FICTION

Atonement

By: Ian McEwan. Publisher: Doubleday, 400 pages, $26.

Review: Set in England just before and during World War II, this powerful novel examines the terrain between childhood and adulthood, as well as the frightening consequences of a single, childish act.

Reviewed by Maureen Gibbon

Special to the Star Tribune

Awarded the Booker Prize in 1998, British author Ian McEwan has written a thought-provoking, luxuriant novel about childhood, love and war. "Atonement" is a novel in four parts, and the first three are where the real story takes place. The fourth is a mercifully brief 16 page metafiction in which the narrator reflects on the story she has told; it is self-conscious and unnecessary, in part because of the gorgeous writing that has preceded it.

The first part of "Atonement" focuses on 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935. Briony is a bit of a good girl -- she writes plays, seeks out her mother's approval and keeps her room and her toys in regimental order. Under the floorboards, she hides a box filled with a "mutant double acorn, fool's gold, a rain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel's skull as light as a leaf," but Briony has no real secrets.

"Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know."

This goodness is in part due to her nature and in part due to her youth: she is on the cusp between child and young woman, yet she is clearly a child when the book opens. She doesn't bathe as frequently as she should, and she is happiest when writing fairy-tale plays, then staging and starring in them. Given to seeing things in terms of fantasy, she is both unprepared and utterly enthralled when she witnesses a scene outside her home involving her older sister and a young man who is a friend of the family.

"Unseen, from two stories up . . . [Briony] had privileged access across the years to adult behavior, to rites and conventions she knew nothing about, as yet."

As Briony attempts (and fails) to use her little girl's imagination to understand what she has seen, she becomes for the first time aware of her innocence and her limitations as an artist and young writer:

"For her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew . . . how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong."

This scene is followed by more fascinating and frightening exposures to the adult world. When a crime is committed on the grounds that same evening, Briony uses her newly gained and poorly understood knowledge of violence and passion to make a devastating accusation.

Complete with "blemishes and hairline cracks," this accusation forms the basis for criminal proceedings and sets in motion a chain of events that take a lifetime to be rectified. The accusation is the act that Briony, in early adulthood, seeks to understand, and the one for which she must offer atonement.

As the novel follows the paths of different characters, McEwan takes us into battle and inside a hospital that treats the war-wounded. These grim, vivid passages compel, but it is the author's spacious portrait of childhood, and the child's skewed perception of sexual passion and violence, that prove his skills as a storyteller. It is Briony who makes this novel so bewitching.