First of all, a confession with precisely the structure (or so I am told) of La Chute: even though I bought a copy of Atonement fresh from the bookstore for class, because I had forgotten that, in fact, I already own a copy, I'm reading the copy I already had, simply because it's an advance. It's of noticeably different dimensions than the paperbacks that everyone else will have, so when class meets next to discuss it, I will be able, with an ostentatious absence of ostention, simply be able to put it on the table, and be inwardly disappointed that no one notices or gives the slightest sign of caring.
Also I'm rather amused by mix of generality and specificity in the first sentence that greets the reader, written by Nan Talese of Doubleday: "It is hard to imagine that an author could top his own 1998 Booker Prize novel, but Ian McEwan has done just that.". Well, he'd be the one to do it, right? Off the top of my head I can't even think of anyone else eligible. (Elsewhere in the opening missive Nan writes that Atonement is "McEwan's most brilliant work to date, and one written on his largest canvas.". I wasn't aware it was a continuation of an earlier work.)
Arguably, spoilers below!
Anyway. I'm not entirely sure why I ultimately disliked it, but it wasn't for the reason I thought I might not and the whole thing definitely took a form for the "who cares?" around the time Briony gets her letter from Palinurus. Exactly how to take the last chapter will change things, but on the more interesting ways it seems to be exactly analogous to Frank Stockton's "Our Story" if it had an exaggerated sense of its own interestingness [1]. Perhaps it's simpleminded of me, but the question "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" just seems bad. The structure seems to imply that one might at first have thought that novelists could achieve atonement, but that the fact of outcome-decision ought to instil grave doubts about the proposition. But why would anyone have thought that in the first place? (Given that Briony's written so many drafts, and makes a point of saying so, perhaps one should say that novelists don't achieve atonement, they work through trauma under the influence of a repetition compulsion—but there's no special novel-related mystery about how that works, if you think it does work.)
[1] Not that there's anything wrong with Stockton or his tricks. But they seemed a little unnecessary here.
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