Atonement is a puzzle

Love this review- very well written and insightful. I think it neatly explores and summarises the more ambivalent feelings some of you have towards the narrative structure of Atonement. Have a read and comment if you'd like:

SOURCE: Winder, Robert. “Between the Acts.” New Statesman 130, no. 4555 (17 September 2001): 49.
In the following review, Winder offers a mixed assessment of Atonement, praising McEwan's literary skill but finding the novel's narrative leaps and omissions unsatisfying.
Ian McEwan's new novel [Atonement], launched smoothly into the slipstream of the autumn rush, presents us with a puzzle. On one level, it is manifestly high-calibre stuff: cool, perceptive, serious and vibrant with surprises. It will probably be on the Booker shortlist, and might even win. So it is probably silly to waste time pointing out that the most glaring aspects of the book are its weaknesses and omissions. As usual, McEwan has contrived a good story; but he seems weirdly reluctant to tell it. The title—thematic rather than dramatic—feels like the idea you have before you have an idea, and what follows also seems incomplete. There are fine episodes, but it feels, in the end, not so much a novel as a description of a novel, a selection of scenes from some much larger project. The best we can say is that it will be marvellous when it is finished.
McEwan has certainly mellowed, as the saying goes. His reputation was forged by a succession of stories written with a scalpel: icy, calculated, elegant and hair-raising. They had a subversive edge, and prickled with a sense of danger. But recently, in the Booker-winning Amsterdam and now in Atonement (whatever else, no one can say he is merely working his way through the alphabet), he has settled in milder country, in an antique, upper-class England more usually associated with the Iris Murdochs of this world. The Comfort of Strangers sent plain old Colin and Mary to Venice to be savaged; now he prefers people called Vernon and Cecilia, Leon and Briony. They are composers or diplomats with Firsts from Cambridge and priceless Ming vases, and live in stately homes. Their misadventures are subtle.
There's nothing wrong with that, and McEwan's senses are as alert as ever. A glug of warm wine, damp earth, a violent word, the hiss of breeze over water, a dismembered leg in the fork of a tree … the novel is alive with physical shocks. But he is an obstinate storyteller and plugs the flow of his ample saga by dividing (and condensing) it into three tidy set pieces. In a languid pre-war country pile, a precocious 13-year-old girl, Briony, utterly misreads the nature of the goings-on between her older sister and the boy next door, Robbie. Driven by a bravura compulsion to star as the heroine in her own melodrama, she falsely accuses him of raping a guest, and sends her sister's one true love off to prison.
It is rather terrific. There's a frisson of class conflict (the boy in question is the son of the cleaner—a ruffian, in other words) and all sorts of interesting things seem about to happen. So it's more than a little disappointing when—cut!—we jump forward and rejoin Robbie in the retreat to Dunkirk. It is as if the author flinched at the thought of describing Robbie in prison, or the vain efforts of his lover to save him. So a couple of years have passed, and now we're in the middle of a new tableau, as Robbie trudges across France with Stukas shrieking overhead. Not surprisingly, he is still obsessed by the injustice done him in those halcyon days before the war, but for now he has more immediate worries. Somehow he makes it to the famous beach, and joins the swarm of dejected troops waiting to be rescued.
Again, it's pretty exciting. Will he make it? What kind of revenge (or atonement) will he be able to exact when he returns? Will his love be able to withstand the shock of war and separation? Once again, we begin to tilt towards the edge of our seats.
So it's more than a little disappointing when—cut!—we jump forward again, and find ourselves back with Briony, in a hospital in London, lugging bedpans to and fro and trembling before the matron. She is grown-up now, and wrestling with her conscience at last. She wants to make amends. For a few pages, all of the book's plates are spinning on the same pole. The protagonists revolve towards a showdown and—oh no, not again, cut!—we jump to Briony in old age. She is now a feted author, brooding on the nature of fiction in a way intended to suggest that nothing we have read so far is quite what it seems.
It's clever. But so are people who can solve crosswords in five minutes. McEwan has taken the classic ingredients of the bodice-ripper—a quivering love story set against a backdrop of war—and, striving for ingenuity, declined to make the most of them. This is not really a criticism. McEwan is sufficiently modern to renounce “character in action” in favour of “character lost in thought”. He wants, as he says of Briony, to free himself from “the cumbrous battle between good and evil, heroes and villains”, and simply present, without judging, the friction between different minds, fogged as they are with apprehension and conceit. He even invents a letter written by Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, to Briony. It's an admiring rejection of her first effort, urging her to have more respect for the “childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens”.
McEwan tries to heed this advice, and offers plenty of suspense. But it is suspense of a thin sort, since it relies not on our ignorance of what might happen next, but simply on our not being told what is happening right now. McEwan deals out information cautiously, as if it were common to say too soon that the girl at the beginning of the book is 13, or that the year is 1938, or that many years divide some new chapter from its predecessor. McEwan carries on narrating in his shrewd and natural way, and it's up to us to figure out what he has neglected to mention. This is certainly a cunning way to keep us guessing, but the result is not mystery: it just feels blurred and out of focus.
None of this would matter if the author wasn't so obviously top-flight. And I might have got it completely wrong: perhaps the problem is not that McEwan is too tight-fisted with his booming emotional plot, but that he has leaned too far towards the love-war formula in the first place. Perhaps there is a fictional Gresham's Law, by which trashy ideas drive out good; maybe the fireworks of the underlying saga simply squelch his more delicate effects. McEwan once wrote a lovely children's book, The Daydreamer, which captured the gulfs between children and grown-ups more vividly than he does here. So perhaps there are not too many gaps, but too few. It's a terrible confession, because I know that reviewers are supposed to be thoroughly adept at snap judgements, but … I'm baffled. As I said, it's a puzzle.