Atonement

I've read a few of Ian McEwan's novels and am generally an admirer of his work. The book I liked best of his was Black Dogs and I've also enjoyed Enduring Love, Saturday, and - somewhat less, but still well enough - Amsterdam and The Comfort of Strangers. Apart from knowing how to put together a good story, McEwan writes with much wisdom about the world, about day-to-day human relationships and concerns.

This is just by way of a preamble to explaining that in the last few days, discovering that the movie of Atonement is soon to be released, I thought I'd catch up with the novel, since I prefer to read first and watch afterwards, rather than the other way around.

Spoilers follow, so read on only if that's not going to upset you.

My verdict? It's a terrific book, telling another gripping story - about a local human tragedy, the crime that produced it and the irreversible effects on three lives. All of McEwan's dramatic skill sustains the dynamic of the narrative, and his formidable descriptive powers are applied successively to three different theatres: the country house where the crime occurs; the approaches to and beaches of Dunkirk; and a hospital in London coping with incoming casualties.

One question. Late, very late, in the book, we learn from its author that it is only, after all, a literary creation. When I say we learn it, what I mean is that this unremarkable truth is integrated into the story itself (though in a way I won't disclose), and the point is hammered home by the mooting of an alternative ending to the one we've already experienced, with that alternative presented as being possibly the truth of what happened to the main protagonists.

So my question is this. Why bother? It's not as if there are going to be readers unaware that their experience of Atonement was a reading experience only and that the book is fiction. Yet we need to be told that although it was written this way, it could equally have been written that way. On the penultimate page, McEwan has a passage whose point seems to be that atonement is impossible for a novelist (in a novel?) because authors are like God, setting their own terms. Really? I'd say they were somewhat less Godlike since, in McEwan's style of fiction at least, they're governed by certain constraints of realism. But, in any case, I don't see that this toying with alternative endings adds anything to the understanding that, atoned for or not, a grave wrong can never truly be made good. The book, I think, would have been better with a more linear ending.