is to never avert your eye. Look at things. And then describe them. McEwan looks at the horror, but averts his pen from letting the reader experience it. So we watch. It is sad. But do we learn anything?
There are large jumps in time and the story jumps over what I feel should have been the most important part. When and how did Briony come to recognize the horrible thing she had done? What caused the epiphany? How did she react? What did she feel? Looking for atonement outside is one thing, but how did she forgive herself?
I thought of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that follows the mental anguish of Rodion Raskolnikov after committing a crime. But her there are no internal feelings at all from Briony. How can this be?
I thought maybe McEwan is making Briony out to be a narcissistic sociopath, but that doesn’t make sense. She is a celebrated author. I believe it would be impossible for such a type to be a writer. Writers need to empathize with the characters they create, imagine what they are experiencing, and understand how a reader would inhabit the book. So my suspension of disbelief kicked in and decided for some reason this is hidden from the reader.
Having finished it I am seeing it as a better work, but I think it still misses the jump from good to great. My three-legged stool model stands. This is a book of the mind and the intellect. The characters spend their time and their lives there. There is some physicality, but not much heart at all.
There is an academic quality to the writing, which is a little off-putting. It becomes meta with Briony writing and getting criticism of a story that has happened earlier. And Briony has thoughts about the novel format that only someone who had attended university and studied literature is likely to have had, but Briony has not attended university. McEwan uses his character to give a lecture on literature and that academic smell invades the work. I feel like I am reading EM Forster’s ‘Aspects of the Novel’. Forster knew to keep such didactic prose in an essay.
It is a good idea for a writer to define their perfect reader. Who is this book for? Not a demographic study of probably readers, that can be for later when pitching agents or publishers. I think McEwan’s perfect reader is a graduate level MFA student who might help the book be accepted into the canon. If so, that is the perfect audience of a reader who needs to get out of their mind and find their heart.
It is odd that the title is ‘Atonement’, but the character Briony does not really atone. And worse for this reader, I never felt she experienced remorse, guilt, or horror at what she had done. The book opens with her as a self-centered child, somewhat emotionally abandoned by her family. Maybe this is McEwan’s excuse for her behaviour. And why she, as the writer, cannot empathize with the reader or let them close enough to immerse into her heart. She gives us her mind, but her heart is closed. Which really is her character fault that precipitates the plot.
It is a bit of meta-fiction, which is done well. Whether it should be done at all is debatable. McEwan is trying to push the bounds of the novel format a bit, and is to be applauded for that. I just wish I could have experienced the novel more with the characters than watched them.
September 10, 2024 at 3:15 PM
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